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
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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… |
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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: |
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How We Can Help |
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