GEO Just Went Mainstream. The Industry Selling It Is Already Broken.
Bing made GEO official. Consultants are charging $5k/mo for dashboards. And a GEO platform co-founder just called the whole thing bullshit. Here's what's real.
Bing Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Last week, Bing merged GEO into its official SEO guidelines. Not as a sidebar. As part of the core recommendations for webmasters.
When a search engine tells publishers "optimize for AI answers," GEO stops being a buzzword and becomes a budget line item. Jake Ward (@jakezward) is charging $5,000 per month for AI Visibility Reports and reportedly printing money. Gartner doubled down on their prediction that organic search traffic will decline 25%+ as AI answers eat into blue links.
The market has decided: GEO is real.
A GEO Platform Founder Calling BS
On March 9, a co-founder of an AI visibility platform published a post titled "The GEO Bullshit." Not an outsider. Someone building in this exact space.
Their argument: the industry around GEO is already full of vague claims, recycled SEO tactics rebranded with "AI" in front, and dashboards that measure nothing useful. Everyone is selling GEO services. Almost nobody can show what they actually track, how they track it, or whether their "optimization" moved any real number.
We've been watching this happen in real time. The pattern is familiar if you were around for the early SEO days. A new channel opens. Consultants rush in. Agencies rebrand overnight. The ones who can't explain their methodology charge the most, because confidence sells better than data.
The Worst Offenders
Dashboard products that show screenshots of ChatGPT mentioning your brand. No prompt standardization. No statistical rigor. Just vibes.
Monthly reports claiming "your AI visibility improved 34%" with no explanation of what 34% means, what baseline was used, or how the measurement was taken.
The $5k/mo reports Jake Ward sells may be excellent. We haven't seen them. But when an entire industry springs up in months and everyone claims to do the same thing, most of them are faking it.
The Trust Vacuum
Bing's move legitimized GEO at the exact moment the industry's credibility is collapsing. Marketers now have budget approval. Their CMO read the Gartner report. Their VP of Marketing saw the Bing announcement. The money is flowing.
But the buyers are confused. They can't tell who actually has data and who has a Canva deck. That gap gets filled by whoever shows their work first.
What Real Measurement Requires
We run Airtrace, so we're biased. But we also know what we actually measure.
Real GEO tracking needs standardized prompts run consistently across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Not random screenshots. A controlled set that represents how your buyers actually search.
It needs mention tracking with numbers. Did the AI name your brand? Your competitor? What was the share of voice across 50 or 200 prompts? "We checked and you showed up" is not a metric.
It needs longitudinal data. AI outputs change constantly. A single snapshot is an anecdote. Weekly scans over months separate signal from noise.
And it needs competitor benchmarking. If you show up in 30% of responses but your main competitor shows up in 70%, a single-brand report would never surface that problem.
Three Questions for Any GEO Vendor
If you get vague answers to these, walk away.
What specific prompts do you track, across which AI platforms, and how often do you run them?
How do you define and calculate "mention" and "share of voice"? Can you show raw API responses, not summary slides?
How do you handle the fact that AI responses vary by session, geography, and conversation context?
You can also do a rough version yourself. Pick 20 prompts your buyers would ask. Run them across ChatGPT and Perplexity. Record whether your brand appears. Do it again next week. That's more rigorous than half the paid tools out there.
Where This Goes
The industry around GEO is moving faster than the data. Most vendors are selling certainty they don't have. The backlash post from a platform co-founder was honest, and we expect more like it.
We're building Airtrace around one principle: if you can't reproduce the result, it's not a metric. It's marketing.