![How to Sell GEO: The Agency Playbook [Webinar]](https://susodigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Webinar-How-to-Sell-GEO-The-Agency-Playbook-1160x1160.webp)
Your clients are asking about GEO. You want to sell it. But talking authoritatively about a constantly evolving discipline is hard when:
- It isn’t your traditional remit
- You don’t have the case studies, the decks or the data to back you up
This session fixes both. It’ll give you the confidence to lead the conversation and convert discussion into retainer revenue: from what actually moves visibility across the different LLMs, to the tools that let you speak with real data instead of opinion.
SUSO’s VP of Partner Growth, Cara Corbett, and CMO, Jamie Stanley, walk our Partner Club members through selling GEO – all the way through from pitch to upsell to retained delivery and revenue.
We cover:
- How to talk about AI search with genuine authority, including how the major LLMs differ
- Showing performance with real data: the tools, the tracking, the insight that wins the pitch
- The assets to slip directly into your pitch decks: case studies, slides, proposals
- How white label teams support you in the sales process, not just delivery
The market is hungrier for GEO than ever. The agencies that win this year and into 2027 are the ones that move now.
See the recording below.
Click here to see the presentation slides.
Webinar Transcript
Welcome & the opportunity
00:00:00 – 00:00:34 – Cara Corbett: Welcome everyone. Really glad you could join us. We’ve actually had people from all different kinds of agencies sign up for this one, so I’d love to see that. So wherever you’re joining from, hello. But if you don’t know me, I’m Cara Corbett, VP of Partner Growth at SUSO Digital. And today I’m joined by Jamie Stanley, who’s our CMO. And so for those of you that don’t know Jamie, he was actually our head of content before stepping into the CMO role, so he brings a really strong mix of editorial, strategic and commercial thinking to everything that we do at SUSO. And for those of you who are new to SUSO, we’re a technical SEO and GEO agency that works with other agencies, mainly PR, marketing, and web dev, on a partner or a white label basis.
00:00:34 – 00:01:04 – Cara Corbett: Essentially, they bring us in to support with work that they don’t have the in-house capacity or capability to deliver. So our whole world is agency partnerships and enabling them to speak about and sell GEO, and that’s really exactly why we built this webinar today. If you’ve been to any of our previous webinars over the last year and a half, this one is going to feel a little bit different. Our previous webinars were all about helping you understand GEO: what it is, why it matters, how to track it and measure it, and of course keeping up with the ongoing changes that are constantly happening in the industry. If you ever want to watch any of those, they’re all live on our website.
00:01:04 – 00:01:30 – Cara Corbett: Some really good conversations with some pretty cool people in the industry, like Mike King from iPullRank. We also spoke with Josh from Profound, so check those out on the website. But the conversations that Jamie and I keep having with our agency partners have signaled that we’re in a much more mature place. Nobody’s really asking me what GEO is anymore, but what we keep getting asked is for tips on how to help sell it. Questions like, how do I pitch it to a client? How do I package it and price it? And what do I say when they push back?
00:01:30 – 00:02:10 – Cara Corbett: So really that’s what today is for. This is not a theory session, although there will be a little bit of a refresher for any newbies, but really what we’re going to cover today is why GEO is important in this moment, the opportunity for your agency, what exactly you’re selling and how to package it, selling with insights, so using competitor and client insights to create a sense of urgency and demand and FOMO for this new service. And then in the commercial playbook, we’ll cover when to raise GEO and some of the objections you’ll hear and how to answer them.
00:02:10 – 00:02:38 – Cara Corbett: And we’ll even share some free resources to help make this whole process a lot easier. So by the time we’re done, we hope that you should have the framing, the collateral and the process to go have this conversation with a client this week, if you want to. So let’s go, and we’ll start off with the opportunity: why this is a service line that you can sell today.
00:02:38 – 00:03:15 – Cara Corbett: I want to start by giving everyone a sense of the landscape that we’re all working in right now, and the opportunity that’s really sitting in front of us, with some stats. By the way, some of these stats can also be shared with your clients or popped into your decks to create some interest and urgency. According to McKinsey’s research, 50% of consumers already use AI powered search today. And according to Bain and Company, over 60% of AI searches end without a click. So this means that people are putting their questions into LLMs, they’re getting their answers right within the interface, and then they’re never visiting a website off the back of that search.
00:03:15 – 00:03:59 – Cara Corbett: So if your client’s brand isn’t in that first response, they basically missed the opportunity for visibility. And we know that because of this, search behavior is changing, and with that shift comes a huge, fast-growing market. According to The Business Research Company, the SEO services market is worth $108 billion this year, and it’s projected to hit $203 billion by 2030, so that’s nearly double in just a few years. Now, here’s an interesting one that got me when I read it. Muck Rack, who a lot of the PR folks on here know, just published their 2026 State of PR report, and they found that while 73% of PR professionals see GEO as important to their strategy, 29% say no one owns it at the organization, and another 13% aren’t even sure who’s responsible.
00:03:59 – 00:04:13 – Cara Corbett: And by the way, this isn’t just a PR thing, I see the same pattern with content, brand and SEO teams alike. So the demand is there, the budget is there, and it seems like the space is still wide open.
00:04:13 – 00:04:45 – Cara Corbett: And what’s missing is someone who is taking ownership. But I think that’s where you guys come in. Whether you’re a PR, content, web, or marketing agency, you already have the client relationships and a lot of the necessary skills that feed AI visibility work. But the agencies that win in the next few years will be the ones who can walk into a client meeting and say: here’s your current performance, here’s the gap between you and your competitors, here’s the things that are causing that gap, and here’s what we propose to fix it. So that’s really why you’re all here today, because I want every single one of you to be able to do that.
00:04:45 – 00:05:22 – Cara Corbett: Now, I’ve been having this conversation for over a year, mostly with PR, content and web agencies, and as I alluded to before, there’s specific skills and offerings that each of you already have that are a natural extension of GEO. So GEO can be a really great entry point to expand and upgrade the services that you’re already delivering. It gives you something genuinely new to bring to a renewal conversation, and it also gives you a competitive edge in new business pitches. Because if you walk into a pitch and your deck already addresses that question of how do we show up in ChatGPT versus competitors, you’re having a completely different conversation than that agency whose deck doesn’t cover it at all, or maybe they don’t go into specifics.
00:05:22 – 00:05:44 – Cara Corbett: And the agencies that I’ve seen that do this best are the ones that lead with the problem, or show a gap, rather than leading with the solution. We’ll get into that more when we talk about the actual sales conversation. But before we get there, I just want to make sure that you know exactly what you’re selling, because the pitch really only works if you understand what sits inside of it and you believe in it.
