GEO SEO

Generative engine optimization is a technical discipline. Its objective is a citation: your brand name and a link to your site appearing inside the text of an answer from an AI model. The models that matter are the ones people use to make buying decisions. Today, that list includes Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.

The work has three parts. First, you must know which questions your potential customers are actually typing into these engines. Second, you need content that credibly answers those questions in a way the models will reference. Third, you must get that content, or mentions of your expertise, onto the pages these models are trained on or retrieve during a live search. GEO is not about manipulating a model's internal weights. It is about earning a place in the external corpus it consults.

Providers sell GEO SEO as a service. Their offerings typically bundle three things: prompt research to identify high-volume questions, content creation aimed at AI citation, and link building to place that content on sites the models are known to read. Pricing is usually monthly, starting around $2000 and rising sharply for competitive niches. Some vendors sell on a per-placement basis, committing to a specific number of links or mentions within a set period.

The execution follows a familiar pattern. The vendor uses tools to estimate search volume for conversational prompts. They then produce long-form articles, often called 'pillar content', optimized not for keywords but for comprehensive topic coverage. The final and most expensive step is outreach to place this content on other websites, or to get existing articles on those sites to link to it. The promised outcome is increased visibility within AI answer streams.

The primary risk is buying links. Many GEO services depend on securing backlinks from other websites to boost the authority of the content they create. When a vendor pays for those links, or trades for them, they violate Google's link spam policy. The penalty for buying links that pass ranking signals falls on the client's website, not the vendor's. A service that promises a specific number of links is often engaging in this practice.

A second risk is misalignment. Content written purely for AI citation can sound unnatural to human readers and may not convert visitors. A third is measurement. Most services report on 'visibility' using proprietary metrics that cannot be independently verified. There is no reliable public tool to track how often a brand appears in ChatGPT or Gemini answers, so clients must trust the vendor's own dashboards. This makes judging results difficult.

Ask how they measure results. A credible provider should explain exactly which engines they track, how often they check, and what data they capture. They should show you a record of the actual answer text, the citations it included, and the date it was seen. Vague scores like 'AI visibility index' are not checkable.

Ask about link acquisition. If they promise or guarantee a number of links, they are likely buying them. A legitimate service will describe an outreach process where they send pitches from a real email address and accept that many will be declined. They should also verify links after the fact and report if a link is removed or changed. Finally, ask what happens if their efforts fail. A contract that commits to deliverables regardless of outcome is a sign of a risky, placement-based model.

Mentionry provides the measurement and outreach parts of GEO SEO. It does not create content. It starts by measuring your actual visibility in the AI engines on your plan. You write the questions your buyers ask. Mentionry runs those questions daily, records the full answer text, notes which brands are mentioned and which sites are cited, and shows you the trends. This tells you where you stand and where your competitors are being cited.

For the outreach part, Mentionry finds specific opportunities to earn a mention. It scans for pages that link to your competitors but not to you, resource pages in your niche, and journalist queries. For each valid opportunity, it drafts a personalized email for you to send from your own connected mailbox. Nothing here is promised. The software sends the pitch, the recipient decides whether to link. Mentionry then checks back to see if a link appeared and reports that result. It is a tool for systematic, measured earning, not for buying placements.