Is GEO the New SEO?

A lot of people are going to try to sell you on what it takes to improve your generative engine optimization to get noticed on the AI chatbots.

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights.

• When Citibin met Seeley: Can businesses and grizzlies be friends? Watch Liz Picarazzi’s triumphant romcom below.

• Is private equity hollowing out home-service businesses or professionalizing them?

• Mars Chapman of Casey’s New Orleans Snowballs explains his approach to tipped wages.

• Jeni’s is looking for a few good franchisees to open ice cream shops.

MARKETING

The shift from SEO to GEO is heating up: “For decades, winning a spot in the ‘10 blue links’ at the top of Google could make or break a business. Not anymore. Today, consumers are increasingly turning to chatbots and Google’s own AI Overviews for information, rather than relying on traditional search. That’s caused profound changes to the very fabric of the internet. Publishers that relied on search traffic have been gutted, and big chunks of the SEO industry have been wiped out. But the shift to information-by-AI has also unlocked the potential for equally profound (and lucrative) opportunities for companies that adapt to the internet’s new reality. Specifically, companies that can get their brands into chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—and who can convince those chatbots to tell consumers nice things about their products and services—can reap massive benefits.”

• “When my wife needed a new laptop earlier this year, we Googled ‘best laptop for female professionals,’ but the results were mostly SEO-driven drek, the kind of useless, vapid reviews that content farms spin up to win clicks. When we asked the same question to ChatGPT, the response was totally different. The bot provided a well-researched table of potential laptop choices, as well as a detailed narrative breakdown of the pros and cons of each one. Thoroughly convinced, we clicked through on a link and bought an $818 Acer.”

• “To be clear, traffic from chatbots is still a drop in the bucket compared to traffic from traditional sources. But traffic alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Consumers increasingly use chatbots to perform research before making a purchase, often having in-depth conversations with a bot about the specifics of a product—especially if the purchase is large. The consumer may then head directly to Amazon or a brand’s own website to buy the product the LLM recommended. The consumer’s conversation would be invisible to the brand and its analytics team. But the things the LLM said about their product would matter tremendously.”

• “Numerous studies and my own research have shown that generative engine optimization depends on three things—the technical quality of a company’s website, the content it publishes on its own site, and the overall strength of its brand (as measured by signals like mentions in press coverage, success on social media, online customer reviews, and industry accolades.)” READ MORE

MARKETING

As you may recall from our recent podcast, “It’s a Bear Market for Citibin,” Liz Picarazzi fought a three-year battle with a grizzly bear named Seeley to get her trash enclosures certified as bear-resistant. Now, in the video above, you can see what it took to win over Seeley.” READ MORE