⛰️ Don't Fall Behind On GEO

Hey y'all — it's announcement time (along with a fresh deep dive).

It's been quite a ride for SEO since ChatGPT was released.

First, people said SEO was dead.

Then, everyone started turning out a bunch of AI slop blog posts that gave them a temporary boost but ultimately hurt their domain authority.

But over the course of the last year we've seen the rise of GEO — (SEO for ChatGPT).

This is where arbitrage opportunity is for growth right now while most other marketing channels suck right now.

So my team and I are leaning into it.

Megaphone is expanding to not only be the best place for a founder to build an audience on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or a newsletter...

But also to help your startup capture the massive shift of search traffic towards AI.

So in August I brought Emma on as our new Head of GEO.

She's taken startups new to SEO from 0 to 350,000 impressions in under 3 months, as well as doubling traffic for established brands who are already getting millions.

We're only opening up a few slots to work with us for now ahead of a broader launch — grab time with me here to chat 1:1.

Packages start at $995/mo and include:

Keyword research & strategy
High quality blog posts
Technical SEO for your site (with zero work for your eng team — we'll handle it)
Backlinks from reputable publications and blogs we have relationships with

Grab Time With Me

And this week's deep dive is all about how SEO is changing, how to optimize for GEO, and why now is the right time to focus on it…

Forwarded this email? Join 60,000 founders and sign up now.

65% of new hires have no clear points of contact for questions.

Get the guide to avoid other onboarding sins.

Get the free Definitive Guide to Onboarding for 2025 and boost retention, engagement, and the ROI of your hiring efforts.

_{Want to stop seeing ads?}_{Upgrade now}_{. Want to get in front of 60,000+ founders? Go}_here_.

How SEO Has Changed

SEO used to be a cheat code.

Google was simpler. Competition was light.

Your site competed on ranking signals (backlinks, keyword density, domain authority).

A keyword-stuffed blog post could rocket you to the top of a common search query's results and being #1 on the first page of Google often got you the lion's share of clicks.

Founders who prioritized it early rode a wave that led to massive traffic, lower CAC, and a flood of inbound leads on autopilot.

Founders who didn't were left spending months building up backlinks before seeing any results at all.

And now search is crowded, Google's algorithm changes are often brutal, and there's so much competition for a tiny bit of real estate.

SEO still works but it's slower, pricier, and the easy wins are long gone.

And AI-generated blog content is only making it harder.

The Rise of GEO

As SEO has gotten harder to win at for startups, consumers have begun getting most of their answers from ChatGPT or even Google's AI summaries rather than a big list of links.

One study found that site traffic coming from LLM chatbots like ChatGPT jumped 527% from January to May of this year. Ahrefs claimed AI traffic was up 9.7x.

And there's no end in sight to this shift.

Chatbots continue to get better — the models get cheaper to run and new functionality (like ChatGPT's new Shopify partnership) is being added all the time.

And the approach for having ChatGPT treat your startup like an authority, and recommend you, is different than traditional SEO.

When people ask questions to LLMs they typically give a lot more detail than they do in a Google search.

This means long-tail content does more to boost authority than competing for the same short keywords as everyone else previously had to.

And authority in GEO comes from citation signals — whether your content gets used by an LLM. Freshness, structure, metadata, and readability (think "quotation potential") matter more than brute-force link volume.

Right now competition's low, results come fast, and LLMs are becoming the new way to search.

How to Maximize GEO Results

You might be tempted to just use an LLM to pump out tons of low-quality AI slop blog posts to target longtail keywords and hope for the best.

It does sound pretty simple.

But LLMs rely on "technical SEO" where you have proper site mapping, pillar pages, and (of course) a crawler-friendly robots.txt file more than SEO ever did (and in different ways).

Your site can be gorgeous with great sales funnels built in, but chances are your eng team are not domain experts in GEO/SEO optimization specifically (and you're therefore missing out on leads).

And they prefer content that can provide useful snippets more than the long, drawn-out language you typically see in blog posts written for SEO that just stuffs as many keywords into each post as possible.

Your posts should lead with the answer before the explanation. LLMs love pulling in short, direct responses. Open with clarity, then expand with details.

And target longer tail, more complex queries that are conversational rather than broad keywords. If you were a potential person coming to sign up for your business, what would you be talking to ChatGPT about?

AI slop, ironically, does not work as well for AI bots.

Why Startups Should Focus on GEO Right Now

When SEO took off, the companies who moved early made millions.

For some, it became 90%+ of their growth for years because each piece of content continued to work to drive growth indefinitely.

Just like we saw with SEO, if you wait then the barrier to entry for GEO will increase.

But much like the early movers in the SEO era, starting now ensures you'll own these new channels for years.

Grab 15 minutes with me this week and we'll go deeper on how GEO can be your new growth channel:

Let's Chat About GEO

How We Can Help

Become a member to get full access to our case study library, private founder community, and more.

We can also help your startup in a few other ways:

Content Creation

Let my team and I ghostwrite for your newsletter, X, or LinkedIn.

Growth

Grow your audience + generate leads with my growth service.

Fundraising

Share your round with hundreds of investors in my personal network.

Advising

I'll help solve a specific challenge you're facing with your startup.

Advertise in my newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.

Share Founding Journey

Raising soon? I'll send over my database of over 1,800+ pitch decks (including companies like Tesla, Shopify, and YouTube), just refer one friend via your personal referral link: https://foundingjourney.com/subscribe?ref=BJ6WYuRpZe