From SEO to GEO: When AI Search Becomes Distribution

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video. Speaker labels are not included and some names and product terms may be transcribed phonetically.

[0:00] I've learned that the best founders are always selling. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast hosted by Rick Kleta. We uncover the strategies, the pivots, and the breakthroughs turning startups into giants. Let's crack open the vault and find out how. Welcome to GTM Vault. Trusted by 25,000 founders and operators building the future of revenue. This week's guest is Jason Patel, CEO and founder of Open Forge AI, one of the first platforms built to help companies gain visibility inside generative engines and AI assistance. We're breaking down generative engine optimization, also known as GEO, the emerging discipline of making your company understandable to AI systems. If SEO is about getting found, GEO is about getting remembered. Because the modern buyer doesn't start with a search bar, they start with an LLM. Inside, we explore how GEO works under the hood, why it will reshape content, authority, and discovery, and what every founder should be doing right now to

[1:09] prepare for AI native growth. So, I want to get right into it. Jason, what is generative engine optimization in practical terms? Rick, first off, thank you for having me. big fan of your work and let's get right into it. GEO ultimately is a user experience change and how people search for an answer on the internet. The plainest way to say it is in traditional search, someone goes into Google and types in what is GTM vault or show me the best GTM resources online. Show me the best GTM newsletters and GTM Vault would show up there and there would be nine other blue links that you're competing against to show up. What GEO is ultimately in plainest terms is someone goes to a chatbot or like chat GPT perplexity, Google AI overviews or claude. They type in what their question is the query and then they get an answer. Usually that answer will not have 10 different options like 10 blue links. Instead, it'll have between one to five answers and that's where you want to show up. And that's the power behind GEO. It's not about showing up necessarily in the 10 blue links. It's now about being the answer or one of

[2:17] three or five answers that shows up when AI recommends you. How do LLM see brands and decide what to surface? Yeah, I think someone who's telling you they know exactly what it is is someone who's probably overestimating their abilities. But I'll give you I'll give you an actual answer here. The way LM typically work for search, you want to remember two things, entities and knowledge graphs. It's a really fancy way of saying brands or the LLMs will remember you by essentially putting you on a knowledge graph and on that knowledge graph you're an entity. Essentially you are something that they associate other terms or topical clusters with and then they associate different entities with you. And so essentially you want to feed knowledge to the LLM about your space in the knowledge graph wherever it might be. And so when LLMs are essentially feeding information to their customers that are searching for a particular answer, you want to be the one that is properly optimized to be the answer for that customer. AI remembers many of your past conversations. It's going to get a lot better at doing that. So you want to be the company. You want to be the answer

[3:27] that shows up for the proper buyer or in this case your ICP. And they do that. The LLM do that essentially by remembering where you are on the knowledge graph, remembering what your entity is, and then figuring out are you trustworthy and is the content you provide a really good straightforward answer to what the person is looking for. It's it's a lot of different stuff. I want to say that, you know, when by the time this episode is released, there's going to be a change in how or there might be a change in how LLMs feed information. By and large, I think Open AI uses a lot of a lot of Google search techniques and the API and whatnot. And it's important to note that, you know, SEO, you see a lot of people online, especially new people in the SEO industry trying to make a buck, saying that SEO is is dying. It's not dying. Anyone telling that SEO is dying does not know what they're talking about. SEO is evolving. And this is the new essentially the new paradigm for AI search where you want to feed the LLM's data about your brand, your products, so that it can then educate the customers that are looking for you. And why is this a foundational shift, not just an

[4:33] SEO extension? The reason why it's a big shift is it's a total behavior change. Instead of people going to Google and then sifting through 10 blue links, AI is now providing an ultra convenient way to give an answer to a user. And as we learn in all things tech, the more friction you remove between the user and the experience, the better it is for users, the more users typically come back. With OpenAI and Chat GPT, we're seeing unprecedented growth, which means that essentially more people are using Chat GPT on a month-to-month basis. And then slowly by slowly and then all at once, people are going to realize that chatbots talking to a chat interface is a really convenient way to get answers. After all, Rick, let's let's let's put our thesis to the test here. When you're looking for something online, would you rather look through 10 blue links and try to find the right answer, or would you rather trust an AI to give you the answer after it remembers more data about you? Chat is just a better experience. It's more convenient. It's faster. And therefore, it's a behavior change and how people go about looking for the responses on the internet.

