what the heck is GEO (AI search, rankings, $$$)

0:00What the hell is Gio? AI search. This is probably one of the biggest opportunities to take your vibe coded app or take your company and get a bunch of customers. So I brought on Cody Schneider, and we're going to give you the clearest explanation of what Gio is, who's Gio for, how to get traffic from Gio, which tools do you need to use, and why are people obsessing over AI search. A lot of people have done tutorials on Gio, but we put it into one place. And I think this is the clearest explanation of what actually matters. Where's the fluff? There's a ton of sauce in this episode. And thanks for Cody for spilling it.

0:43Let's start from the beginning. Like, what is GEO? Because what I'm hoping to get from this episode is by the end of it, I want to know what GEO is, how it works, which tools I need to be using. and if it's just hype. And I know you'll give me the truth on that. I mean, I'll just be blunt right now. I think it's hype, right? And here's the reason, okay? There's still more searches happening on Google. Like people aren't stopping searching on Google. It's just like, it's basically like, if you think about the graphs growing up, like searches on Google are still increasing and searches on AI chat is still increasing.

1:21Like it's not like a bigger percentage of searches are being cannibalized by chat. It's like they're almost increasing at the same velocity, if not faster on Google, right? And so when people are obsessing over this, I think it's also a bubble thing. Like when you're in startup land, like everybody's talking about this because they saw this massive spike that happened like a couple months ago. Guess what? ChatGPT5 launches, right? GPT5 launches and people just get nuked on that as a source. And so they invested all this into it. Like a great example of this is the tally founder has this graph where it's like absolute liftoff.

2:00Right. It's going crazy. GPT five drops that like it changes the entire search algorithm within chat GPT. And their their referral from that they're like basically referral traffic coming from chat GPT and signups just like plummets. Right. So I think it's something to think about and invest in. But the only reason that you should be investing in it is if the product that you're building has a purchasing decision time horizon that's long where people do research to understand what types of products are available and the best for their specific business use cases. So let's break that down. Right.

2:37So if a person is like having to research, like basically people don't do sales calls anymore to understand how the product functions. They do all of this research on the front end. And then if they talk to a salesperson, it's like they're so deep in the funnel by that point that they're buyer ready. And we see that this we see this happening with people that use chat as the research tool. So they basically go to chat. They research like, you know, we'll say best funnel building software 2025 for sole or, you know, we'll say like local businesses, med spas, right, or whatever. And so they do this like long query and then it pulls back all the information and then basically surfaces that to them.

3:25What people are doing is they're using it as a research tool. And this is why like there's like this obsession with it is because what we see is that there's a higher conversion percentage of people that come from chat to the website when they sign up. And the reason for that is they've like gone through the whole buyer journey. like they've educated themselves and gone through the whole buyer journey so that they're more buyer ready by the time they hit their site they're like they're like yeah i credit cards out they're in hand they're basically about to like purchase this thing right um but overall like the the when you look at the total volume of like searches that are happening like it's minuscule it's it's super tiny and i think it's this bubble thing that's that is software because software saw this happen most quickly because early adopters are all software people like or anybody that's in this ecosystem and also software has a long purchasing decision time horizon so there is that research component so i think that's what is skewing the data here that's what's like going on so okay so what is geo geo is perplexity chat gbt gemini people querying and getting answers from LLMs, who's GEO for, you know, for people who's purchasing decision timelines long, these long tail keywords.

4:39And the beauty about it is that people are so well researched that by the time they come to your startup, they're ready to pull out that credit card and spend versus the old way where it's kind of like people come to your website and you're getting the one to 2 % average conversion rate. Here, I know a lot of people are saying they're seeing like 10, 15, 20 % conversion rate from LLM. I've seen like 40%, right? So it is a really high value customer. But like just the volume, again, is so small, right? There's two customer types that the data I've seen that like we've seen like have success with this.

