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Paid placements and questionable outreach tactics are blurring the line between legitimate GEO and manipulative SEO. #
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 publisher fees directly, then sends an invoice to the client to recoup those costs.
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GEO vendors push for scale and volume, but dismiss quality and relevance #
My argument is that third-party validation is only valuable when it comes from credible, topically relevant brands.
GEO vendors argue that AI visibility is a “volume game,” claiming that driving a high quantity of mentions will meaningfully increase a brand’s “mention rate” in AI answers.
They’re treating the problem as a mention-rate, citation-rate, and volume game without factoring quality or relevance into their approach.
In the example below, there are several outgoing commercial anchors to LMS software vendors. That’s a hallmark signal of paid links.
Considering that GEO is a reputation problem, I don’t think any brand would want to be mentioned on a page loaded with paid links to its competitors.
Temporary window of effectiveness for inauthentic brand mention spam #
The reason some spammy GEO tactics appear to work right now is that most LLM citation systems are still immature compared to Google’s advanced spam detection. It’s possible that LLMs reward mention volume from low-quality sources that Google would typically ignore.
This creates a temporary window of effectiveness, perhaps one to two years, before AI platform companies refine their authority and spam signals. Marketers who prioritize a high-volume approach over brand safety may risk confusing LLMs about their entity or permanently damaging their reputation.
Here’s what Lily Ray thinks about it:
- “With each new product release, we see more signs that some of the new GEO/AEO companies – the ones selling services to boost visibility in AI search – lack the experience and context to anticipate how their approaches will be treated once Google and the AI platforms build countermeasures to strip spammy signals from their training data, indexes, and results.”
- “Our industry has gone through these cycles many times before. Going back to the first Penguin update in 2012, when Google began systematically suppressing inorganic links, paid mentions on low-quality sites have been treated as exactly what they are: another evolution of spammy link building. It’s naive and irresponsible to assume the search and AI platforms won’t eventually catch on too.”
GEO vendors are creating unnecessary risk #
This type of work can inflict real damage. Glenn Gabe thinks of it as an evolution of paid link schemes.
Marketing leaders aren’t just wasting time and money. They may be buying tactics that disappear, damage brand reputation, confuse LLMs about their entity, and ultimately waste effort on ineffective marketing initiatives.
It may also be illegal. The FTC says paid advertisements must include clear disclosures. Yet after paid or “negotiated” brand mentions are added to content pages, many websites don’t update those pages to disclose that the placements were sponsored.
How to evaluate GEO vendor claims about off-site mentions #
When evaluating GEO vendors, remember this: Many prioritize mention volume over source quality.
Here are three common claims and why they deserve scrutiny:
Claim:“The majority of AI brand discovery comes from third-party sources.”** Pushback:**It doesn’t prove that buying or negotiating low-quality mentions causes a brand to rank better in AI answers.
Claim:“Listicles and third-party pages are the lever.”** Pushback:**It doesn’t support the idea that brands should pay to appear on thin, irrelevant, AI-generated listicles.
Claim:“AI search is different, so traditional SEO quality judgment does not apply.”** Pushback:**Googlesays the oppositefor its AI search features. SEO best practices remain relevant. There are no special optimizations required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and pages must still follow Search policies.
More broadly, there’s no substantial evidence that:
- Adding a paid mention to a cited page will cause a brand to be mentioned more often.
- Low-quality, long-tail publishers are beneficial for AI search visibility.
- Citation rate beats source quality.
- Traditional SEO and brand safety principles are obsolete in AI search.
Paying for “25 brand placements” to achieve a “10-15% mention-rate lift” isn’t the right way to think about AI search. Instead, pursue off-site mentions that reflect genuine category validation from trusted businesses, reputable publishers, and real communities.
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