[5:38] That's why it's a foundational shift. Anyone telling you that chat is not here to stay, I bet money that they're going to be completely wrong. Yes, in many ways. uh chat is a lot smaller in terms of market share than Google search. That's because a change hasn't quite hit yet as a as a gigantic tsunami or or a wave that's going to hit the industry, but it will. Chat GPT right now is less than 1% of Google traffic, right? So, it it it's still a lot. 800 million chat GPT users every month thereabouts. It's going to happen. Chat is just a better experience. And that's why it's not a just a foundational shift. It's a behavior change and how people go about looking for responses and information on the internet. How should companies think about recall as the new visibility metric? When we talk about recall or really any concept of vis visibility metrics, it's important to note that AI is probabilistic. So if you type in a response or or a query into into Google traditional search, you're generally going to get the same 10 blue links thereabouts. In search AI search, AI is probabilistic. the answer is not going to be the the same every time. So the

[6:46] way companies need to think about this is that they want to show up in front of their customers as many times as possible and that means getting seen cited and selected by the AI. So how does that happen? Generally speaking I tell our customers and I tell people who are new to GEO that this is a threelegged stool. Number one you want to focus on commercial and transactional topics for content. You could do informational topics as well, but you don't want to be too broad. Okay? So, you want to focus on when customers are looking for a particular product or your product, you're there because they're already looking for something and they're primed to buy. So, pricing charts, comparison charts, and blog posts discussing your product versus the competition are things that are really good. The second thing is there's going to be an increased focus on thirdparty citations. Now, we know about how important backlinks are on Google search. It's so they're important. Third party citations is when chat GPT not only mentions you in the response, but then links to you. And what that means and how do you get more links from chat GBT is by not getting necessarily all kinds of other links pointing to your own website, but it's about getting

[7:55] relevant links pointing to your website. So top 10 articles, industry roundups, publications that are relevant to your space, review sites for B2B SAS, you know, G2, Capterra, etc. And then there are other sites like Trust Pilot, I guess, for B2B B TOC SAS. We work with B2B companies by large. And so the point is is that here is that you want to get relevant links to point to your website so chat GPT trusts you more and therefore you get promoted and lifted into answers. Finally, the third leg of this stool is structured data. Structured data was kind of optional before. Now, because AI reads your site and you want to educate AI into what your site is, you want structured data schema which fits in the header and body of of your website. It's very easy to do. If you use web flow or another CMS like like uh WordPress or anything like that, there are schema plugins that you could do very easily. A lay person can do it. You don't need to be technical.

[8:49] The point is is that schema tells the crawler, the AI, whatever you want to call it, what is on that page. So in the plainest terms, it tells them this is a product page, this is an FAQ page, this is a blog page, this is a landing page. And then you could tell them or tell the crawler what is on that page, a pricing table, an image, just pure text. It makes everything on that page more machine readable. And as we know, as I mentioned before, the more friction you take away from X between, you know, Y the goal, it becomes a much better experience and you're creating a better, more optimized machine readable experience for the AI, the crawlers or whatever you want to call it. So to re to review uh Rick, threelegged stool here, three parts and how and how companies should be thinking about this GEO change. Number one, more specific content related to your ICP, especially when it comes to commercial and transactional content. Number two, you want to focus on thirdparty citations.

[9:44] Build relevant links to your site. It depends on what industry you're in. I can help you guys out with that, but the point is is thirdparty citations will get you trusted by chat GPT and then lift it into more answers. And then finally, structured data and schema, which essentially make your website more machine readable to the AI and therefore a higher lift of conversion into AI answers. If Google indexed the web, what exactly are AI systems indexing today? They're using the Google index. I mean, that that's the safe answer and that's that's what's most what's probable right now. I'm sure OpenAI eventually, you know, Perplexity has a search API. They all have their own ways of showing answers. It's a black box by and large. And you're asking how do they get the answers? Well, there's a lot of similarities between Google responses and Open AI responses. Google uses something called query fan out. Open AAI probably uses something like that in the back end. My point being is that they're not completely revolutionizing revolutionizing how companies are getting their information crawled on the internet. In many ways, OpenAI is looking at the success of Google and saying it already works. Why are we reinventing the wheel and then doing what Google does and adding their own