What you’re actually selling: the four pillars
00:05:51 – 00:06:13 – Jamie Stanley: Thanks, Cara. We’ve deliberately tried, as Cara mentioned a minute ago, to make this as practical as possible for you guys. We’re not going to go into too much detail into how these specific pieces work, not get too deep into the weeds. But I think it’s really important to understand the backbone of what the service is if you’re going to have successful sales conversations. The key thing to take away here, as I just mentioned, is that you don’t really need to be a GEO expert to sell this stuff, but you do need to know what it is you’re selling.
00:06:13 – 00:06:36 – Jamie Stanley: Otherwise, that first follow-up question from a client is going to catch you out. And that’s kind of sales one-on-one really, which will be nothing new to most of the people on this call. But to keep it simple, we break down the overall service offering into four key pillars. There’s prompt monitoring, earned and PR, content and technical. And the shorthand that we use typically in an early stage conversation is that prompt monitoring is how you measure whether this is working. Earned is about where your client gets mentioned and cited elsewhere on the internet rather than on their own site.
00:06:36 – 00:06:55 – Jamie Stanley: Content is what’s on their own site and whether an LLM can actually use it. And technical is whether the AI bots can actually get into the site in the first place. Most of you are probably already doing one or two of these already, and that is a great place to start that sales conversation. But the bits you don’t cover, you can bring in a white label partner so your client can still get the full program and you lead with what you’re best at.
00:06:55 – 00:07:41 – Jamie Stanley: So to break this down in a little more detail, but not too much: prompt monitoring comes first always, because basically everything else gets judged against it. It’s tracking the prompts people put into ChatGPT, Gemini and all of the rest of the main LLMs in your client’s space, and seeing whether your client shows up in the answers, and if they don’t, who’s showing up instead.
00:07:41 – 00:08:15 – Jamie Stanley: Nobody can see the exact prompts people typed into these platforms. So you have to track a representative set of prompts. If you pick the wrong ones, it can completely skew the data. And a lot of people quite understandably use AI tools to generate their AI prompts, but you can very easily end up in a snake eating its own tail situation, where it’s a closed loop that doesn’t take in enough human generated insight and is basically generating prompts that human beings don’t actually ask.
00:08:15 – 00:09:16 – Jamie Stanley: That’s why we build ours from audience and customer personas, real search data and the client’s first party data. An example would be for a moving company we worked with in NYC: we split ‘best movers NYC’ by intent, neighborhood and situation to generate our prompt set, and many of the prompts that we pulled out of this didn’t just tell us what people were looking for, it also told us what content we needed to write, and gave us a really great head start on that site. The other thing about monitoring is that it’s an ongoing play, which turns GEO from a one-off audit into a proper full-blown retainer. And it also tracks the competitors, because nothing gets a client’s attention like a competitor named in an answer where they want to be showing up. To round that off, the other three pillars that I’m going to take you through now are the work, this is what shows you whether that work is actually making an impact. So, earned.
00:09:16 – 00:10:34 – Jamie Stanley: PR agencies, you might be well aware already that you’ve got a bit of a head start here, but just going to give this a bit more of an overview. LLMs train and cite exactly the kinds of sources you’re already getting your clients onto: news coverage, industry publications, authoritative third-party sites, etc. So the work you’re doing is already feeding these systems. What GEO adds is a way to measure that and show its value, plus a few extra tactics that make the same coverage work harder in AI answers. But the thing I’d really stress here is that it’s related to what you already do if you’re working in a PR agency, but it’s not quite the same thing. If your client hears this as the same PR strategy with AI bolted on, in our experience, you won’t get that upsell. So it’s worth being clear about what’s different. The first thing that’s different is the targeting: you’re prioritizing the publications LLMs actually cite, and that takes you to places a normal media list perhaps wouldn’t. Reddit is one that surprises most, but there’s also Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, and a whole myriad of different review sites depending on the industry. These all change depending on the prompt set, the industry, the vertical, the business goals of the client, etc.
00:10:34 – 00:11:20 – Jamie Stanley: The second thing that’s important to understand is the difference in how the content is written. Anyone who’s already undertaken our free Writing Content for AI Search workshop, which I host, if you haven’t, please DM me afterwards and we can get that set up for you. But you’ll already know that content needs to be easy for an LLM to pull out and cite, and it should link back to the client’s own site so that the coverage and the site are working together. Finally, you’re not giving anything up if you are a PR agency: every placement still works as a backlink for SEO, as well as a mention for AI. We did this with a global crypto exchange who were relaunching in the UK. We optimized their existing outreach strategy for GEO, and they picked up around 4,500 AI mentions off the back of that same PR work.
00:11:20 – 00:11:58 – Jamie Stanley: We can also work with you to train your team so that the work is pulling its weight for GEO, and pick up the content and technical side if you need support there as well. Pillar three is on-site content. As Cara mentioned, as a former head of content, this is particularly close to my heart, and this is all about what’s on a client’s specific own website. LLMs are there to answer questions, so the content that gets cited is the content that clearly answers what people are asking, and the query fan-outs AI tools generate on the back end.
00:11:58 – 00:12:34 – Jamie Stanley: Again, not to push this workshop too much, but query fan-out, for those of you who don’t know, is basically related queries to a central question. So if your central question is ‘best business hotels in London,’ a site which also has content around ‘best business hotels in London with free breakfast,’ ‘best business hotels in London with hot desking space,’ whatever, that’s what query fan-out is, and that’s what gives it more body and more authority in the eyes of the models. So the basics here are on the left-hand side of this slide: clear sections, key takeaways up top, the main answer in the first 100 to 250 words, proper FAQs, and the right title tags and H1s.
00:12:34 – 00:13:08 – Jamie Stanley: On the right-hand side is the authority. The one of these points that I push hardest when speaking to clients, particularly in the early stages, is corroboration: other sources backing up what you’re saying, because hardly anyone does that, or at least has done in traditional content strategy. Then topical depth, publishing fresh content consistently, and using real named authors. Content agencies, most of this comes down to the brief. Plenty of briefs read really well but don’t ask for any of the things you’re seeing on screen now. Again, we’ve seen this out in the wild. We worked with a healthcare brand where we added the medical team’s credentials,
00:13:08 – 00:13:43 – Jamie Stanley: added proper author bios and peer-reviewed sources, and we fixed some crawling issues. With all of these pieces working in parallel, AI traffic went up nearly 600% and AI conversions went up more than 300%. So if you’re already producing good content for your clients, you’re not far off, it’s more about whether the brief is asking the right things. And then finally, technical. Technical is probably the scariest to most people in traditional agency land, I can only speak for myself there, that’s why we have a whole team of way smarter people at SUSO who look after this than me.
00:13:43 – 00:14:37 – Jamie Stanley: But if you are a web or dev agency, first of all, congratulations, I’m in awe of you, this is where you’ve got a real advantage. You already have access to the client site: you’re in their CMS, you’re in their code base, so making sure AI training and retrieval bots can actually get into the site’s content is really your territory. So first, crawlability: can the AI bots actually get to the content? There are a lot of sites that have, for instance, robots.txt rules from years ago that were set up to block scrapers, back when that was something that you really wanted, and they ended up blocking the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and all the rest of the core LLMs. Loads of brands have done this without realizing. And age-gated sites are another thing to bear in mind here: with alcohol brands, for example, the age gate can stop AI citing content at all, so you actually have to be quite creative in the way that you get around that. But you don’t know whether that’s an issue unless you’ve delved into the technical side.
