There seems to be a bit of a split in the comms industry at the moment about how much brands should be focussing on GEO. The case against: we don't really know what's going on. And Google is still more widely used than ChatGPT. By a LONG way. Anyone with GEO in a creds deck is selling snake oil. The case for: it's not about user numbers, it's about the pace of change. LLM based platforms will end the dominance of search when it comes to how people find stuff online. We should at least try and find out what's going on. We do not know for sure how these things work. In fact, neither do the people who built them – if that sounds a little far-fetched, have a listen to Black Box, a podcast by The Guardian. (That you Nicky Regazzoni for that recommendation. TLDR, we genuinely don't know, for sure, how these answers are formed. Even Sam Altman was surprised by how good GPT-3.5 was. They didn't see that breakthrough coming.) But the idea that should stop us is nonsense and, frankly, lazy. You never know exactly why every customer bought your product. But you can, with some half decent research, find out what tipped the balance on the typical sale. You never know exactly whether a journalist will pick up a story. But if you scan their past coverage, you can have a pretty good guess as to whether the odds are 'pretty good, actually' or effectively zero. You never know exactly why one campaign 'went viral' and another flopped. But you can research trends and algorithms to get you a pretty good as to where the next one will fall between the two. We will never know – with 100% confidence – why ChatGPT recommends Pepsi over Coca Cola , or Broadcom over Qualcomm, or Corona over Modelo. But the notion we shouldn't be looking at data and trends and advising brands on how to behave accordingly is defeatist, and an example of letting perfect get in the way of useful. As for whether GEO is a friend or a foe of the PR industry – I spoke to PR Moment recently about that. Thanks for including me Elizabeth Howlett for including me. https://lnkd.in/e_bqiA2P
The clearest analysis of the situation and argument for continuing to investigate data I’ve read. Thanks for sharing.
Jonathan Johnson
1mo
All great points Paul Stollery (he/him)!
David Lewis
4w
I think if you are planning to run thousands of daily queries and trying to endlessly tweak your content in response, to game a constantly-changing model that you don’t understand, then that’s probably a good way to waste a lot of money, whilst making your content much worse, to gain incremental GEO advantage - if any. On the other hand if your strategy is: produce authoritative content that shows you are an expert at what you do, and secure coverage for it in respected media, because (as seems to be true) GenAI is more likely to recommend you based on such content – then that is probably a good approach. Because those are all good things to do anyway and they come with a pretty good chance they will boost your GEO as well. That may change as we understand it better, or course.
Rax Lakhani
3w
Femi Falodun
4w
As of now, I guess it's safe to say the same approaches that work for SEO should work for GEO. At least, until the machine stops feeding on internet/web content.
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1moReminds me of whenever Google makes a massive algorithm change. We don't know what, exactly, will help our clients – but we have to try something. After all, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Going full-in on AI search doesn't make sense based on the numbers. Yet, ignoring the trend isn't a responsible strategy.