[10:53] splash to it? There's a lot of really great influencers and co researchers online that have pointed to this phenomenon of how similar the many of chat GPT's results are to Google. It's the presentation and how you get it is is a lot more convenient on chat GPT. So again, there is no reinvention of the wheel here. Not yet. Right now we're seeing chat GPT use a lot of Google's techniques to feed its answers to users. We used to fight for attention and search results. So now we're competing for inclusion in AI answers. How does that change the economics of distribution? So I would say that GEO in many ways is like a land grab in the 1800s. America in the 1800s, everyone going out west to find oil, gold, cheap land and get those easy easy wins. So it's was hard to travel west. You know, it's better than uh staying put in in a place where there's a bunch of monopolies. So what ends up happening here with the economics is that if you're able to defeat your larger competitors on chat GBT, if their content is just not refreshed, it's not something that's great for the AI answers, it's not optimized with schema. If you're able to

[12:03] do that early, and we're seeing customers do that, you can actually get high intent customers who are looking on chat GPT to purchase something and then you can lead them to your site and they'll purchase from you. The top line here thing is that, and I see this with myself, my wife, my friends, just real time, really think about how people in your life use chat GPT. When they're using Chat GPT, they're going to type in a question. They might already be interested in buying. Chat GPT is doing the research for them. And therefore, when Chat GBT surfaces your brand, the person, the user already trusts you because they're like, "Well, heck, if Chat GPT did the work for me, I'm going to trust the AI." And then they're going to click into your site. This is your chance to capture them into your email funnel or have them subscribe to your YouTube channel. But essentially, you go from renting the customer from chat GPT to getting them into your own your own ecosystem. Kind of like your your huge newsletter you have, Rick. When you're able to do that, if the customer does not buy from you right there when they're already primed, if you capture their email, you can cultivate them with newsletters, with different types of content to show that they can trust you. And so, there are two things here. One

[13:10] is that the customer is already primed to buy from you or they're already primed to trust you more because chat GPT did much of that work. But then number two is that once they're on your site, even if they don't buy, you have the chance to bring them into your content ecosystem. Why is that second part, the content ecosystem, so important? It's because attribution in many ways is breaking. Here's the I don't want to say downside, but here's the one of the black boxes of the whole search experience. When someone visits your site, you can usually see on Google Analytics in the direct line item of traffic source. It says direct. You can assume a lot of them come from chat GPT. You might see a UTM code. You don't know what that customer typed into chat GPT to find you. You know what they did after they came from ChatGpt, but you don't know what they typed in before that. You don't know how much how many queries they typed in. You don't know what queries they typed in. You don't know if these or clicked on competitors. who don't know any of that stuff. And so there's a whole experience that's in a black box that's out there that you as a business don't know before a customer visits your site on chat GPT. That's a

[14:17] huge that's a that's a big black box that businesses don't know. And so my advice my advice to businesses is the content, the structure, everything I talked about before. Although you can't, you know, scope out exactly what your customers are looking for, when they come to your site, ask them how did you hear about us? What was your journey here? What are your pain points? and then build your content and website ecosystem based off of that. And so to answer your question, Brick, and to to go back here, one of the downsides, yes, is that attribution is breaking. But one of the positive sides here is that AI does much of the trust building work for you. And therefore, if you're showing up on chat GPT, you can have a higher conversion rate from customers that search for you on these AI search engines. What happens to the middle of the funnel when generative systems collapse discovery and validation into a single query? It means you want to show up for that query. It's that simple. The beauty though is that if there is there is no single query that is the end all be all for customers. It was sort of like that in the traditional surge age where if there was a really competitive keyword, everyone hundreds of publications, competitors and businesses were looking to get onto that keyword. What's