00:14:37 – 00:15:24 – Jamie Stanley: And then there’s structured data: schema basically tells an LLM who the brand is, what it sells, who’s behind it and what it covers. Entity association is making sure the brand is clearly linked in the data to the topics it wants to be known for. So again, web and dev agencies, you can fix all of this yourselves, and the audit tells you what you need fixing. For PR and content agencies without technical people in-house, honestly, don’t worry about this: a white label agency can handle it for you and guide you through it, and it shouldn’t stop you selling GEO. That’s a really key thing that we want to push ahead with here: if you see gaps in your current offering, there are support networks that allow you to provide that value to your clients without feeling like you’re taking a step into the unknown. One thing I’d say is get on this stuff early, because clients can’t see this technical stuff,
When and how to raise GEO: trigger moments and discovery
00:15:24 – 00:16:31 – Cara Corbett: but it decides whether they show up at all. And it’s not always a quick fix if it’s left, but you’ll never fix it if you don’t know whether it’s there. Let’s move over into the commercial playbook, so this is when and how to raise GEO. Now that we know what goes into a GEO campaign, let’s talk about when to have this conversation, some of the trigger moments that are the perfect opportunity to wow the client and open the door to a potential new revenue stream for you. So obviously with existing clients, the reporting call, where you review your performance, is a really good place to start. If you’re already in the data with a client, adding one AI visibility slide to that call is the easiest door opener that you have. Of course, if the clients ask about AI search or ChatGPT, they’re doing a lot of the work for you, that’s an obvious moment to take that away, generate a quick audit and then come back with those insights. Renewals or scope reviews are also a great opportunity to add a new dimension, not just renewing the same thing that you’re already doing. So this is another great opportunity for
00:16:31 – 00:17:29 – Cara Corbett: you to also pitch and position GEO as additive to what you’re already doing, not separate. And of course a campaign or a product launch is a great time to add it on, because AI is just another surface area for discovery that should be considered. There’s a lot of things that you can do from a GEO perspective, like Jamie just walked through, that can make a launch go even further. Now, in addition to this, there’s also a step in the whole sales process that I think it really hinges on, and that’s discovery. And I know that not everyone is going to get a proper discovery with every client or prospect, especially if you are the one being proactive and raising it yourself. But if you can get even a couple of these insights up front, it really changes everything that comes after. So on the screen, I’ve put some of the main questions that I don’t think you should skip. Of course, you might have more specific questions for your agency and process, but these ones are really the non-negotiables, in my opinion, because they’re going to help you make your case later.
00:17:29 – 00:18:07 – Cara Corbett: Working through those first: what are your main goals for GEO, and what KPIs are you measuring against? This is important because some clients care more about reputation, how their brand is being described and whether AI is getting the facts right. And others are purely commercial, and they want AI search to be a lever to drive leads and sales. So those two goals inherently lead to very different strategies, very different prompt sets and different reporting. So it’s important to pin that down early, but also, if you get insight on the specific KPIs that they’re looking at, it gives you the success criteria that you’ll be measured on later, and that you can speak to in your sales presentation.
00:18:07 – 00:18:56 – Cara Corbett: Second: what products, services, or markets, I feel like markets is a big one that’s missed a lot, matter most for this campaign? This question is going to help you understand their priorities from the get-go, but also give you focus, because let’s face it, you often can’t cover everything with GEO, because prompts can get really expensive the more markets, the more focuses that you’re looking at. And this is especially true for bigger brands with lots of different areas or segments. So definitely make sure that you understand the scope of what you’re working towards upfront, so that you can avoid any costly mistakes later. Now, these first two questions alone are so important, because like I said, they’re going to decide the types of prompts you’re monitoring, which, as Jamie said, will wildly change the output of responses and therefore the focus of campaigns. So nail those two for sure ahead of time.
00:18:56 – 00:19:24 – Cara Corbett: Third: what’s a new customer worth to you? This is an age old sales question that I think some agencies tend to skip a lot of the time, but really it’s the most useful one for selling, because for example, if one new customer is worth $4,000, and you can build confidence with industry statistics or relevant case studies that you can get those new customers via AI search, then a GEO retainer suddenly looks very reasonable. And that’s how you frame your pricing: as a return on investment rather than a cost.
00:19:24 – 00:19:54 – Cara Corbett: Now fourth: who’s your target audience? This one’s important because the more you know about their customers ahead of time, the more specific you can make your prompts, and then the more accurate your output is. As we know, AI search is very conversational and context driven, people are going to be putting information about where they live, what they like, in previous chats, and all of this contributes to the answer. So that’s why it’s so important to get really specific, because it’s going to give you a more accurate output to that person.
00:19:54 – 00:20:14 – Cara Corbett: Fifth: who are your competitors? This one’s obviously huge, because that’s going to allow you to create the benchmarks that matter to the prospect. And something interesting here is that the competitors they name aren’t always going to be the ones that are showing up in the LLM responses, so I think that’s a really great insight to bring back to them, and a great way to make the case for a GEO retainer.
00:20:14 – 00:20:30 – Cara Corbett: Sixth: what is their timeline? You want to know whether there’s a launch, a campaign or an internal deadline that might be driving this, and this also helps you create urgency and set realistic expectations, because GEO isn’t something that’s a one month, one-off switch, it’s something that you build over time.
00:20:30 – 00:20:49 – Cara Corbett: And lastly: what’s their budget? I know this one can feel kind of awkward to ask sometimes, but it really saves everyone time, and it allows you to weed out anyone that’s unqualified. And if you know the budget, you can shape the right package from the start, whether that’s a focused pilot or maybe a full program, instead of guessing and then getting it wrong.
00:20:49 – 00:21:06 – Cara Corbett: After getting these questions on that discovery call, I typically tell the prospect that I’m going to have my team do some preliminary analysis, find some real opportunities that will guide a recommendation. And I always try to push for a follow up call with the decision makers to essentially walk through all of that, present them our findings,
00:21:06 – 00:21:50 – Cara Corbett: make sure that they understand everything. So you really want to lock in this call while you’re still on the discovery call, so that you can keep the momentum going while the conversation is still fresh, and that you’re not stuck chasing them for a time over email for weeks. This also gets the right decision makers in the room from the start, so when you walk through those findings, the people who own the budget are hearing the opportunities firsthand instead of getting a secondhand summary. So now that you know what they’re going after, who their competitors are, you can really start to craft your prompts, which will ultimately help you uncover competitive gaps. And those are what you want to lead with, because let’s face it, executive teams are more concerned with whether they’re showing up accurately, whether they’re beating the competition, than with the mechanics of GEO itself.
