Rebellious Thoughts #84 - 🤘 The Era of GEO

Hey!!!

I am still answering emails from the last newsletter when I asked you to help me with a title and a subtitle!!! Holy shit! Thank you!!! Sooo humbled…

Wanna know what the current draft title and subtitle is??? Drumroll please!!!

Too Smart to Fail?
“A counterintuitive approach to staying relevant”

It’s draft still because the Book is yet to be presented in a few months to the trade for feedback…scary!

Thank you thank you thank you everyone for responding and caring and giving me sooo much.

Anyway more about the book later.

Before I jump on the topic of today let me share with you - you are going to see more and more content there, longer form, more thoughtful, better crafted than the short dopamine hit on Instagram - have a look at my first video and subscribe please!!!

Ok let’s go - today I want to share with you something that I’ve been working over the last few weeks and have been interested for about 12 months.

You may have heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), you know the optimisation of your content online so you rank well on search engines (primarily google). You probably know it has evolved and continues to evolve all the time and there’s companies that specialise in helping you or your business with SEO.

So for example, if you go to google and type “innovation speakers” I don’t know where I come up in your search, but I effectively can optimise how well I rank. If you didn’t know this, I’d be surprised, don’t worry because it is becoming irrelevant very fast.

Welcome to GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) this is what we need to do to rank on AI searches. We are increasingly moving our searches to AI, asking ChatGPT and others and conversing about various ideas. How an AI model decides to mention Gus Balbontin and what it says about me is not the same as what made me rank well on google.

It’s still very much embryonic, there isn’t a huge amount of info (like SEO) nor expertise and the big players are starting to monetise versions of the inorganic type - like ChatGPT “sponsored recommendations” - Google has a hybrid you probably all experience with traditional Google results as well as AI.

I started playing with it recently with a friend’s company called Aqura - what I am about to share is probably old by the time you read it! Hahaha - things are changing so fast that you cannot stand still - so for what is’s worth, let me share my experience so at least you start thinking about it.

The way an AI model scans its available sources and decides what to answer varies. Generally, it’s less about how much you are cited or linked/mentioned and more about the credibility of those mentions - you probably have seen on LinkedIn, in particular, articles written for example, John Doe, hosted on John’s Website called www.doesconsultancy.com , reviewing the top 10 speakers in Australia and surprise surprise number 1 is…you guess it - John Doe! Then he comments and says “wow what an honour to be selected as number one speaker by me!”

AI can’t quite figure this out, sees the article well written on a website endorsed and responds to the question “who’s the number 1 speaker in Australia?” With John Doe!

Now that’s a terrible example, and I don’t think that will last long but there’s plenty of that in the market at the moment.

The exercise I am doing with Aqura is one of alignment primarily - making sure my website, my socials, my LinkedIn, all say the same and that a machine can read it - eg: because I am a bit of a rebel, I don’t like saying “keynote speaker” in my bio - I'd rather write “I like telling stories”. But AI doesn’t like that….I also probably need to sort a Wikipedia page (apparently AI likes those)! You won’t notice the changes really, but AI machines will!

Anyway - have fun exploring a bit and thinking about your business’ GEO

Claude gave me this answer to the top GEO companies (means these companies are doing well at GEO ranking themselves as GEO companies! - may need to read that twice - Haha)

www.aqurastudio.com
www.tryprofound.com
https://writesonic.com
https://otterly.ai

Yew!
Love
Gus

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