6 months of geo vs SEO - the data is brutally clear

paperclick

Pulled up the parallel tracking dashboard this morning and just stared at it for a while. Six months of geo vs SEO data across eleven retainers and the pattern is so clean it almost feels boring.

The clients where geo was 'working' were already ranking well organically. It wasn't additive, just reflecting what SEO already built. One client went from 4% AI citation to 23% and I almost got excited until I checked conversions. Organic drove 8x more in the same window.

Had a client paying a separate consultant £2,400 a month for geo strategy. Asked what he was doing different from normal content optimisation. Long pause. 'It's more nuanced than that.' Sure it is, buddy. Couldn't even give me a slide deck.

Anyone else tracking both with real numbers or is everyone still vibing off conference slides?

wordweaver

Running 22 retainers over here. Dropped GEO as a formal deliverable in Q1. Not because the theory's dead - it's because I can't report on it without a hint of nausea. Clients want dashboards with numbers that actually climb and mean something. AI citation percentages? That's just noise wearing a suit right now. One client asked to add it back last month. Told her to kick the can six months and see if attribution catches up. She appreciated not being sold a fantasy.

maya-b2b

"That line always gets me. 'More nuanced than that' at $2,400 a month? That's just consultant-speak for 'I haven't got a real answer.' Seen the same framing from too many LinkedIn 'strategists' who couldn't back it up with actual pipeline results.

wordweaver

Parallel tracking, love. Without it you'll keep funding both forever because blended traffic makes everything look useful.

metricsmuse

Honestly, you've hit the nail on the head. Organic traffic converts better because the person is already searching for what you offer - the intent is baked in. Geo citations are great for visibility and trust, but they're more of a mirror than a magnet. If your site already ranks well, search engines will pull that content into their summaries anyway. Charging a premium monthly retainer just for geo strategy feels like riding the hype wave while the real work is in the organic foundation. A lot of clients don't realise that until the bills stack up.

wordweaver

Oh wow, the "proprietary process" pitch is always gold. Had one of those consultants try to sell me on his "proprietary" methodology-turned out it was just a slightly reworded version of a 2024 LinkedIn infographic. Dude was charging £3k a month for vibes and a Notion template that looked like it was designed by a teenager on Adderall.

honestly, at that point you're not paying for strategy, you're paying for their ability to sound confident while reading a blog post out loud. I'd rather take that money and just buy the blog author a coffee.

ppcnerd

Genuinely curious about the methodology here. Eleven retainers-what verticals are we talking about? AI overviews don't behave the same across query types. A B2B SaaS client and a local plumber are living in different search ecosystems entirely. Also, that 4% to 23% citation jump you mentioned-over what window were you measuring, and how many queries were actually in the tracking set? Without volume and the industry mix, that 8x figure might just be a mirage from a small sample. It's like saying the tide is rising because one rock got wet.

sleepermode

I've been wrestling with the same parallel tracking nightmare for months now. On the AI citation data front - are you scraping it from a specific tool like BrightLocal or doing manual checks? I've tried both and the sources keep contradicting each other, especially when Google's local panel updates mid-experiment.

As for the branded vs non-branded split: absolutely had to control for it. In one test I ran, branded geo queries accounted for roughly 60% of the conversion lift, while non-branded SEO was almost flat. That 8x gap smells like a brand halo effect bleeding into the geo bucket unless you've isolated that variable. Would love to know your setup - are you running separate GA4 properties or using UTM parameter partitioning at the landing page level?

analyticsjunkie

Every single time I spot someone slap 'GEO Strategist' on their LinkedIn, I feel my soul leave my body. At this rate, I'm down to negative twelve years left. Grim reaper's gonna start sending me LinkedIn invites soon.

dusting

i've watched this pattern play out in marketing for nearly two decades. Every few years, a new acronym emerges and suddenly every consultant with a landing page is selling panic. The cycle rarely delivers on the hype. What usually happens is that a handful of practical tactics get folded into what competent practitioners already do, and the rest fades. GEO feels like that same rhythm - a few legitimate angles that will eventually feel like common sense. Most of the noise will just vanish.

growthgeek

Honestly, asking "is GEO not worth learning" is the wrong question. The heavy lifter in that post is obviously SEO because it's been around forever and has the volume. But if you're not using GEO to capture the intent shift when people start their research on AI interfaces, you're leaving conversions on the table. It's not either/or - it's about knowing which lever to pull when. Depends entirely on your funnel stage

maya-b2b

Honestly, couldn't agree more. Spent months layering GEO on top of my LinkedIn outreach strategy thinking it would give me an edge. Turns out the traditional SEO fundamentals and genuine relationship building were doing all the work. GEO feels like a nice story to tell clients, not a pipeline driver.

bigcoffee

SEO's still doing the heavy lifting for me too. There are edge cases where enough public sentiment citations actually shift rankings. Also noticed LLMs seem to be weighting video content a lot more lately. Reporting is still a mess though-still haven't found a tool that cleanly separates current state from the actual opportunity gaps worth chasing.

ranktracker

Been running the same experiment for a year across eight accounts and yeah, GEO is basically theatre for most niches. The clean pattern you're seeing is exactly what I found - the clients already crushing SEO just don't need it. What actually moves the needle is doubling down on content depth and topical authority in SEO, then GEO becomes a nice-to-have if there's budget left over.

That $2,400/month consultant thing is wild but honestly not surprising. Seen it a hundred times - consultants justify their retainers by adding complexity and terminology when the real work is content, backlinks, and site structure. GEO has legitimate use cases like hyper-local service businesses or franchises, but the way most people use it is just repackaging existing SEO work with fancier names. Start tracking conversion value per channel instead of just rankings and traffic - most people find out real quick what's actually paying the rent.

avadata

The reporting problem is real. Been pulling those AI visibility metrics from Semrush myself-interesting in theory but the data's still far too noisy to take to a client. You can spot directional trends, sure, but there's zero statistical significance behind most of it. Wouldn't touch a deck with it yet.

Funny thing is, it's still the boring old rank tracking and backlink data that saves my bacon on reporting calls. People love a shiny new vanity metric, but when the rubber hits the road, clean backlink profiles and real SERP positions actually move the needle on attribution. The new stuff? Maybe one day. Right now it's just noise with a trendy label

wordweaver

Oh absolutely, there are folks out there doing the actual graft. Problem is, this space is so fresh that the snake oil salesmen rolled in before anyone could scribble a decent definition of "best practice." I've clocked real movement on citation rates when you actually bother optimising entity relationships and structured data properly. It's not just regurgitating content with a thesaurus. But yeah, I get why everyone's side-eyeing the whole thing when every consultant rocks up with the same tired pitch.

paperclick

Over four months, tracked roughly 200 queries across a mix of B2B SaaS, ecommerce, and two local service clients. Saw a few move from position 4 to 23. Not a massive sample - I know 11 isn't huge - but the directional signal was consistent across every account: GEO rankings shifted, conversions didn't follow. Even the local clients where AI overviews show up more often saw the same pattern. SEO is still doing the heavy lifting in my book.

metricsmadness

Someone pitched me white-label GEO services last week. His site had stock photos. Tells you something.

ctrjunkie

God, the voice search comparison hits hard. I've still got a deck from 2019 about optimising for Alexa queries gathering dust somewhere on my drive. What a rabbit hole that was.