[15:28] happening now is that yes, the query will become very expensive and competitive, but there are now different queries that you can rank for to find your ICP. So before multiple ICPS would go on to that one keyword and then everyone would fight for their own real estate on that those 10 blue links. Well, with AI search, if Jessica versus Rick versus Jason versus David, they all have different personas about them and more different data about them in Chat GPT, Chat GPT is going to feed them different answers and therefore you want to show up in front of Jessica and David if they're your ICP. So yes, the queries themselves on the top line are going to be competitive, but you don't necessarily need to compete for generic queries. You want to compete for those mid or bottom funnel queries where customers are looking for you. And if your customers or ICPs are there, you're able to then convert them as a at a much higher rate. How should GTM teams adapt messaging and content print audience that's algorithmic, not human? I mentioned earlier to focus on the commercial and transactional intent topics. And if I haven't explained that earlier, what those two things mean is

[16:39] that when someone is ready to purchase or looking to purchase and find more information, but they're they're getting to that purchasing point. That's commercial intent. Transactional intent is I'm going to buy, but I'm going to buy from either Brick or Jason. I just want to start doing some comparison stuff and figure out, you know, maybe which product is better or where is this person's this company's checkout page. That's more navigational. Actually, the comparison stuff is better. Or show me the pricing table. show me the benefits. That's transactional. So when it comes to GTM teams, they want to start building more focused content. that very broad top off ofunnel content where you ask what is or how to that I'm not going to say it's going to die but the danger there is that if your content is way too broad the AI search is going to eventually summarize you into just a generic ocean of answers and then summarize your responses and 10 other people's responses and feed that to the user and you're not going to get a link and you're not going to get a citation cuz again it's it's just a generic ocean of content that the AI can summarize on its own. You're not going to get credit for that. You're telling me you're going to spend time researching, outlining, or

[17:50] creating a piece of content that never gets cited. Even if it does get selected, it's a waste of time. It's bad ROI. So, for GTM teams, I would suggest stay away from theformational intent or broadformational intent topics and focus more on commercial lowerend or deeperformational topics and then of course transactional topics. Ultimately on a conceptual thematic basis, Rick, what customers or GTM teams have to do for their customers is focus on their customer journey and learn literally everything about their customer. Not just how did you find us, but what troubles you? What other competitors did you look at? What did you like about those competitors? What did you like about us? What what do you not like about us? And then create entire content ecosystems based on those questions and answers. If you're able to do that, when customers are primed to look for you or a competitor similar to you, you're going to show up and you're going to be able to win those queries. That's ultimately what I think. Show up when someone is looking for you. If there's a market that exists for your product and there's always a market for something, you want to show up when a person from that market is searching for a product.

[18:58] Like if SEO was a content playbook, GEO is a data architecture discipline. Where should companies start if they want to be visible in generative engines? Yeah, I mean ultimately you could use our tool to help you create long- form content and research audiences. It's a full AI agentic platform to help you automate the entire AI SEO process. But ultimately, you know, if you want to start somewhere, if you want to start somewhere, LinkedIn is a great place to to scour. There's a plenty of newsletters from Kevin Indig, um, the HREF's team where they go into a lot of different GEO topics and talking about how important brand mentions are and how what's so important about schema. Um, if you want to start somewhere, I would start there or just start on YouTube and just type in, you know, questions. You might see me pop up. We have a pretty big YouTube channel. Um, what I'll do, too, is that when I'm sending you some materials, Rick, I will send you some people whose information I really like reading. I believe a gentleman, Dwayne Forester. I read all their all their emails. The names are escaping. Kevin and Dig, Dwayne Forester, Lily. Uh feel so bad for not remembering everyone's names. They deserve their credit and

[20:04] their flowers. There's some amazing researchers out there who are just focused straight up on the trends and stats of the industry. And then we take a lot of their findings and implement them into our product. So, we're built on their shoulders. I will send a list of those people that your users can then, you know, when they're watching this episode, they can go to and read more of their post and their newsletters so that they get the credit that they deserve. But again, the beauty of this industry is that everything is new. It's changing. It's not dying. SEO is not dying. It's evolving into something bigger and much more lucrative. So listening to people that are actually researching and putting their theories to test, those are the the amazing people that you should be listening to. Then you take those findings and implement them into your GTM team. So I'm always here to help, but there are a lot smarter, more talented people than me out there. You know, we have a great product, but there are people that are doing research that are out there that I highly recommend, and I will send those resources to you after this call. What does a machine readable brand look like in practice?