00:21:50 – 00:22:02 – Cara Corbett: So use the competitive gaps as the anchor for the pitch, versus the tactics that Jamie just walked you through. And a super easy way that you can do that is with SUSO’s free AI visibility checker tool, which we’ll show you in just a minute.
00:22:02 – 00:22:48 – Cara Corbett: But with this tool, for example, we were able to pull a quick reading on a huge shoe brand, a multinational shoe brand. It showed them which competitors were dominating conversation, but it also found some really fundamental technical issues that were stripping their ability to show up in the AI responses at all. We found that their content wasn’t being cited in the prompts, their products weren’t even being able to be pulled in, because their robots.txt was blocking AI bots from accessing the page. That’s a huge insight that only took five minutes to pull with our tool, that may have otherwise been missed, if a PR agency was looking, they’re not considering the back end. Plus it gave us major brownie points: we pointed that out to the client, we were able to put forward a plan of action, it really wowed them.
Selling with insight: the AI visibility checker demo
00:22:50 – 00:23:41 – Jamie Stanley (live demo): Sure, so this is our AI visibility checker. It looks at how a brand is showing up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, the ones you’d expect, and it uses over a hundred signals across six different areas, and gives you a score out of a hundred. It’s free, there’s no login, and the report lands in your inbox in about five minutes. You can see a real one here on the right hand side that was scrolling through, that Cara was just describing. The first thing that it looks at is answer frequency, which is how often AI tools mention the brand when somebody asks about the industry. This brand, as you can see from the start of this rolling gif, came up just 1% of the prompts that were tested, so already alarm bells, something that needs to be done.
00:23:41 – 00:24:01 – Jamie Stanley: Then it looks at competitor comparison, which is the bit I’d focus on as probably the most important for the sake of starting that conversation, as I mentioned before. It’ll give you a strong indication of whether your client is being left behind, and in which areas. That’s what you want in front of your client if you want to get them interested in an upsell or a new service.
00:24:01 – 00:24:23 – Jamie Stanley: Online reputation is the next thing it looks at: this is basically concerned with whether AI is describing them positively, negatively, or neutrally. This instant checker will give you a broad strokes indicator as to where the sentiment is, but what it often will do is give you a really good starting point for a deeper analysis to see why that’s happening.
00:24:23 – 00:24:36 – Jamie Stanley: Brand authority, the next thing it looks at, is how well known they are across the web more broadly, so that takes in a number of different search factors to see how well understood the brand is across the internet generally.
00:24:36 – 00:25:09 – Jamie Stanley: Training data inclusion is whether they’re turning up in the sources these models actually learn from, so we talked about Reddit, we talked about a couple of others earlier as well. And then there’s technical accessibility, web agencies, that one’s for you: again, can bots actually find what’s on the site? Now, in this particular case, the story is actually that the brand was being cited in the prompts we tested because their robots.txt was blocking AI bots from accessing the page entirely. That is a five-minute finding that becomes a major insight for a client, and a very fast win once it’s fixed.
00:25:09 – 00:25:31 – Jamie Stanley: And to cite another example, on that side of the one Cara mentioned, for a crypto trading platform we were working with, we doubled their AI traffic in six months, and added 151 AI citations, based on actions that we took as a direct result of red flags that were raised in a report just like this one. Obviously with an ensuing deeper analysis, but this points in the direction that we need to go.
00:25:31 – 00:26:03 – Jamie Stanley: The checker will stay free and public, and once the Partner Club Hub, which we’ll talk to you about in a moment, goes live, every check you run will be saved to your login account as a member of the Partner Club, and you can then share it directly with your team. We’ll take you through the Hub in a bit more detail in a bit. And also, if you’d like to see one for your own client, just drop a domain in the chat and we’ll send over the reports after the session. Otherwise, you can go on to SUSOdigital.com and access the checker straight away, just by the link in the header. I think we’ll also have a QR code at the end of this presentation if you guys want to wait.
00:26:03 – 00:26:46 – Jamie Stanley: But I also want to add that you’re not just limited to these self-serve reports, although they are quick and very easy to use, you can get in touch with me at any time to do something a little more custom, a little more in depth. So we actually have resources on our team that will take about two hours, do some analysis on the website that you’re looking at, and really prepare a more in-depth report. Sometimes they’re up to 30 pages, but these reports are really good, they’ve got real insights that you can bring to the conversation or add to the deck. They go really specific, whereas this is more high level. Plus, we can white label these reports in your branding if you like, so feel free to always email me if you want something a little more in depth than this. But the bottom line is all of this stuff is literally gold, because the minute
From data to pitch: the winning proposal formula
00:26:46 – 00:27:23 – Cara Corbett: that somebody can see where their client is invisible right now, and why, that’s when the conversation gets interesting. You don’t have to explain why GEO matters anymore, now they can see it with their own eyes, for their specific case. So once you’ve got that report, what do you actually do with it, and what’s that winning formula? Now, of course, every agency has a different way to go about it, but this is my personal formula that sold many GEO and SEO retainers over my career. In fact, this very structure closed a GEO retainer in under a week, last week, from discovery to close. Take what you want, but I’ll just walk you through what I think the winning proposal structure is.
00:27:23 – 00:27:52 – Cara Corbett: It starts with credibility: it’s always good to reintroduce yourself for maybe potential new decision makers on the call, but also establish why you’re the one to trust with this: your track record, your awards, any client wins that are particularly relevant to them and their industry. So for instance, if we are selling GEO, I always make sure to highlight the speaking engagements we’ve done on the subject matter, like New York Tech Week, LA Tech Week, the webinars that we’ve done with Profound, etc. And I also like to include any impressive
00:27:52 – 00:28:10 – Cara Corbett: client logos that we’ve worked with, maybe within their industry. After that, you want to restate their pain points and their goals that they shared with you in that discovery, because this is going to remind them that you really understand their business, their specific challenges, and then you can hinge that entire recommendation on solving these challenges.
00:28:10 – 00:28:37 – Cara Corbett: Next, we move into the key findings: this is where that checker output, or those free audits that we do, that really lives and is taken from. So we’re talking about the competitor gap, any technical issues, the here’s-why-you’re-invisible-right-now moment. And I like to lead with their strongest metric first and show the tension, and then I frame it as an opportunity, not a failure. That’s really important, you don’t want to make anyone upset, but this is really your FOMO section.
00:28:37 – 00:29:24 – Cara Corbett: After you’ve built that FOMO, you’re going to move into how you’re solving these issues, which is effectively what you’re proposing. Now, this isn’t a generic service list, like, ‘this is what we’re going to do every month.’ This is an in-depth walkthrough of exactly what they’re going to receive, and it’s tied to the specific gaps that you just showed. So connecting those four pillars, prompt monitoring, content, technical and earned, into real examples and deliverables for this client or this prospect specifically. So for us, that means taking them through a real client audit and strategy so they can see the thinking and the work that goes into it, but then applying real life examples to their specific case. Then, of course, you want to show the proof that it works, so this is where you can put case studies, ideally from the same industry or a similar problem. And remember, you can get those from us anytime, completely white labeled if you like.
