OpEd Sunday, Follow the Money

Brett Tabkeon

In the 1976 film All the President’s Men, screenwriter William Goldman gave Deep Throat one of the most memorable lines in political journalism:

“Follow the money.”

It was a powerful reminder that when big interests are involved, the money trail is usually a pretty good place to start solving a mystery.

While I was at BrightonSEO last week, I talked with at least 20 exhibitors, probably 100 different people, old SEOs, vendors, even a rare new SEO, and sat through 15 different presentations featuring more than 30 speakers.

One thing stood out to me almost immediately: people were talking about all the BS being spread by SEOs online, and how people were once again selling junk SEO, this time around what they supposedly could do with AIO/GEO.

What struck me as strange was that by the end of the first day, I hadn’t actually heard anyone doing that. There were no vendors feeding me lines about capabilities that weren’t real. There were no sessions promising rankings, citations or mentions. There were no new tools claiming they had found some secret way to manipulate the machine that was going to send me a flood of highly qualified traffic with mega-high conversion rates.

I heard NONE OF THAT. ZERO. NADA.

Not one person told me anything close to bullshit about LLM citations, AI Overviews or Google Gemini. But, if you listened to some of the social media influencers and pundits bouncing around LinkedIn and X, you’d think SEOs were back to selling flour as crack cocaine on a street corner again.

I got home and realized just how much this was bugging me. I mean, some pretty big names in SEO have been talking about “SEO snake oil” for the better part of the last couple of years.

That’s where this OpEd came to life. So I went looking.

I searched for marketing firms making strong promises that I thought stretched beyond the current reality. Surprise, I found quite a few making bold and often aggressive claims.

The interesting part is that most of them aren’t really talking about traditional organic rankings. They’re talking about getting you cited in AI Overviews and LLMs.

Some of the marketing language:

  • “Be cited on every AI engine” – BlastGEO.ai
  • “Ensures businesses are cited” across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and several Chinese AI systems – GoForgeAI
  • “Gets SaaS and ecommerce brands cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI … guaranteed in 90 days.” – RankZero
  • “We make AI systems cite your brand as the answer.” – RankSages

But here’s the part worth paying attention to. They are careful about qualifying those claims around chosen keywords and prompts.

Remember when they promised you #1 in Google and they were just buying AdWords to get you to the top of the list. This is kinda similar, but with an AI twist.

Having spent several years now working on getting things into AI Overviews and LLM responses, it turns out that getting a citation under a specific keyword or prompt set is actually ummm – (gulp) – umm ya – it’s pretty easy!

It is largely a matter of figuring out what is feeding the machine for that particular query or prompt.

In fact, I think getting cited in an LLM or AI Overview under a defined prompt set can be easier than getting a traditional organic ranking in Google.

Yes, I just said that. Why?

Because, much like PageRank and the backlinks of yore, once you start understanding the indirect, off-page factors feeding these systems, you can influence what gets surfaced. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly enough that I don’t consider the basic idea controversial anymore.

Turns out, under a defined prompt set, it can be easier to get you cited in AIO than it is to get you Google rankings. – me

And that brings me back to BrightonSEO.

None of those firms were there. I didn’t run into anybody selling that kind of thing. Raise your eyebrows. I did.

You know who was there?

Firms like Profound, fresh off raising a massive funding round, Searchable, Diginius, Digital Web Solutions, Otterly.ai, AccuRanker and Wix Studio.
There was also a healthy collection of old-school SEO tools and companies: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Semrush, Ahrefs and others.

Q) What were they selling? A) Tracking. Measurement. Link building. Visibility. Reporting.

Tools for figuring out what the hell is actually happening. Nobody, at least nobody I talked to, was selling smoke.

And that left me scratching my head. Where the hell are all these smoke-and-mirrors people? If there is really this much money flooding into GEO and AIO, where is it going?

Is the real business opportunity simply measurement, with companies like Profound, Searchable and Writesonic building the picks and shovels?

Is it simply that there is enough demand out there for GEO/AIO reporting that firms can make out ok?

Is this a case of the cart leading the horse? Is this wishful thinking? The idea that everyone is here, so we have to be here, and we hope that there will be a market?

Is everyone measuring this stuff while very few people are actually working on pushing the results?

Because if there’s a giant GEO gold rush underway, I went to the latest SEO gatherings around and somehow missed the guys selling the magic maps to the gold.

So I’m back where I started.

Follow the money.

Where’s the money, dude?