[20:59] What that in practice looks like is structured data. If you have an image, a pricing table, a comparison chart, a graph on your page, you want the AI to know what that is. And structured data tells the AI or the crawler what is this? Because the AI can't necessarily read the image or read the graphic, right? It's just a chart. What is it supposed to look at? Human beings can barely read a chart. And so the AI understands now it's a chart and then it's primed to to understand essentially better. And so when it comes to being machine readable, I tell everyone structured data, schema, these are these are very popular things and uh your CMS can will will take care of it for you with just a little bit of elbow grease. That's what makes content machine readable. The other aspects are things that are best practices in SEO that are brought into GEO, which is why I'm I'm telling you all the whole audience co if someone tells you it's dying, they're wrong. It's evolving. Broken up paragraphs, okay? No paragraphs over four sentences long. Don't don't do that. Bullet points. And then most important, liftable content, which means when you're writing a paragraph or writing any long- form piece of content, you want to make sure that the H2 that you have, the the the heading for that

[22:10] particular section is semantic based, not keyword- based. So, make it a question or make it a sense someone would say, and then the first sentence of that paragraph underneath that H2 should be the answer or a clear-cut response to that initial question. So the AI can read the question, the H2, and then lift that first one or two sentences of that paragraph out of your content. Because your entire piece of content is not going to be lifted into the AI answer. It's going to be a snippet. So give the AI concise snippets, semantic snippets that make it as easy as possible to feed to human users. What are the early signals that a company is indexable by AI models? Super easy. You could just ask Google. They have an, you know, index tool on Google search console. I will tell teams, don't over complicate this stuff. If you can get seen by Google, you'll get seen by chat GPT. All you got to do is set up search console. They'll have tools there. It'll tell you, you know, are there errors on your site and whatnot. And then again, you'll be well taken care of by Google. Google in many ways is a public utility company. They do a great service to the internet. Not some of not a fan of some of their

[23:17] practices and UIUX, but you know, they've done a great thing for the internet when it comes to SEO. They deserve their flowers. Set up search console. you'll be able to see your crawability or whether you're being crawable at all. And if you're crawable there, you'll be crawable by chat GBT. Don't over complicate it. What's the right balance between own data, earned signals, and external distribution? Yeah, we I touched on this before a little bit is that there's a framework here where you are renting audiences and then owning the audience. If someone visits your site from chat GPT, you are renting that audience because they come to your site, they see you briefly and then they leave. They go and live their lives and they might come back to you a couple weeks later to purchase from you or they might forget about you altogether. And then there's the owning part and this is really important and this is where GTM teams and marketing teams will earn their dollars and earn their their ROI. When a rented audience comes to your website from chat GPT, you want to bring them into your ecosystem. be so clear about what you offer and what your content is and what the content will be that they provide to you

[24:24] the business their email and therefore you can cultivate them over time and that means send them notifications about master classes you throw out or send them a newsletter twice a week providing actual content and in-depth research send them from their newsletter to your YouTube channel where they can see your face and build trust with you because no one no one trusts a person more than when they shake hands and and see their face and So those are the things you want to think about. You rent the audience from chat GBT, but once they're on your site, you own them because you provided so much value and clarity initially that they handed over their email. This is all marketing 101 stuff, but again, these things don't change. The concepts just evolve into something much bigger. We're moving from SEO to AEO, agentic engine optimization, and it's a bigger shift than most teams realize. To win in the age of AI search, rethink your entire growth motion across four pillars. Content from keywords to clusters. Design content to answer multi-step questions, not just queries. Technical from onpage SEO to structured metadata that helps LLMs interpret your product docs and brand story. Authority

[25:34] from backlinks to brand signals, credible mentions, social proof, and emotional consistency across channels. measurement from rankings to relevance. Ask not did we rank, but did we appear in the conversation? That matters. If your GTM playbook still starts with keyword maps, you're already behind. Jason, where should GEO sit inside a modern GTM or? If you ask a barber for a haircut, they're going to say you need a haircut. I have a GEO company, but I'm not going to say that it should sit at the very foundation of your marketing playbook. Here's what I would tell you and to any business out there. If you are at that point where you are scaling marketing and you want to get seen by chat GPT and the and just any search engine in general, if you believe your customers are on chat GPT and you no longer have a founder sales process, you are a marketer or a CMO who is now scaling that marketing process. You might be at a couple million dollars in annual recurring revenue or higher.