00:29:24 – 00:29:59 – Cara Corbett: And finally, you want to end with next steps: is there anything else that needs to happen between signing and kicking off? What does that onboarding period look like? How do you report on progress, and what’s the cadence? It’s always good to be as clear and detailed as possible, so they know exactly what to expect. And it’s also good to get confirmation from their end on when they’re trying to reach a decision. I always make sure to set next steps and follow up with them. Now, even with a great deck,
Objection handling
00:29:59 – 00:30:22 – Jamie Stanley: you’ll still sometimes get pushback, you’ll hear some good objections. (Cara: ‘So Jamie’s going to take you through a couple of those and how to answer them next.’) Yeah, objections from client, isn’t it? Everyone’s favorite part of agency life. So I’ll go through a few of the most common ones that we’ve encountered over the last number of months and years since we’ve been discussing GEO with specific clients. The first one, we’d actually still hear constantly, is ‘isn’t this just SEO?’ And you’d understand why that would be coming to us as a search agency.
00:30:22 – 00:30:51 – Jamie Stanley: And to be honest, the way I’d start with the reply to this is I’d start by partially agreeing with them. Now, if you try to argue that these two things are completely different in every way, you’re going to lose that conversation and clients are going to go somewhere else. Because things like good content, topical authority, E-E-A-T, and having a site that’s fast and easy to crawl, they all matter for both SEO and GEO.
00:30:51 – 00:31:14 – Jamie Stanley: Original research is also a good example here, because it earns links for SEO, and it also makes you more likely to be cited in AI answers. But they are optimizing for different things, and that’s what this table shows. I’ve tried to make sure that there’s a row for all the key types of agency who are on this call.
00:31:14 – 00:32:05 – Jamie Stanley: At the top level, SEO is about ranking in search results, and GEO is about getting cited in the answer. For content agencies, SEO is keyword research and content gaps, whereas GEO is more about prompt research, structuring content so it’s easy to pull out and chunk up, and also leveraging named authors. For web agencies, SEO is crawl budget and Core Web Vitals, GEO is AI bot access, so things like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and also rendering checks. And for PR, SEO is backlinks and domain authority, while GEO is mentions across places like Wikipedia, Reddit and review sites. Some of those do a huge amount for GEO and they don’t do a huge amount for SEO, and that’s something you really need to make clear if you’re faced with this question as often as we are.
00:32:05 – 00:32:48 – Jamie Stanley: The other thing to note here, related to this query specifically, is that the gap is also getting bigger between SEO and GEO and where that overlap is happening. Ahrefs found in July last year that about 76% of pages cited in Google’s AI Overviews also ranked in the top ten on traditional Google search, which does make sense when you think about it. But by early this year, that was down to just 38%. Now, to be fair to them, they say some of this is down to better detection on their side, but the direction of travel is pretty clear when you look at this: ranking on page one doesn’t guarantee you’re in the answer anymore, and we’ve seen plenty of brands with great rankings and poor AI visibility.
00:32:48 – 00:33:19 – Jamie Stanley: One extra nugget to think about, speaking about Claude specifically, is that if you are looking at the rate of how often the top cited sources in Claude show up in the top ten of Google, you’re much better off looking at what’s ranking in the top ten of a search engine called Brave, where the overlap is about 80%. Now, it’s taken a huge amount of thought and research and checking to find that out. But at the same time, you can see where this divergence is happening between traditional SEO and GEO itself.
00:33:19 – 00:33:40 – Jamie Stanley: So the way I put this to a client is something like: if we’re already doing SEO together, this isn’t starting again, it’s taking what we’re already doing into AI search, or GEO, or whatever you want to call it. A lot of the same work helps, but it’s measured differently, so we can’t assume that one necessarily equals the other.
00:33:40 – 00:34:23 – Jamie Stanley: Now, the next question that we hear on an almost daily basis is: is there actually any traffic, and can you prove ROI? And that is a totally fair question, if I was spending my money, I would want to know the answer too. And the good news is that you can answer way more of this question today than you could even six months ago. So start with where the attention has gone, because there’s a whole stack of numbers that can back this up. Around half of Google searches now show an AI summary, those of you who operate on the internet, as I think we all basically do in our day-to-day lives, will probably have already noticed this.
00:34:23 – 00:34:48 – Jamie Stanley: But when an AI summary appears, the number one result loses around 58% of its clicks, according to Ahrefs’ survey of about 300,000 keywords. Pew has also found users end their search journey 26% of the time when shown an AI Overview, versus just 16% when they weren’t shown one. That demand hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s moved into the answer, and that’s exactly where GEO puts your client.
00:34:48 – 00:35:18 – Jamie Stanley: And when the traffic does click through, it’s worth more. Shopify looked at its own merchants for the first quarter of this year, 2026: AI-referred visitors converted about 50% better than visitors from organic search, and spent 14% more per order. AI-referred orders were up thirteen times on last year. Now, that refers just to e-commerce, I know, but it’s a pretty good answer to ‘is there any real traffic.’
00:35:18 – 00:35:52 – Jamie Stanley: Then what you can do is show them what you can measure, and that’s really important, so you leave with what you can do, not what you can’t do. So since May, GA4 has had an AI assistants channel, many of you may have already seen this, it’s switched on by default, so that traffic and conversions from all of the big hitters, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, show up as their own line in your GA4 reports. Search Console also now shows how often a site appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode, straight from Google’s own data.
00:35:52 – 00:36:28 – Jamie Stanley: And better prompt monitoring and the site’s own logs: you’ve got citations, share of voice against named competitors, and AI bot activity all moving month to month. This is all stuff that you can track and show to your client, you can show them where they are and where they’ve traveled, once you’ve started making inroads on the areas that need improvement. So if you present this confidently and are just clear about what each number is: GA4 numbers are sometimes undercooked, I should say, because some apps strip the referrer, so the real traffic figure is often higher than it’s displaying.
00:36:28 – 00:36:56 – Jamie Stanley: Prompt tracking, as I said before, is a representative data set, but if it’s built from real search and first-party data, it’s a reliable indicator of what’s going on. This is the stuff that you can show to a client within a few days of onboarding. If you reframe this conversation as a brand visibility and authority investment, with traffic as one of the payoffs, that’s a much easier way to reconcile this in those initial conversations.
00:36:56 – 00:37:29 – Jamie Stanley: Muck Rack has found that 39% of PR people aren’t measuring GEO at all. So the moment you start, you’re already ahead of a lot of the market, and that’s a particularly important thing to hammer home whenever you can. Here we’ve bundled the last two together, because they approach things from different angles, but over a broadly similar narrative thread. ‘We’ll wait and see’ is really about risk, and ‘we don’t have the resource’ is really about effort, that’s pretty obvious really.
