I’m so sick of gurus spewing 35 GEO and AI Search hacks when they personally drive ZERO business from them…
47% of my agency’s leads in the last 30 days came from AI. Here’s what ACTUALLY WORKS for us.
Every week another “AI Search Expert” posts gimmicky hacks to increase AI mentions. llms.txt. Chunking. Made-up EEAT garbage that magically powers you into every AI answer. One magic technical fix. Unlimited programmatic pages. Fairy dust and good vibes!
Here is what has worked for us:
- Rank well in traditional Google search for your BOFU terms. Gurus convinced the masses “traditional SEO is dying.” Yet almost 40% of our leads still come from 5-10 keywords on Google, and they convert with budget. Our AI search lead gen also directly rises and drops with these rankings.
- Get positioned on directories people use to make purchase decisions. AI draws on these and will continue to.
- Get positioned on comparisons, roundups, and listicles. Obvious!
- Build TONS of contextual backlinks in a service-related context, NOT on listicles. Less obvious, just as important, and so forgotten it works even better now.
- Drive social engagement around the exact context of your product. Mostly second and third order impacts of branding.
Didn’t create new content or articles that mattered, at all. Didn’t do content refreshes and chunking.
All we did was focus on building a reputable brand tied to one key segment of a market, even long before AI search was a talking point btw, now doubling down via the 5 points above.
Whether AI mentions you comes down to: does the market, your website, your customers, and third-party sources tell the same story about why your brand belongs in the answer?
Everyone preaches “positioning” and “category alignment.” Of course this matters…but what is it, actually, in practice? Consensus about your brand across the internet.
You build it by ranking well with your own site (which unironically begets more backlinks and mentions without lifting a finger btw) and getting other sites to talk about you.
In other words, tons of off-page SEO and third-party discussions.
People love to say “old SEO is dying”…ok… TOFU SEO is dying, sure I’ll give you that. BOFU is stronger than ever.
Hot take: people that equated “more traffic good!” with good SEO never knew how to do good SEO in the first place: GET REVENUE.
Pull up my site on Ahrefs and you’ll laugh. “They lost tons of organic traffic!” Correct. None of it converted anyways. Yet we still rank first page for the buying keywords that drive millions a year in revenue.
The ONLY thing that matters in SEO is ROI.
People are skeptical on HubSpot’s data showing 90%+ of AI search mentions (NOT CITATIONS which is going to be lower) come from third party sites.
I’m not, because I’ve done all the above and it mostly equates to: the more we get mentioned and talked about the more leads we get. And you can only talk about yourself on your own site for so long!
/ Rant over! ✌️