[26:35] That's I think the time to invest in GEO. Why? Well, the founder can't do everything herself. And so, when they bring on a marketer, it probably means that you guys are ready to scale marketing and really just amp up the growth of the company. GEO doesn't actually take long. I've se I've literally seen someone play the algorithm where they show up 24 hours later. I generally say give it like 3 weeks to a month. It's a lot quicker than SEO. So, you could actual see visibility ROI after a couple weeks of doing GEO correctly. My point here is that it's not for every business. It's for businesses at certain growth levels, a couple million in ARR, and they're looking to scale. They're looking to actually build a long-term presence on the internet. If you are a founder and you are right at the inception of your company, you want to focus on product, product market fit, getting to a million bucks in revenue, paying yourself a little bit, and then making sure that your company can fight to see next year.

[27:33] Once you're at that level where you're in a larger market and you have that traction, I would say invest in GEO. The other aspect too is that just on a competitive level, pure competitive level, if you do GEO really well and you're able to monopolize to the best of your abilities, the responses on chat GBT, you can really dethrone some larger competitors. We are seeing it on a day after day basis. Those competitors who've invested years into SEO will still show up at the top. They'll still show up at the top. But in Google search, if you never showed up in the top 10 blue links, you now have the ability to show up next to a much larger competitor if you play your cards right. You build good content, optimize for user intent, and then have structured data and third party citations. It's work, but this, I believe, is the future. This is the future of search. If you get on it now, you're going to set up your systems correctly and then be able to expand on your presence much later on. What does a head of GEL role look like in 2026? Actually, I don't think it's a big team that's necessary. I think, you know, I I won't plug the product. You don't need in the AI age, you don't need multiple

[28:43] or a large team of people doing one function. I think a head of GEO could be literally one person or one or two people. And I'll explain. If you're able to research your audience, the rest of your company should have that information. Someone should. The founder certainly should. If you're able to research more about your customers, you can reverse engineer what your content should look like, or at least you can find a northstar for your content. So, you don't need to do content research as much with GEO as long as your company has that content. Third party citations take time. Reaching out to people takes time takes time. And that's why I think you might need a junior team member to do those things. But writing content, building content, you want human involvement there, yes, but you don't need a large stable of writers to do all that. So to answer your question, what what does a head of GEO look like? One or two people. I think we're going to see billion-dollar companies being born with just 50 employees. AI is so powerful that you could do the work in the SAS era of of 15 people, but really do it with two or three people if you if you really use the tooling correctly.

[29:45] We're seeing that with our own company and I think it's going to be true of a lot of companies that are that have been born in 2025 and afterward. What metrics and cadences define GEO success? Yeah, again this is the this is the trouble here with GEO and it's an early industry. Give it some time. I'll give you a couple metrics. Number one, I think business in general is going back into the 20 into 2005 in the 2005 era. We're in the year 2025 and you think that metrics and business will get more complex and more high-tech. Sure, in some ways. Well, what do I mean about business going back to 2005? Brand mentions are more important than ever. So, even if someone does not link to you, the fact that AI sees your brand mention means that it'll trust you more.

[30:31] And so if you get people talking to you about talking to you at events about your product and then they post about you later on or you're in a newsletter mention, you're in a YouTube video, the point is is that you want people to talk about you a lot more and that doesn't need to be online. As long as they eventually go online and mention your brand, that's a great way to get boosted in the AI answers. So why am I mentioning all this? Well, there are some KPIs here that I would really focus on if I were a head of GEO or head of marketing focused on GEO. It's no longer about traffic to the website. In other words, you would much rather have 25 people who are primed to buy from you visit your website from chat GPT than a thousand customers from traditional Google search who are just tire kicking. If you find those right prime customers, you should focus on the following KPIs.