00:37:29 – 00:37:56 – Jamie Stanley: On the waiting side, the thing to really hammer home, and I think this is something that, in my many years working in marketing, sales and all the rest of it, has actually yielded quite a lot of important results, is: waiting on this stuff isn’t actually free. It’s also moving really, really fast. Shopify, who we spoke about a minute ago, have seen sessions referred from AI tools grow eight times year on year, against 5% growth in organic search.
00:37:56 – 00:38:21 – Jamie Stanley: Competitors who start now are building up citations and authority, and if your client comes in in eighteen months’ time, they’re starting from scratch against somebody who’s already been working in this space for a year and a half. I wouldn’t be dramatic about it and say the sky is going to fall in, but just be clear about what waiting actually means, and the opportunity that is being lost.
00:38:21 – 00:38:59 – Jamie Stanley: On the resource side, I’d almost flip this round, because that’s exactly why this is a managed service: the work sits with you, and hopefully with us as well, as your partner, so that your client doesn’t actually need to hire anyone or build their own team. That’s what agencies have been for since the beginning of time. If neither of those responses lands in the moment, there are a few things here that can help: send them a follow-up visibility check a few weeks later, many of you on this call might already be subscribed to specific monthly checks which we can send through automatically, and either way you can just run them and see how you feel.
00:38:59 – 00:39:38 – Jamie Stanley: If you send it a few weeks later, the gap doesn’t tend to close by itself. If you use named competitors rather than a generic pitch, and let the gap do the talking, they’ll say, well, actually, this gap is either staying where it is and that opportunity is still being unfulfilled, or worse, it’s getting wider. And that’s the kind of thing that really can grab the attention of a client who initially may not be so interested. Either way, this comes back to the same point: your client’s competitors aren’t waiting, so waiting does have a cost. And really quickly, just on the resource side, the answer here is really the way into the next bit.
How to work with SUSO: partnership models and pricing
00:39:38 – 00:40:25 – Jamie Stanley: So if the work suits you and suits us, the obvious question from your side is how that actually works between us as your search partner, your GEO partner, and how the numbers stack up for your agency. So let me walk you through that really quickly: working with us, how does that work for you, and how do we make sure that everybody eats? I’ll keep this fairly high level, because it’s the part that everyone likes to dance around in these sorts of conversations. But there are three ways that this works. With white label, you own the client relationship and the billing, and we deliver under your brand. Unless you want it set up differently, we use alias emails so the client never sees SUSO and never really needs to know that we exist, just that their AI search performance is improving every single week.
00:40:25 – 00:40:57 – Jamie Stanley: With referral, you pass the client onto us and earn a commission. There’s much less overhead and no delivery responsibility, so it works well if GEO delivery isn’t something that you want to take on, or that you have the confidence to be involved in. But at the same time, it still allows you not just to increase your retainer size as an existing client, or to bring in a new client who you’ve been pitching to, it also allows you to provide that extra value to them and be the hero of the piece, without having to take on any of the delivery responsibilities.
00:40:57 – 00:41:16 – Jamie Stanley: And finally, with the collaboration, we put the GEO service together with you and fill in whatever gaps there are in whatever you already offer. So we work with a myriad of different agencies who pick up different parts of what I’ve already described, and we fill out the other areas, so that we can have a fully cohesive strategy that’s making the maximum impact. On the pricing side, the service tiers go from about a grand a month to $3,600 USD for a full
00:41:16 – 00:41:37 – Jamie Stanley: program, and there’s no long-term commitment on any of them. And on white label, margins are typically somewhere between 20 and 50% on top of our cost, and we’ve made sure that the numbers work for you, for us, and for the client, because, as I said, we want a world where everybody eats.
00:41:37 – 00:42:35 – Jamie Stanley: But having said that, we also know that the best way to get comfortable with this stuff is with a real world example, and the best way to get the sales ball rolling is with deep expert analysis. So for this whole month, we’re giving all of our Partner Club members, that’s everyone on this call, a free client GEO audit, usually worth around a thousand US dollars, for you guys to use on any client pitch or upsell throughout the month of October. This is obviously a much more in-depth analysis than the visibility checker, it’s kind of what we provide for a number of our clients when we’re having that early stage GEO discovery and first stage strategy creation. This will assess all the key areas impacting your prospect or client site, including painting a picture of the competitive landscape and what you can do to get them those citations and recommendations. So, scan the QR code on screen and fill out the details in the form, and tell us which site you want us to do an audit
Partner Club Hub
00:42:35 – 00:43:30 – Cara Corbett: of, and we’ll get that set up for you and get the ball rolling on that side. This will be back on screen at the end of the presentation, by the way, in case you missed it this time. All right, I know we kind of alluded to a Partner Club Hub, some of you might be like, what is that? But this is a quick look at what’s coming for you guys. So we’re building the SUSO Partner Club Hub, which I’m really excited about, something I’ve been pushing for probably since I started at SUSO. But instead of accessing our partner club perks through me, via email, agencies will now have one place for everything that you need to close a GEO retainer and get support. So things like a pitch deck, proposal templates, objection guides, case studies, all ready to use in one place.
00:43:30 – 00:43:48 – Cara Corbett: This isn’t live just yet, but we’re really, really close, and it’s coming soon, so I just wanted everyone in this room to be the first to know about it. Once it launches, you’ll get an exclusive invitation before we open it up to everybody else. In the meantime, though, none of this stuff that I’ve mentioned is locked behind that. If you want any of these assets today, like the deck, the proposal template, any case studies, you can still reach out to me and get that right now, you just have to email me. You don’t have to wait for the Hub to start using this stuff.
00:43:48 – 00:44:22 – Jamie Stanley: Yes, of course. This is kind of my baby, and also many people in our marketing team have been working on this, particularly Veronica, who I owe a huge amount to. So here’s what’s coming. What’s going to be in here is going to be your one-stop hub for anything that you need to pitch a new client, pitch an existing client, but also answer any questions that might come your way, so you’re not having to funnel through a member of our team.
00:44:22 – 00:44:38 – Jamie Stanley: First of all, there’s the pitch deck, which we’ve already mentioned, where you can put your own logo in there and use it completely white labeled. There’s going to be a proposal template in HTML format, which we’ve already scoped, you’ll just have to fill out all of your client’s details and then you’ll be able to generate it and take it and use it however you wish.
00:44:38 – 00:45:02 – Jamie Stanley: There’s going to be an objections guide, which will cover everything that we’ve talked about, so those first four that I mentioned, but also a whole index of questions that we’ve received on a daily basis, and also, if there’s anything that you guys are struggling with, or anything that you’re hearing consistently that you don’t have a confident answer for, ping us straight away and we’ll make sure that’s added to the Hub, and we’ll help you out with it as soon as we can.