5:17One is local businesses that are service businesses. So something that you don't make a purchase of often. So think like roofing. Think like anything that's like home related, like HVAC. When you don't have a understanding of that thing because you're not purchasing it on a regular basis, right? People are using this to discover those local businesses. It's like a research tool. Again, like larger purchasing decision, like larger commitment, larger purchasing decision, time horizon, research tool. Okay, local businesses fit into that. the other piece of software right like tools anything like that where it's like okay we're going to use the crm i'm about to commit my whole company to using the crm i'm going to like go super deep on comparing all the different you know options and then make my decision based on that so if you kind of fall into those categories like those are the two that i've seen i haven't seen it really in e-com yet there is some around this like but it's a lot of it's like very like best supplement for sleep or something like that.

6:25But again, the volume that's happening there, it's just really not worth it for them to go and invest in it. Where it can make sense is for e-com brands that have almost like cult followings, I would describe them. So imagine a tailor that's like... For another project that my team's working on, we had them go deep on this company called Sunspell. It's like this old, basically, menswear manufacturer. And for them, say you're trying to discover a brand that has a certain aesthetic and great quality levels. But again, it's a bigger purchasing decision. You're almost like, I'm going to choose this brand for myself.

7:16The only shirts I'm going to buy are going to be from this company. That is when this can work. But if it's for almost impulse buy types of products that are in a cheaper purchase, we're not seeing it be as valuable. This may change, this may evolve. But currently, it's just not as valuable as if it's more of a higher ticket item. Okay, cool. So I have a good understanding of geo is whatever we're calling it. I call it AI search because it's all it is, right? But anyway, yeah. AI search, it's true. That's true. The VC's got a hold of it and started calling it geo. So AI search. Okay, so let's say people are into this idea.

8:09Maybe they have a service business. Maybe they're building a cult-like e-com brand. Maybe it's a SaaS software that's pretty specific. How do you actually get started? Yeah. Okay. So this is kind of the, I think what I'll start with is the, how it actually functions, because then that will lead into, okay, what are the strategies I can execute to actually go and influence this so that I show up within these results. So first off, let's break down how like when I type into a chat, when I go to chat GPT and I type in, you know, again, best funnel building software for mobile devices, right? Or for mobile.

8:47What's actually happening in the background is the AI is basically taking that keyword and then it's doing what it's called what's called basically like AI fanning. There's not really a name for this yet, but this is like what I've seen people describe it as. So imagine it takes that initial query from the user. And then what it does is it goes and expands that query into, we'll just say, 100 different queries. So it takes the user provided query. And then it goes and it writes 100 different queries that are more descriptive. It actually enhances them. And it writes them from all of these different angles.

9:24It's almost like a FAQ page, right, Greg? Like think about it like that, where it's like, okay, here's all the different questions that somebody could ask in relationship to this. It's going to make this like mind map of questions, right? Or this word map of questions. And then it takes all those queries and it goes and it searches those individually on Google, on Bing, each of them kind of like lean into different ones. So let's again walk through this. User types in it, their initial query. it goes the ai goes and it writes these derivative queries that are more descriptive and how we know this is happening is you can actually see this in google search console right so if you go to your google search console and you filter queries that uh have a length of over 50 characters you're going to see these queries that no human would ever write like that it is only ai writing them like if you actually drop these queries into an ai detector like ai or not.com as an example, like it's going to tell you like, this is a query written by AI, like this is written by AI.

10:28And so the other component of how we know that AI is doing this search is because it is showing impressions, but no clicks. So why do we like assume that this is happening? So basically what's going on is it's searching for that query, the AI fanning that it's created. It searches that long query. It then finds what's ranking on page one. And then it individually goes to the URLs. It doesn't click through through Google. It goes to the URLs that are in the search results. It scrapes those out and it puts it into the context window. So imagine like just to put numbers on this, you have a hundred different derivative queries that it creates.

11:15It goes and scrapes a thousand pages. It pulls those thousand pages into the context window. And then it answers the original query that the user gave it, right? So how do you actually win in that setting? You have to have surface area and brand mentions is really the specifics here. Surface area within that thousand pages that it scraped, right? And it loves listicles. It loves like top 10 lists. And so you as a company basically have to get included within that. And the more surface area you have within that thousand different pages, the more likely you are to be suggested as the top result for the original search that you did.