[31:26] ROI of content. How much time and energy and money did I spend on building content? And then did this content lead to a conversion? You can track all that on Google Analytics. Very easy to do. Then you want to see what is the lift that I'm seeing in my AI content month over month. Our platform provides that and you can build the content and the third party citations on our platform. When you're doing this type of lift measurement, you want to find out not just is your score, the vanity metric going up, but you want to find out, am I beating my competitors on a query by query basis, but also am I beating my competitors in the queries that I care about. Okay? So GEO is not about traffic. Forget traffic. Focus on the literal business part of what GEO based customers do on your website. How often do they stay? Do they buy from you? Do they end up in your conversion funnel?

[32:19] Those are the things you want to focus on because customers are already high intent. Forget about the traffic part. All right? Better to have 10 customers who love you and buy from you than 100 customers who are just tire kicking. If you're able to go back to the fundamental of business and look at time to value, ROI of content, how much time am I spending on content versus how many customers are coming from it? you move away from the importance of the traffic metric and go more into the importance of how much revenue am I getting per customer, how many what's my conversion rate, how many people are entering my conversion funnel, you're actually able to then really figure out, hey, this this GEO content is worth it. We should invest more in it even if it does not have the same traffic potential as it did as Google did in in 2015. How does this integrate into existing RAW ops dashboards or PLG motion? the PLG motion, the RevOps dashboard, there is no one-sizefits answer. This is going to be different from company to company.

[33:14] With that said, you can put your information, your data from GEO, like your visibility metrics and what queries you're winning into a Looker dashboard. I mean, we have companies that literally do that. And the point here is is that the metrics are metrics. Like, don't over complicate this stuff. GEO is not some new complete reinvention. It is it is an evolution. I've said that like four times on this call and I really want to stress it. That is an evolution of SEO. It fits right into the SEO metrics. You're just going to have to replace some of the metrics like traffic and could replace that with conversion, for example. Replace clicks with how often does someone stay on your page after they come from chat GPT. So, it fits right into what you're doing. Literally right into what you're doing. What you're measuring is going to change. But you don't need a fancy new dashboard. You don't need to redo anything. It fits right into the SEO part of what you're doing. the line item of what you're going to measure is going to change a little bit. That's fine. That's business, but it fits right into the SEO part of things. I want to look a little further into the future now. As AI agents start to search, compare, and buy autonomously, how does GEO evolve?

[34:22] Yeah, this is where the beauty of business going back to 2005. In my opinion, this is where, you know, one of the big changes happens. Instead of saying or having a really complex website with fancy colors and this and that, great. If that works for your customers, do it. You want the messaging on your website to be as clear as possible. So, you're asking me, how is the agentic evolution? How is an agent coming to your website going to change the web experience or what you do on a website? Well, you want to make sure that when an agent goes out and does research on behalf of its human operator, you want to ensure that the content of your website is clear. It's concise. It's succinct. What ends up happening there is that the agent then can synthesize your information and go back to its human operator and tell you, hey, this is Rick Collider from GTM Vault. This is what they do. This is how much they charge. This is what's so great about them. This is their downsides. Do you want me to buy from him? The agent is then going to compare you naturally against competitors. If your competitors don't have clear value props, clear data, a clear message on their website, you're going to win because the agent says, "I trust Rick more because his stuff is more clear."

[35:34] What does that mean for GTM teams? Well, it means that the messaging should be clear. Your website should be HTML or easily understandable so that the agent can go into your site and then really understand what your site's about. You should have a clear ICP on your website. Don't say you're for everyone, which is why vertical software is going to be huge in the AI age. You also want to have pricing and be clear as pricing. Be as clear about pricing as possible. And if you can have enterprise pricing and things like that on your on your page, great. Do that. You essentially want to be able to feed enough clear, direct, straightforward information to the agent in order for the agent to relay that info in a synthesized way to the human operator. If you're able to do that, you will win more deals simply by being more clear. And now you're telling me right now being clear that that's such a fundamental business idea. That's what I'm saying is that in many ways, business is going back to the fundamentals of just value prop. Tell the customer what it is. This is your ICP and go after your market that needs your product badly. So in many ways, business is going back in time just to go back and focus on the fundamentals.

[36:41] What does it mean to market not to people but to machine intermediaries? The clarity part, right? People and people should be involved in the process. I'm not one of these AI guys who says we're going to replace people and and whatever. I think that's one a dystopian. I don't think it's very patriotic either. And I don't want to live in a world where just machines do all the work and and we're removed from the process of discovering the world. My personal philosophy is a side Rick. What it means is clarity. Just what I said before. You want to be as clear as possible about what your value prop is and who you serve so the agents understand who you are as a business and then they can go back to the human operator and relay that information. It's that simple. If you have clarity and an easy to read page, you're already doing a great job in the future of the agentled web.

