The Startup Ideas Podcast - what the heck is GEO (AI search, rankings, $$$)

Starting point is 00:00:00 What the hell is geo? AI search. This is probably one of the biggest opportunities to take your vibe coded app or take your company and get a bunch of customers. So I brought on Cody Schneider and we're going to give you the clearest explanation of what geo is, who's geo for, how to get traffic from geo, which tools do you need to use, and why are people obsessing over AI search? A lot of people have done tutorials on geo, but we put it into one place.

Starting point is 00:00:28 And I think this is the clearest explanation of what. actually matters. Where's the fluff? There's a ton of sauce in this episode. And thanks for Cody for spilling it. Let's start from the beginning. What is GEO? Because what I'm hoping to get from this episode is by the end of it, I want to know what GEO is, how it works, which tools I need to be using, and if it's just hype. And I know you'll give me the truth on that. I mean, I'll just be blunt right now. I think it's hype, right? And here's the reason. Okay. There's still more searches happening on Google. Like, people aren't stopping searching on Google.

Starting point is 00:01:12 It's just like, it's basically like, if you think about the graphs growing up, like, searches on Google are still increasing and searches on AI chat is still increasing. Like, it's not like a bigger percentage of searches are being cannibalized by chat. It's like they're almost increasing at the same velocity, if not faster on Google, right? And so when people are obsessing over this, I think it's just, it's also a bubble thing. Like when you're in startup land, like everybody's talking about this because they saw this massive spike that happened like a couple months ago. Guess what? Chat GPT5 launches, right?

Starting point is 00:01:48 GPT5 launches and people just get nuked on that as a source. So they invested all this into it. Like a great example of this is the Talley founder has this graph where it's like absolute lift off, right? It's going crazy. GPT5 drops. Like it changes the entire search algorithm. them within chat GPT and their referral from that they're like basically referral traffic coming from chat GPT and sign it's just like plummets. Right. So I think it's something to think about it

Starting point is 00:02:17 and invest in. But the only reason that you should be investing in it is if the product that you're building has a purchasing decision time horizon that's long where people do research to understand what types of products are like are available and like the best for their specific business use cases. So let's like break that down, right? So if a if a person is like having to research like basically people don't do sales calls anymore to understand how the product functions. They do all of this research on the like front end. And then when if they talk to a salesperson, it's like they're so deep in the funnel by that point that they're buyer ready. And we see that this we see this happening with people that use chat as a research tool. So they basically go to chat. They research like, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:04 we'll say best funnel building software 2025 for, you know, we'll say like local businesses, med spas, right, or whatever. And so they do this like long query and then it pulls back all the information and then basically surfaces that to them. The, uh, I, if what people are doing is they're using it as a research tool. And this is why like there's like this obsession with it is because what we see is that there's a higher per conversion percentage. of people that come from chat to the website when they sign up.

Starting point is 00:03:38 And the reason for that is they've gone through the whole buyer journey. Like they've educated themselves and gone through the whole buyer journey so that they're more buyer ready. By the time they hit their site, they're like, they're like, yeah, credit cards out. They're in hand. They're basically about to like purchase this thing. Right. But overall, like the, the, when you look at the total volume of like the searches that are

Starting point is 00:03:58 happening, like it's minuscule. It's, it's super tiny. And I think it's this bubble thing that's that is software because. software saw this happen most quickly because early adopters are all software people, like anybody that's in this ecosystem. And also software has a long purchasing decision time horizon. So there is that research component. So I think that's what is skewing the data here.

Starting point is 00:04:19 That's what's like going on. So. Okay. So what is GEO? GEO is perplexity, chat, GBT, Gemini, people querying and getting answered from LOMs. Who's GEO for, you know, for people who's, purchasing decision timelines long, these long-tailed keywords. And the beauty about it is that people are so well researched that by the time they come to your startup, they're ready to pull out that

Starting point is 00:04:48 credit card and spend versus the old way where it's kind of like people come to your website and you're getting the one to two percent average conversion rate. Here, I know a lot of people are saying they're seeing like 10, 15, 20 percent conversion rate from LLN. I've seen like, 40% right so it is a really high value customer but like just the volume again is so small right um there's two customer types that i the data i've seen that like we've seen like have success with this one is local businesses that are service businesses so something that you don't make a purchase of often um so think like roofing think like um uh you know anything that's like home related like hback when you don't have a understanding of that thing because you're not purchasing it on a

Starting point is 00:05:34 regular basis, right? People are using this to discover those local businesses. It's like a research tool. Again, like larger purchasing decision, like larger commitment, larger purchasing decision, time horizon, research tool. Okay, local businesses fit into that. The other piece of software, right, like tools, anything like that where it's like, okay, we're going to use the CRM. I'm about to commit my whole company to using the CRM. I'm going to like go super deep on comparing all the different options and then make my decision based on that. So if you kind of fall into those categories, like those are the two that I've seen. I haven't seen it really in e-com yet.