00:45:02 – 00:45:28 – Jamie Stanley: There’ll be an intake form, which is basically everything you need to scope something from a domain, how you’re going to assess it for GEO. There’ll be white label report templates in your branding, and white label case studies, the ones Cara already mentioned, so you can attach them to any proposal or drop them into any pitch that you’re preparing independently. There’ll be no holdups from our side, there’ll be nothing that will get in your way, you’ll just have all the information at your fingertips to push this service as hard as you want to.
00:45:28 – 00:45:45 – Jamie Stanley: There’s plenty more in the pipeline beyond that, so if you have features you’d like to see, or problems you’d like us to help solve, please DM me or Cara at any time and we’ll get right on top of that. And as Cara said, you guys will be the first through the door, when this launches your invite will come through before anyone else’s. So keep an eye on your inbox over the next few weeks for the official launch
Resources and Q&A
00:45:45 – 00:45:58 – Cara Corbett: of the Partner Club Hub, and with your login details. All right, I know we covered a lot today, so before we get into questions, just wanted to outline a couple of resources that you might find useful that we mentioned today.
00:45:58 – 00:46:57 – Cara Corbett: The first one on top, feel free to redeem a free thousand dollar GEO audit, this is not that free tool that we walked you through, or those additional two hour ones, this is like our paid entry service, so a really good offer there for you, scan that, fill out the details about the client, and we’ll take it from there. The one under that is the free, quick, self-serve, three to five minute AI search visibility checker, so that was the quick thing, over a hundred points that we look at, that takes three to five minutes, so you can scan that there. And then of course, as always, if you’re not part of the SUSO Partner Club already, definitely encourage you to join, it’s completely free, you’ll get access soon to the Hub, but in the meantime you still have access to free workshops and training, you get access to those free audits, and then you have access to our specialist team, so if your clients have a particularly interesting question that you don’t know how to answer, we’ve got a help desk, or you can email me directly, and we’ll have that right in the Partner Club Hub as well.
00:46:57 – 00:47:29 – Cara Corbett: And we’ll get back to you with a detailed answer within 24 hours. So lots of good resources there for you. But if there’s any questions, now will be the time that we’ll walk through those. I see that we have some folks still lingering around, there’s about 33 of you. I saw Angela and Leon tuned in from LinkedIn, I’m glad they found that useful. And by the way, just so everyone knows, this will be shared with everybody on email, this recording, but also the deck will be available, so don’t worry. Deep, how long does a GEO audit actually take, start to finish?
00:47:29 – 00:47:54 – Cara Corbett: Well, I will say for SUSO, you need to be measuring prompts for a minimum of two weeks to get an accurate reading, so for us, we can turn the GEO audits around typically in two to three weeks. What does onboarding look like once a client signs? So again, this is…
00:47:54 – 00:48:53 – Jamie Stanley: Sorry, Caroline. One quick thing to add to the previous answer as well is that once you’ve decided which prompts you want to track, you can’t actually track them retroactively, so you’re basically tracking from the day that you decide to switch on that tracking. So that’s why two weeks is a really important line in the sand, because that gives you a big enough data set to understand how these are actually performing, it’s not like you can go back for the last six months and just mine that data, we don’t have the functionality to do that yet, so we find this is the best way of getting a representative data set. On top of that, in our GEO audits, we’re also auditing the content, we’re auditing the technical factors as well, we’re auditing the broader landscape across the web. So it’s a lot of analysis that goes into that, it’s not simply just running the prompts and seeing what shows up and what kinds of citations there are. But that’s why it typically takes around two to three weeks to turn that around.
00:48:53 – 00:49:35 – Cara Corbett: And what does onboarding look like once a client signs? Well, for SUSO, we have a specific onboarding, every agency, of course, is going to have a different onboarding process, but for us, once they’ve signed the agreements, we usually send a questionnaire that gets a lot of really important bits that maybe we missed in discovery, just so that we loop the team in, we set up the project internally, and then we’ll introduce their client growth manager. So all of our clients get access to a SUSO provided account manager, client growth manager is what we call them. And essentially then we would book the kickoff call to get any remaining bits, walk through the process, and then essentially we would start that audit phase. Jamie, you want to add anything to that? Did I miss anything?
00:49:35 – 00:50:38 – Jamie Stanley: No, I think that’s basically it. I think the onboarding, and I think this has always kind of been the case in the agency world, the onboarding is one of those things that is almost the most important part of anything that you will ever do with a client. It will give you the context and the baseline that you have to build everything else on top of. So the more, and Cara really hammered home the importance of discovery, the more you can understand about what the client is actually trying to achieve, but also how much they know about their own wider context amongst competitors, amongst the industry, amongst the internet generally, the more you know in that regard, the easier you will find it to find the most impactful opportunities to actually take actions to give them a better chance of being cited, recommended, and all that good stuff. So never skip, never breeze over onboarding, the more detailed it is, the more you can get away with, with clients, the better it will always be.
00:50:38 – 00:51:43 – Cara Corbett and Jamie Stanley: Perfect. Crey has a good question: what verticals or industries are seeing the most success in GEO services? I don’t have SUSO-specific data right on the top of my head, but what I will say is, lifestyle, direct to consumer, anything that would have those ‘best of’ listicles, lots of publications talking about them, those do really well. Specific brands, direct to consumer, consumer goods, I would say those are definitely seeing a lot of success in GEO services. And one thing I would say there again, sorry Cara, just to jump in, is that, again, I can talk about this for days and it’s probably the basis of a whole other session, but another really important thing to understand per client is, in their industry, what are the LLMs that really matter? I touched on it with the Claude stuff: obviously, you can find sources for citations in Claude in a completely different way than you maybe would for something like ChatGPT, or for Gemini, or AI Overviews.
00:51:43 – 00:52:49 – Jamie Stanley: But you really need to understand what operates in that industry to find what the most useful ones are. So, for instance, I spoke at a PR Moment event earlier this year, where I was speaking to a number of different people who worked in traditional finance, and they were saying that if you don’t have Perplexity, or a full understanding of how Perplexity works, then you’re way behind, because that’s what’s used in financial institutions. So it completely depends, there is an LLM that will provide value for any brand, it’s just about understanding what the sandbox is and what the strategy needs to be. Now, if we’re talking broadly about LLMs as this big homogenous thing, then they’re more used, particularly in a commercial sense and an e-commerce sense, for direct to consumer. So as a result, ChatGPT, and to a lesser but growing extent, Claude, is used to recommend products more often than the others. AI Overviews is obviously part of this as well. But yeah, it depends on which sandbox you’re operating in, there’s no absolute rule to any of this stuff, hence why a deeper analysis and a really important discovery phase is so important.
00:52:49 – 00:53:30 – Cara Corbett: All right, Ettienne, what happens if the checker shows that a client is already doing fine on AI visibility? Is there still a pitch to make? I would argue yes, because AI tools are constantly training on data and the internet, and if you’re not putting out the active narratives that you want to remain consistent, everywhere else on the internet is going to get picked up instead. And on top of that, competitors are also putting in lots of effort into their campaigns, lots of effort into their marketing, so it’s not something you stay on top of forever. It can be overshadowed, and competitors or other third party sites can own the conversation. Jamie, would you add anything on that?