[37:30] Procurement pricing and competitive intelligence change in that world. Okay. On the clarity part, if you're going, imagine you're an agent and you go to the website of Ketta Enterprises versus Plant Enterprise. Kleta Enterprises has clear pricing. It tells you who its ideal customer profile is, but Plant Enterprises has mysterious pricing. It it keeps saying ask or click this button for more information and it brings you to a phone link or an email link. The point is here is that Kleta Enterprises is going to win because it's much more clear on who it serves, what it serves, and then of course what the pricing is. You then on the pricing table want to say and be direct. Ka enterprise is different is different from plant enterprises because this and that. We serve this ICPX, they serve this ICPY. You charge by tokens or one flat fee and they charge by seats. If you're able to create a clear contrast in the pricing and the comparison, it's really good for you because you're get cutting to the heart of who your ICP is and making the decision of recommendations a lot easier to the agent. Again, the agents here are not out yet or they're out, but we don't

[38:37] live in an agent dominated web. Not yet. But I think this is where it's going to go. Make things as clear as possible for the AI agent to go back to the human operator. clarity, simplicity and sharpness of your message will go a very long way. What data ethics and trust layers need to exist before agentic discovery becomes mainstream. I think I mean it go it goes without saying we're seeing this thing in tech right now. It's it's being a founder now a lot of it is is a fashion statement. You see these young kids getting into being founders where they you know it's great people should explore what they want especially young people. Explore what you want out of life. Being a founder is tough. This is my second company. I battled a lot of things in my first company. I eventually sold it. It was it was a good ending. But I went through a lot to build that and I discovered I really just want to be a founder the rest of my life. I love building things. There are people that are going to promise things in this space and in every space that's out there to win quick because AI in many ways is a land grab. So you talk about ethics. Be honest about who you are and what your IC who your ICP is and why you are different from competitors. Be honest about that because the importance

[39:46] of being clear to agents, as I mentioned in my last answer, is that you want to show why you're different from the competition. Okay? Don't talk crap about the competition on a pricing page. It's bad business. We should not be doing that in American capitalism. We should be providing value to the customer and then winning on the battlefield. Be honest about how you're different, how you compare, contrast versus your competitor. and therefore you'll give your customer more value in making a decision as to whether they'll go with you or a competitor. Does it suck to lose a customer to a competitor? Yes, it's one of the worst feelings in the world. No competitive businessman or businesswoman likes that. But if you do it in an honest way, you left it all on the field. There's no shame in that. And so when we talk about ethics, it's important that we be honest so that we can have a really great agentic web evolution and then it works for everybody. But if too many people enter the GEO space, literally any other space online to try and game the AI agents, which is going to happen, there's always bad faith users, then it's going to make things harder and less trustworthy for all of us. And then we operate in a low trust environment. And then we just lose

[40:53] the promise of doing business in a really easy, straightforward way. And so it comes down to how do individual entrepreneurs, business owners, and marketing teams present themselves on the internet? Yes, market. Tell that story. Dream big. But when you're comparing yourself against comps and telling you what your product does, be honest about those things so the agent has as easy as time as possible. If we all do our little part in just being honest about what the what our respective products provide, it'll lead to a high trust environment. It's easy to do business there and the whole pie grows for all of us doing business on the internet. Okay. I'd like to now move on to the rapid fire section of the pot. Jason, one misconception about GEO every founder should drop. GEO is not radically different than SEO. The most underrated signal of brand authority in the AI era.

[41:42] Number of third party citations. A company already building GEO the right way. Data growth. A content practice that won't survive generative search. Keyword research. If SEO was about ranking, GEO is about representation. The companies that master generative visibility will define how information products and brands are surfaced in the next decade. Thanks to Jason Patel and the Open Forge AI team for helping operators understand the laws of discoverability and for pushing GTM thinking beyond the browser. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to GTM Vault and I'll see you at the next one. Tech founders and VCs careers lessons GTM