6 GEO lessons

This edition is brought to you by our friends at uSERP.

Your competitors are already showing up in ChatGPT. Are you?

AI search is pulling answers from a handful of trusted sources, and if your brand isn't one of them, you're invisible in the fastest-growing discovery channel in a decade.

uSERP has spent 10 years building the exact authority signals that AI models rely on: high-DR backlinks, expert-level content, and brand mentions across sites like HubSpot, Gartner, and G2. The same strategy that drives traditional rankings now determines whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode cite you or your competitor.

They've done it for monday, Robinhood, CrowdStrike, Wiz, and 100s more.

Superpath reader exclusive: Book a strategy call and uSERP will build you a custom AI Search Visibility Report showing exactly where your brand shows up (and doesn't) across LLMs, and how to fix it.

Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Speaking of AI search visibility, I finally got the “we need to start paying more attention to GEO/AEO in our reporting” talk from my CEO last month.

It’s been one of those things that I know I should think more about—especially because Dock so heavily relies on SEO in our content strategy—but I have a million other things on my plate, and our sales pipeline has been really healthy as is.

I’m also hesitant to track anything that I won’t have the time/attention to action, but I bit the bullet and signed up for three popular AEO tracking tools.

(Side note: one of those tools was Gauge. They sponsored Superpath a few months ago, but did not sponsor me to say this—I checked with them before sending this, and they’re still offering 50% off for the first 3 months to Superpath members here).

Of course, I let the free trial pass for all three tools and accidentally paid for all of them, but it forced me to really give them a real shot and get up to speed on GEO/AEO tracking quickly.

Here are some things I learned that might help you:

1. Coming up with prompts to track is harder than coming up with keywords

In SEO classic, it was pretty easy to come up with keyword lists. But…what the heck do you track for AEO/GEO prompts? It’s unlikely anyone ever uses the exact same prompt twice.

Sure, the odd person might type “best sales enablement software” into ChatGPT, but they’re more likely to say, “I am a head of sales enablement at a series B company with 300 employees, I’m looking for sales enablement software that blah blah blah…”

You can’t just plug in a list of keywords like you could in SEO tracking tools.

Most of the tools try to make you think more in terms of “topics” and “tags,” so you have a healthy variety of prompts tracked under each bucket. One thing I liked about Gauge is that it helped you auto-generate a variety of prompts from seed keywords you upload. (i.e., It helped translate my SEO brain into GEO speak.)

I also used Claude to generate a variety of prompts for each set of keywords I track in Ahrefs. That was moderately successful.

But heads up: this is the biggest hurdle to figure out. I tried different sets of prompts in each tool and got quite different results over the first two months.

2. SEO performance clearly helps AEO

Unsurprisingly, most of Dock’s content that ranked highly in the SERPs was frequently cited by ChatGPT. Our listicle that ranked highly for “content management software”, for example, was the most commonly cited source for ChatGPT across content management prompts.

Because we’ve prioritized SEO at Dock for a long time, we’re well positioned to be a source for LLMs.

3. But there’s a lot more variance

Whereas SERP rankings are relatively steady, LLMs like to mix up their citations a lot more. Even our top-ranking articles are only cited 50-ish percent of the time for the same prompt.

4. Citations are not mentions

The biggest a-ha moment for me was that although Dock is frequently the top source for LLM answers, that doesn’t automatically translate to being the most mentioned in answers.

For example, our “best sales enablement software” blog post is the most-cited article, but Dock isn’t among the top 5 brands mentioned. Which leads me to my next point…

5. Third-party stuff is more trusted than first-party stuff

What other brands say about you is way more important than what you say about yourself (for the most part). Not to say it completely ignored what Dock said about Dock, but it trusted what Dock said about other brands more, and vice versa.

Traditionally, if we were the first result, we owned the discussion. Now it’s more of a group consensus.

If there were one big actionable takeaway from all of this, it’s that I need to focus more on off-page going forward. Dock has always prioritized building backlinks (and, more recently, third-party mentions), but this really highlights the need for a strong off-page strategy, too.

6. It’s hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube

Another thing I noticed is that Dock used to be a narrower product category (digital sales rooms + content management), but we pivoted more horizontally in the last year to being a full sales enablement platform.

The wide majority of third-party mentions about Dock still call us a digital sales room, so we get really strong brand mentions in that category, but LLMs are really slow to call us a sales enablement platform (even after a year+).

I’ve encountered this on my own, too. I built a competitor database recently and really had to force Claude to use first-party sources for info on each company rather than third-party articles.

I’m hoping LLM algorithms adapt to this somehow going forward. In some cases, we are a more reliable source about our software than a 3-year-old listicle that will never be updated.

Final thought: This puts content marketers in a weird position. It's our content that influences what LLMs say, but they won’t necessarily listen to what we say about ourselves. I’m not sure what a great off-site content strategy would look like in a world that is still so clearly influenced by SEO rankings—but it’s something for us all to figure out. Fun!

Cheers,

- Eric

📧 Podcasts with beehiiv – A few days ago, beehiiv launched Podcasts. It took about 10 minutes to move Content, Briefly and its full episode history into beehiiv. I had no idea the team was building this, but it's pretty clear now that beehiiv is going to be the hub for everything Superpath media. - Alex

Want to try beehiiv? Use SUPERPATH30 for 30% off

📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events

To get the invitations to our virtual events, join Superpath Pro.

And don't miss our open-to-everyone, in-person happy hours. Come grab a drink with Alex and the crew:

🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Katie Parrott on Every’s AI editorial strategy

In my first-ever guest interview episode, I chatted with the great Katie Parrott, Staff Writer and AI Editorial Lead at Every.

I wanted to get Katie on the show for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, because Every is really nailing the “build a media brand” strategy that everyone touted a few years ago, but few followed through on. Secondly, because their content strategy feels more like an editorial newsroom than a “content strategy”. Thirdly, because Katie is on the precipice of AI for content marketing. And finally, because Every has a neat business model in which their premium newsletter and AI tools are bundled into one subscription.

I highly recommend subscribing to their newsletter—it’s where I get most of my AI news.

Katie and I chatted about:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here are some questions members asked in Superpath Pro this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some thought-provoking articles shared in the Superpath Slack community this week:

💼 Who's hiring?

Heads up: We’ve currently put a pause on new job board postings as we re-evaluate what a useful content job board looks like in 2026.

By the way, if you're looking for a new role, many roles are posted privately in the Superpath #jobs-and-gigs Slack channel.

🆓 Get a free 30-day trial of Superpath Pro

Superpath Pro is our paid community membership. On your free trial, you'll get access to:

👉 Sign up for the 30-day trial here

"I was about to cancel my Pro subscription as part of my annual January subscription culling. But after catching up on all the recent posts, I was like ‘uhhhh yeah I'd better stay here. These people are smarter than me.’ Grateful for all the knowledge-sharing. Take my money!"

— Nik Wright, Sr. Content Marketing Manager