12:01And it's just numbers, right? Like if there's a thousand pages and you're only included on five of them, that you're way less likely to show up than if it's a thousand pages and you're included on 40 % of them. Right. So the, the, when you think about this, it's like basically like whatever query somebody could search, you have to go and find all of those, uh, like pages that it's sourcing from get included on those. And the more that you're included on, the more likely it is that you show up within the search results that the AI actually gives back to you. so so listicles like being on listicles the top you know 25 restaurants in new york city that sort of thing brand mentions but how do you actually how do you actually do that like which tools do you need like what's your stack to go and actually do these things totally i mean so there's tons of them out there right like like prompt watch is one like ai for seo or ai seo Tracker is another.

12:58That's like an indie one. There's, I can't remember the name of Jackie Chow's company. He just released one of these as well. There is another one called Try Profound. That's more enterprise. But all of them kind of do a similar thing. All you're looking for is the URLs that are being referenced by the AI search for queries that are related to your product. So all of these companies and all of these products, they do almost really similar things. You basically like give your product, it creates all of these like different ways that somebody could query for your product. And then it goes and it finds all of the URLs that are being referenced for those queries.

13:44So once you have that URL list, you're like set, you already know what AI is referencing, right? So now your job basically goes and it turns into, I need to reach out to every one of those websites and get our brand placed on each of those individual URLs. Right. So just to like, again, to use real numbers, I got to keep that company hidden. But this is like what a friend just told me when I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. So imagine you find like you're a software company. You basically find all of the queries that are related to the software company, like what somebody would search within the discovery process using AI chat.

14:20You find 40, 45 ,000 URLs that are unique, that are being referenced in all of the queries that are related to your product. You take those 45 ,000 URLs, you go find the emails of those like website owners and you reach out to them and you're basically like, hey, I want to get added or included on this URL. What is the cost to do that? Right. Like this is literally a campaign that they're running. They're seeing this be super expensive. People know that this is like how this works and the value of this. They're paying basically like$500 per link that's being included on these. Right. Wow. It's actually crazy.

15:03Right. It's crazy. You can get that down if you give them a really high affiliate commission. So if you're like, hey, well, can we pay you X and we'll give you a 40 % affiliate commission or 50 % affiliate commission on the traffic that you drive or something like that. Right. You can figure out some type of deal composition that can make it cheaper. But that's just the numbers that he shared with me. I haven't seen a lot of raw data on this yet. With that, though, a few of these can make a lot of impact. Because a lot of the times, it's referencing the same URLs for a lot of the queries. So if you find like, okay, these URLs are referenced like more often in that kind of like, you know, niche or that search, like, you know, that keyword family that people are searching, right?

15:57If you just go and basically prioritize those that are being referenced most, like you can make a way like very high impact very quickly with this. And it's overnight, right? Like, I think that's the thing that like why people are obsessing over this as well. If you do what I just described, like you get impact like literally 24 hours later. Right. And it's way different than traditional SEO where it's like, oh, it's this very long build up. Like, you know, you have kind of like, you know, like you have to build this trust with Google over time, etc. In contrast, when you go and get placed on this because the AI is just aggregating from those URLs, you're going to suddenly start being shown up.

16:37right? Like you're going to start suddenly showing up for those queries when somebody types it into chat. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. And also not only does old SEO take years, new SEO takes days, the amount of new SEO, AI search SEO is increasing every single day, right? There's more and more people searching on perplexity, searching on chat. So you're just, now's the time, right? Now's the time to actually be doing this sort of thing. Totally. And there's tons of these services out there that are like, hey, we're going to go and write like a thousand blog posts for you and like make this private blog network that's specific towards you to help influence the AI.

17:18I think it's bullshit. I've seen the data. There's no way that that stays sustainable and works. I again I this is just like my personal opinion I know I'm gonna get flamed in the chat just like talking about this but the when it comes down to it like all that's happening is basically what is ranking on page one through three of Google that is what the source material for the AI responses are it's like your job is to basically get on to all of the all of the pages that are ranking on page one through three of Google so that you show up within the AI chat So when you're paying for that link to like that$500, like technically you are building a backlink as well to your site.