Starting point is 00:06:14 There is some around this, like, but it's a lot of it's like very like best, you know, supplement for sleep, right, or something like that, right? It's kind of these, but it, but again, the volume that's happening there, it's just really not worth it for them to go and invest in it. where it can make sense is for ecom brands that have like almost like cult followings, I would describe them. So like imagine like a tailor that's like we just, I just for another project that my team's working on, we had them go deep on this company called Sunspell.

Starting point is 00:06:50 It's like this old like basically like menswear manufacturer. And for them like say you're trying to discover. a brand that like has a certain aesthetic and like great quality levels. But again, it's like a bigger purchasing like decision. Like you're almost like, I'm going to like choose this brand for myself, right? Like this is all the only shirts I'm going to buy are going to be from this company. That is when like this can work. But if it's like for, you know, almost impulse buy types of products that are in a cheaper, you know, purchase, it, we're not seeing it be. as valuable.

Starting point is 00:07:33 This may change, right? This may evolve, but like currently, like, it's just not as valuable as if they're, if it's more of a higher ticket item. So, okay, cool. So I get, I have a good understanding with geo, GEO is whatever we're calling it. I call it AI search because it's like, it's all it is, right? But anyway, yeah. AI search.

Starting point is 00:07:55 It's true. That's true. The VC's got a hold of, of, of, a, of, it and start calling it geo. So AI search. Okay, so let's say people are into this idea. Maybe they have a service business. Maybe they're building a cult like ecom brand. Maybe it's a, you know, SaaS software that's like pretty specific. How do you actually get started? Yeah. Okay. So this is kind of the, I think what I'll start with is how it actually functions because then I will lead into, okay, what are the strategies that I can execute to actually go and influence this so that I show up.

Starting point is 00:08:31 within these results. So first off, let's break down how, like, when I type into a chat, when I go to chat, GPT, and I type in, you know, again, best funnel building software for mobile devices, right, or for mobile. What's actually happening in the background is the AI is basically taking that keyword and then it's doing what it's called, what's called basically like AI fanning. There's not really a name for this yet, but this is like what I've seen people. people describe it as. So imagine it takes that initial query from the user. And then what it does is it goes and expands that query into, we'll just say, a hundred different queries. So it takes the user provided query. And then it goes and it writes a hundred different queries that are more

Starting point is 00:09:18 descriptive. It actually enhances them. And it writes them from all of these different angles. It's almost like a fact page, right, Greg? Like think about it like that where it's like, okay, here's all the different questions that somebody could ask in relationship to this. it's going to make this like mind map of questions, right, or this word map of questions. And then it takes all those queries and it goes and it searches those individually on, you know, Google, on Bing, each of them kind of like lean into different ones. So let's again walk through this.

Starting point is 00:09:51 User types in it their initial query. It goes, the AI goes and it writes these derivative queries that are more descriptive. And how we know this is happening is you can actually. see this in Google search console, right? So if you go to your Google search console and you filter queries that have a length of over 50 characters, you're going to see these queries that no human would ever write. Like it is only AI writing them. Like if you actually drop these queries into an AI detector, like AI or not.com as an example, like it's going to tell you like this is a query written by AI. Like this is written by AI. And so the other component of how we know that AI

Starting point is 00:10:31 is doing this search is because it is showing the it's showing impressions but no clicks so why why do we like assume that this is happening so basically what's going on is it's searching for that query that that the AI fanning that it's created it searches that long query it then finds what's ranking on page one and then it individually goes to the URLs it doesn't click through through Google it goes to the URLs that are in the search results, it scrapes those out and it puts it into the context window. So imagine, like, just to put numbers on this, you have a hundred different, you have a hundred different derivative queries that it creates. It goes and scrapes a thousand pages. It pulls those thousand, a thousand pages into the context window. And then it answers the original

Starting point is 00:11:24 query that the user gave it, right? So how do you actually win in that setting? You have have surface area and brand mentions is really the specifics here surface area within that thousand pages that it scraped right and it loves listicles it loves like top 10 lists and so you as a company basically have to get included within that and the more surface area you have within that that you know thousand different pages the more likely you are to be suggested as you know the top result within the, for the original search that you did. And it's just numbers, right? Like, if there's a thousand pages and you're only included on five of them, that you're way less likely to show up than if it's a thousand pages and you're included on 40% of them, right?