00:53:30 – 00:54:47 – Jamie Stanley: I think I would also say, if you are looking at a client for a specific reason, there are obviously a million and one contextual factors that can impact this. But I think if there’s somebody who you think would really benefit from this, but their performance is decent but not exceptional, then sign up to those monthly reports and see how things change, because as we’ve talked about, competitors aren’t really going to stand still unless they’re already doing a huge amount of work to warrant this solid performance. Then obviously that’s a more difficult conversation, you might well be better placed putting your resources elsewhere. But if it’s just a case of ‘we have this standing because this is where we have always been,’ I would be very, very surprised if it stays like that without any effort on their part. And the only way you’re going to be able to show that is to say, well, three months ago, this is where you were, and now today you are here, and your competitors are gaining on you fast. That’s a really good way of opening up that conversation, or pushing that conversation down the line to when maybe the factors around that particular client are potentially going to change, because this is such a fast moving industry that you really need to be paying attention to this stuff, otherwise you’ll get left behind.
00:54:47 – 00:55:13 – Cara Corbett: And not to mention, on the ongoing retainer part of an AI visibility or a GEO campaign, there are constantly also big changes that happen in LLMs with their algorithm, they update things, sometimes we saw that headline about Reddit dropping out of things. So that’s why you need to have an ongoing prompt monitoring GEO campaign to see these kinds of changes specific to this industry as well.
00:55:13 – 00:55:44 – Jamie Stanley: From Caroline, using your free AI search tool, if you can’t access the competitors, does this mean their website isn’t open to AI search? Not necessarily. One thing about our AI search visibility tool is sometimes it can’t access websites that have particularly specifically blocked other crawlers. So sometimes they will find that AI tools can access, but our crawler can’t. So in that case, please just reach out to me separately and we can have our team do a manual report, because it’s just our tool that can access it.
00:55:44 – 00:56:04 – Cara Corbett: That was me, sorry. Caroline, does that answer your question? I just want to make sure I understood that correctly, I’ll come back to that when you respond. Nicholas, fantastic insights all around, thank you.
00:56:04 – 00:57:06 – Karen (via Jamie): I’m going to fill out the free audit, but I’m wondering how much the measurement playbook for GEO in general is shifting and evolving as the LLMs update. I’m also curious how much own content is weighted versus third party, a lot of my clients are pumping out mediocre blog posts in lieu of focusing on third party citations or earned media. How is own content broadly weighted versus earned hits?
00:57:06 – 00:58:08 – Cara Corbett: Really good question, and this is going to depend on the industry, the prompts that you’re tracking, that’s why it’s so important, like we said, to get really clear on what the intent of the campaign is. What are the prompts you’re monitoring, and making sure those are informed with first party and real search data where you can get it, because that’s going to show you the direction of the kinds of content that’s being pulled in, whether it’s owned content or third party content that’s influencing. It’s not a one size fits all strategy, you need to know for that specific industry and that specific client what particular content is being pulled in. I will say, in talking to a lot of our PR agency partners, earned is having a huge influence, and that makes sense: the more high authority third party websites that are talking positively and have these consistent narratives about your brand, the more surface area you’re taking up on the web, the more likely that narrative is going to be repeated, or that a brand is going to recommend you. Because if a lot of people are giving third party votes saying ‘yeah, this is a good product,’ it’s going to naturally recommend you more. But that’s not to say that if somebody is doing a search for a specific product, your own content, maybe a collection page or a product description, that stuff is owned content, and it’s directly pulled into AI tools when looking at a product carousel or something. So it really depends on the industry, I don’t have a direct answer for you, what I would recommend is, if you’re going to do our free GEO audit for your client, we’ll be able to give you that direction.
00:58:08 – 00:58:57 – Jamie Stanley: I think one thing I’d quickly add in there, Cara, is that I really wish there was an absolute answer, an absolute rule for this, and unfortunately, this being the real world, there isn’t. But one thing I would say is that this is why analysis is so important, and discovery site by site is so important. You’re right, there’ll be lots of content that’s being pumped out that ultimately won’t provide any benefit, but you do need to be checking it to prove that it either is or isn’t benefiting it, that’s what makes a mediocre blog post: whether it actually achieves the engagement that you need it to, or whether it doesn’t. So making sure that the client is tracking things properly, reporting things properly and actually interrogating that data properly is a really important starting point.
00:58:57 – 00:59:57 – Jamie Stanley: Also, thinking about earned media and where best to put your resource, because there’s only ever a finite resource that you have, I think the thing you really need to understand is that if your offsite, your onsite and your PR content aren’t consistent, that is really not going to perform well in AI search, because LLMs check all of the claims being made by your client against as many different sources as they can. So if there is a disconnect between those two strategies, regardless of whether you’re doing the PR work, or you’re producing the content, or the client is doing that, if there isn’t that level of cohesion between agency and client, then the impact you’re going to be able to have is, by its very nature, going to be reduced, because the content it’s looking to double check and validate for responses isn’t going to match up. And as a result, it’s not going to have the impact on AI search citations that you want it to. That’s quite a broad strokes view, but it is something to really bear in mind, that cohesion across those different channels is more important than ever.
00:59:57 – 01:00:15 – Cara Corbett: Okay, we are technically over, but we got one quick question that I think we can answer super quick and then we’ll wrap it up. Chris says: how quickly can LLMs pick up freshly published content and responses? I’ve seen it happen in as little as 24 hours sometimes, with LinkedIn Pulse, there’s been direct correlations of that. Jamie, you look like you want to say something.
01:00:15 – 01:01:06 – Jamie Stanley: Yes, and anyone else who does want to sign up to the Writing Content for AI Search free workshop, which you can set up with your team. Sorry, this is just something I’ve had a lot of conversations around. A key thing to bear in mind here is that, not only is it within 24 hours, it’s also so much more about highly aggregated fresh content, because back in the day, when LLMs had no knowledge of the last six months, they gave way more focus to the most recent sources that they could see. So that kind of aggregation remains, but the ability for LLMs to read content more recently is way, way better.
01:01:06 – 01:01:35 – Jamie Stanley and Cara Corbett: So it still cares as much about that recency as it did six months or two years ago, the difference is that it’s looking at stuff from yesterday rather than stuff from six months ago. So you don’t have that time delay anymore the way that you used to, but that recency and that freshness is as important as it’s ever been in the eyes of LLMs. All right, we’ll call it there. Thank you so much to everyone that joined today, hope it was helpful, hope it was useful. Looking forward to seeing some of you come in through the Partner Club Hub, some of those free GEO audits, and of course, get in touch with me anytime if you need any specific support or resources from us. See you on the next one, bye! Thanks everyone.