18:00So that's actually like a good thing. Like there's like you like there is like a kind of a knock on effect where it's like, oh, we're doing this specifically for AI SEO, but we're also building a link, which helps the like total domain authority and like effectiveness of the site that we're like actually, you know, our own like company site, which allows for us to rank for more, you know, hard keywords that are more competitive over time. So there is that component as well. But I think the big thing here is that like the only way that this works is that like, for example, ChatGPT and OpenAI and Perplexity, like they're all built on the back of this like search engine Google, right?

18:40Google has spent the last, whatever, 30 years or 25 years basically indexing the entire internet. Imagine perplexity and chat GPT. Why would they go and index the entire web when they have this thing that they can lean on top of or get on top of that gives already good results, right? Maybe in the future, they go and index the entire web and then they serve back what they think is most relevant. But currently, it's more effective for them to just basically build themselves on top of Google because Google has done all that heavy lifting of that indexing. It's already invested all of this capital into that process of indexing the entire web and understanding it.

19:22And so I think that when you kind of break this down, it's fundamental pieces. When you go elemental with this, this is just SEO. It's just like a layer on top of it. And it's honestly, in a way, almost like influencer marketing, right? Because you're basically saying, hey, your pages are ranking page one through three. Can I pay you to put us on this list that we show up higher, right? And so it's just this derivative layer that's above traditional search engine optimization. And dumb question here, like to find out which URLs are being referenced, are you using Google Search Console or is there another tool that?

20:06Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all of those AI like SEO tracker tools, they all show you this. It's basically like the URLs that Google is sourcing from. I can't remember the name of the one my friend was using. It's a startup. I think like for, for like, is, you know, I know there's, you know, Ahrefs and there's, um, SEM rush and, you know, all those companies, like, is there any de facto one to use? There isn't one yet. They're all kind of like, I think they're all right now. They're all just trackers, right? It's basically just like percent of brand mentions, which I don't give a fuck about and you shouldn't either.

20:44Like, that's like kind of a vanity metric. What's more important is like, What are the actual things being referenced? How do I go and reach out to those people? I think if any of these people building these types of companies, that's actually the value. As a growth person, that's what I want. I don't really care about the percent of brand mansions. There's so many of these out there that do this now. It's more about what are the URLs that are being referenced. I know Ahrefs and SEMrush are going to provide this as a solution at some point. um i'll try to find the uh uh the uh one that my friend is using uh greg because he basically went to them and was like can i just like get the entire list for this these keep like these queries like that whole list that 45 000 can i just get that from you and basically pay for access to that um and that was like how he went about that process but i can't remember the name of it so i'll ping him after this and we can just include it in the show notes so cool yeah and i'm on you You can see my screen, right?

21:42Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm on PromptWatch. I've never used it, but it seems like it's doing what you're talking about. It's all of them are doing the same thing. There's only so much. Basically, what they do is they go and they send synthetic data to all of these chats. Like whether you pick any of these like AI optimization, search optimization tools, they send synthetic data to these chats. They get the results back. They look at what's being referenced. That's where the brand mentions are basically coming from, like the percent of brand mentions. And then they look at the URLs that the chat is using as the source material.

22:21Like that's every single one of them is doing the exact same thing, basically. So and then how do you actually do this? How do you actually like make impact with this is you're again finding those URLs that are being referenced for queries that are related to your product. And then you have to create some type of campaign or some type of process to go and basically get placed. So cool. Anything else that people should know about with geo and AI search? I think that's the biggest, like biggest thing that I'm seeing currently. I would have it be a part of your stack, but not the only thing you rely on.

22:58Just like all marketing. Like, again, just the fact that, you know, a new model gets released and it just claps everybody from a from a, you know, a signups from that as a source. It's a classic, right? It's basically like new algorithm drops and everybody gets screwed or like it just totally gets messed up, right? Like Twitter algo changed and all it is on my feed is just like basically like bombing videos. It's ridiculous, right? And I think we have to like, you have to think about that with all of this. It's like you can get platformed just like, with this, you can get platformed just like anything else, so.

23:34Amazing. All right, thanks, man. I appreciate it. There you have it, Sauce about geo AI search. from the sauce boss himself, Cody Schneider. Thanks. I live to serve. Thanks for hosting, J. I appreciate you.