Starting point is 00:12:13 So when you think about this, it's like basically like whatever query somebody could search, you have to go and find all of those like pages that it's sourcing from, get included on those. And the more that you're included on, the more likely it is. that you show up within the search results that the AI actually gives back to you. So listicles, like being on listicles, the top, you know, 25 restaurants in New York City, that sort of thing, brand mentions. But how do you actually, how do you actually do that? Like, which tools do you need?

Starting point is 00:12:47 Like, what's your stack to go and actually do these things? Totally. I mean, so there's tons of them out there, right? Like, prompt watch is one, like AI for SEO or AI SEO tracker is. another. That's like an indie one. There's, I can't remember the name of Jackie Chow's company. He just released one of these as well. There is another one called Try Profound. That's more enterprise. But all of them kind of do a similar thing. All you're looking for is the URLs that are being referenced by the AI search for queries that are related to your product. So all of these

Starting point is 00:13:27 companies and all these products, they do almost really similar things. You basically like give your product. It creates all of these like different ways that somebody could query for your product. And then it goes and it finds all of the URLs that are being referenced for those queries. So once you have that URL list, you're like set. You already know what AI is referencing, right? So now your job basically goes and it turns into I need to reach out to every one of those websites and get our brand placed on each of those individual URLs, right?

Starting point is 00:14:00 So just to like, again, to use real numbers, I got to keep that company hidden, but this is like what a friend just told me when I talked to him a couple weeks ago. So imagine you find, like, you're a software company. You basically find all of the queries that are related to the four company, like what somebody would search within the discovery process

Starting point is 00:14:19 using AI chat. You find 45,000 URLs that are unique that are being referenced. in all of the queries that are related to your product, you take those 45,000 URLs, you go find the emails of those website owners and you reach out to them and you're basically like, hey, I want to get added or included on this URL. What is the cost to do that? Right. Like, this is literally a campaign that they're running. They're seeing this be super expensive. People know that this is like how this works and the value of this. They're like paying basically like

Starting point is 00:14:56 $500 per link that's being included on these, right? Wow. It's actually crazy, right? That's crazy. It's crazy. You can get that down if you give them a really high affiliate commission. So if you're like, hey, well, like, can we pay you X and we'll give you, you know, a 40% affiliate commission or 50% affiliate commission on the traffic, you know, that you draw, or something like that, you can kind of, you know, like, you can figure out some type of like deal composition that that can make it cheaper. But that's just like the numbers that he shared with me. I haven't seen like a lot of like, you know, raw data on this yet. So, um, with that, though, like a few of these can make a lot of impact. Um, because a lot of the times,

Starting point is 00:15:39 like, it's referencing the same URLs for a lot of the queries. So if you find like, okay, these URLs are referenced like more often in that kind of like, you know, niche or that, that, that search, like, you know, that keyword family that people, are searching, right? If you just go and basically prioritize those that are being referenced most, like you can make a way, like very high impact very quickly with this. And it's overnight, right? Like, I think that's the thing that like why people are obsessing over this as well. If you do what I just described, like you get impacts like literally 24 hours later, right? And it's way different than traditional SEO where it's like, oh, it's this very long buildup. Like, you know, you have

Starting point is 00:16:21 kind of like, you know, like you have to build this trust with Google over. time, et cetera. In contrast, when you go and get placed on this, because the AI is just aggregating from those URLs, you're going to suddenly start being shown up, right? Like, you're going to start suddenly showing up for those queries when somebody types it into chat, EBT. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense.

Starting point is 00:16:44 And also, not only does old SEO take years, new SEO takes days, the amount of new SEO, AI search SEO is increasing every single day, right? There's more and more people. searching on perplexity, searching on chat. So you're just, now's the time, right? Now is the time to actually be doing this sort of thing. Totally. And there's tons of these services out there that are like, hey,

Starting point is 00:17:08 we're going to go and write like a thousand blog posts for you and like make this private blog network that's specific towards you to help influence the AI. I think it's bullshit. I've seen the data. There's no way that that creates, like, stays sustainable and works. I again, this is just like my personal opinion. I know I'm going to get flamed in the chat just like talking about this.

Starting point is 00:17:33 But the, when it comes down to it, like all that's happening is basically what is ranking on page one through three of Google? That is what the source material for the AI responses are. It's like your job is to basically get onto all of the, all of the pages that are ranking on page one through three of Google so that you show up within the AI chat. So when you're paying for that link to like that $500, like technically you are building a backlink as well to your site. So that's actually like a good thing. Like there's like you like there is like a kind of a knock on effect where it's like, oh, we're doing this specifically for AI SEO, but we're also building a link, which helps the like total domain authority and like effectiveness of the site that were like actually, you know, our own like company site, which allows for us to rank for more, you know, hard keywords that are more competitive over time.

