oitozero

we just finished a 90 day GEO experiment that most people in AI search will hate we took a partner from 4% to 80% visibility, pushed BlackRock out of the answers (with decades of authority and $15T under management) and didn't publish a SINGE piece of CONTENT the entire time no blogs, no landing pages, no "AI optimized" articles, literally nothing now our partner is showing up ahead of multi-billion dollar legacy brands like BlackRock, KKR and Temasek in LLMs I want to explain why we ran it this way, because I think most people in GEO are spending their money on the wrong thing if you look at every tool in this space, the product is almost always *content* if you look at every agency pitch, it's some version of "we'll write 40 articles a month for you" and the reason is quite simple content is simply the easiest thing to produce, sell and the easiest thing to invoice for but what nobody had actually tested and questioned is whether it's the thing that moves the needle or whether it just happens to be the thing everyone is doing! so we picked a brand new partner, and didn’t deploy a SINGLE piece of content for 90 days and pulled on every other lever we had (we really wanted a clean answer) now, here's the thing you need to understand about how these models work (and think) instead of reading your blog and deciding you're the best in your category the LLM builds a picture of you from everything it can find and most of the weight goes to what other sources say about you, not what you say about yourself your own content is literally the least trusted input, because you're the one claiming you're great and the model knows that! so instead of writing, we spent the 90 days on the stuff that actually feeds that picture 1) the first thing we fixed was the entity itself the partner was described in six different ways across the web depending on where you looked, and models punish that kind of inconsistency hard. we went through and made every source agree on who they are, what they do and who they serve. 2) then we mapped the sources for every buyer prompt in the category, we pulled which domains the models were actually citing, and then made sure the partner was present and correctly described on all of them. directories, databases, industry lists, wikis, news. if a model pulls from a source and you're not on it, you essentially don't exist for that question 3) after that we worked on third party validation, so mentions and references on sites the models already trust, framed around the actual questions people ask we also cleaned up the structured side, schema, naming, entity data anywhere a machine reads it. boring but it matters! 4) and the whole time we tracked the real buyer prompts, reverse engineered the sources behind each answer, and went after it one by one the combination of all these is what took them from 4% to 80%. companies with billions in brand spend were simply pushed out of the answers by someone who didn't add a single new page to their site! think about that next time someone's convincing you that it's all about content also, the lesson isn't that content is useless content works, but only once the model already believes you're credible! most people are doing it backwards and building the roof before the foundation exists, and then wondering why 40 articles a month isn't doing anything meaningful if you want the exact playbook we used on this, RT + comment "Visibility" and I'll send it over