As traditional SEO shifts toward GEO, there’s a growing narrative that visibility in AI search depends heavily on off-site brand mentions. As a result, marketers are being told to think beyond on-site content and prioritize off-site marketing initiatives to succeed in AI search.
There’s industrywide consensus on the growing importance of off-site signals in AI search. However, this has opened the door for opportunists to repackage shady SEO tactics as legitimate techniques for increasing visibility in AI search.
Unfortunately, much of what’s being sold under the GEO umbrella is unethical and potentially fraudulent.
The deception under the GEO umbrella
I’ve personally audited the work of top-rated GEO vendors offering brand mention outreach services.
What I’ve uncovered is that these service providers are charging premium prices for questionable, low-quality work.
Deceptive tactics include:
- Leveraging “research studies” to advance their sales narrative: Claims like “X% of AI visibility is driven by third-party sources” can be manipulated and taken out of context to convince marketers they need to manufacture an aggressive, high-volume system for generating brand mentions.
- Framing the program as “partnership” building: During the sales process, GEO vendors present these programs as opportunities to build partnerships with other brands. In reality, the placement opportunities are often low-quality paid-link inventory schemes.
- Selling PBN brand mentions: Selling brand placements on Private Blog Networks (PBNs) for around 10–15 times the cost of a typical SEO backlink.
- Selling topically irrelevant placements: The domains offering these brand placements are often topically irrelevant. For example, a site may have one page dedicated to LMS software while also publishing listicles about the best crypto wallets.
- Reddit astroturfing: Agencies use aged accounts to mass-post brand mentions across irrelevant subreddits. These “mentions” are often removed within 30 days for violating community guidelines.
Paying for brand mentions is just an evolution of black hat link building
This is an example of what GEO outreach vendors are pitching. It’s unethical and amounts to an attempt to manipulate AI systems.
Clients are being asked to approve and negotiate payments for mentions
This is happening in Slack. The agency generates a “placement opportunity” for approval, and the internal marketing liaison has to review it.
The internal marketer is often a junior specialist who doesn’t know how to evaluate the legitimacy of a referring page.
There’s a prompt topic, domain authority, citation rate, and publisher placement fee.
In this example, the fee is $250 in exchange for adding the brand mention.
Clients have to pay the publisher fees on top of the GEO agency retainer
This is the slimy part that doesn’t get talked about. The GEO vendor pays the…
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