Starting point is 00:18:20 So there is that component as well. but I think the big thing here is that like the only way that this works is that like, for example, chat GPT and Open AI and perplexity, like they're all built on the back of this like search engine Google, right? Google has spent the last whatever 30 years or 25 years basically indexing the entire like internet. Imagine like perplexity and chat GPT. would they go and index the entire web when they have this thing that they can lean on top of? Or like you like get on top of that gives already good results, right? Maybe in the future they go and index the entire web and then they like serve back like what

Starting point is 00:19:05 what they think is most relevant. But currently it's more effective for them to just lean like basically build themselves on top of Google because Google has done all that heavy lifting of that indexing. It's already invested all of this capital into that process of like indexing the entire web an understanding it, right? And so I think that when, like, you kind of break this down, like, and it's fundamental pieces, right? When you go elemental with this, like, this is just SEO. It's just like a layer on top of it. And it's honestly in a way, almost like influencer marketing, right? Or like, because you're basically saying, hey, your page is a ranking page one

Starting point is 00:19:44 through three. Like, can I pay you to like put us on this list that we show up higher, right? And so it's just this like, you know, derivative layer that's above like traditional like search engine optimization. And dumb question here, like to find out which URLs are being referenced, are using Google search console or is there another tool that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all of those AI like SEO tracker tools, they all show you this. It's basically like the URLs that Google is sourcing from. I can't remember the name of the one my friend was using. It's a startup, I think, I think, like for, for like is you know I know there's you know a drafts and there's um SEM rush and you know all those companies like is there any de facto one to use there isn't

Starting point is 00:20:34 one yet they're all kind of like I think they're all right now they're all just trackers right it's basically just like percent of brand mentions which I don't give a fuck about and you shouldn't either like that's like kind of a vanity metric what's more important is like what are the actual things being referenced how do I go and reach out to those people? people, right? So I think if they're like, you know, any of these people building these like types of companies, that's actually the value. Like as a growth person, like that's what I wants. Like I don't really care about the percent of brand mansions. There's so many of these out there that like do this now. Right. And so it's more about like what are the URLs that are

Starting point is 00:21:09 being referenced. I know AHRFs and an SEM rush are going to like provide this as a solution at some point. I'll try to find the, uh, the one that my friend is using. Greg, because he basically went to them and was like, can I just like get the entire list for this, these queries, like that whole list, that 45,000. Can I just get that from you and basically pay for access to that? And that was like how you went about that process. But I can't remember the name of it. So I'll ping him after this and we can just include it in the show notes. Cool. Yeah. And I'm on, you can see my screen, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm on prompt watch. I've never used it. But it seems like it's doing what you, what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:21:49 It's, it's, all of them are doing the same thing. There's only so much, basically what they do is they go and they send synthetic data to all of these chats, like whether you pick any of these like AI optimization, search optimization tools. They send synthetic data to these chats. They get the results back. They look at what's being referenced. That's where the brand mentions are basically coming from, like the percent of brand mentions. And then they, uh, they look at the URLs that, um, the chat is using.

Starting point is 00:22:19 as the source material. Like, that's every single one of them is doing the exact same thing, basically. So, and then how do you actually do this? How do you actually, like, make impact with this? Is you're, again, finding those URLs that are being referenced for queries that are related to your product. And then you have to create some type of campaign or some type of process to go and basically get placed.

Starting point is 00:22:42 Cool. Anything else that people should know about with geo and AI search? I think that's the biggest, like, biggest thing that I'm seeing currently, I would have it be a part of your stack, but not the only thing you rely on. Just like all marketing. Like again, just the fact that, you know, a new model gets released and it just claps everybody from a, from a, you know, a signups from that as a source. It's a classic, right? It's basically like new algorithm drops and everybody gets screwed. Or like it just totally gets messed up, right? Like, towards.

Starting point is 00:23:19 Twitter Algro changed and all it is on my feed is just like basically like bombing videos. It's ridiculous, right? And I think we have to like, you have to think about that with all of this. It's like you can get platformed just like with this. You can get platformed just like anything else. Amazing. All right. Thanks, man.

Starting point is 00:23:36 I appreciate it. There you have it, Sauce about geo-AI search from the sauce boss himself. Cody Schneider. Thanks. I live to serve. Thanks for hosting, J. I appreciate you.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - what the heck is GEO (AI search, rankings, $$$)

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