0:01 You want your customers to find you on Google, obviously, but recently also in ChatGPT, and the little problem is that when your customers ask questions to AI , other brands show up instead. Perhaps competitors you know, or maybe even names you've never seen before. In this video, we will give you the best tips and methods to start your AI optimization today, understand and measure where you stand, and above all, implement actions to get ahead of your competitors. Get comfortable, take notes, there will be a lot of information and a lot of value. This is the first video and the most comprehensive video on the subject in France. My guest is Victor Da Silva, an SEO consultant for 7 years. He manages SEO for websites and large organizations that get millions of visitors each year. Payfit, Sézane, Doctolib, or even Edenred. And regarding AI optimization, he is one of the very first to have spoken about the subject in France. Back then, few people were actually interested in it, but today, we know it is a crucial 1:01 issue for long-term survival. And today , Victor's main daily mission is to deploy the best strategies and provide the best advice for his clients and their AI strategies. And that is exactly what he will share with us in this masterclass. And by the end of this video, my promise is that you will know, firstly, how to verify that AI can properly access and read your site. Secondly, how to make AI fully understand everything you do, so that all information is well-prepared for AI processing. And thirdly, most importantly, how to ensure that you are recommended elsewhere on the web. That you are cited and mentioned in order to appear on Google. But especially within AI systems like ChatGPT. We will break down each pillar one by one with Victor and give techniques that are directly applicable whether you are a 100% beginner or an experienced SEO. Hi everyone. Hi Victor. How are you doing? >> Hi. I'm doing great, Romain, and you? Very, very well, it's a pleasure to 2:02 have you here. Thank you for giving us your time. I know you've prepared a great masterclass to share today. So, let's not waste any time. My first question to kick off this complete guide to GEO is, when someone types a question into ChatGPT, what exactly is happening? That's really the number one question a beginner might ask. >> Yeah. Ultimately, you see, this question is really fundamental to ask yourself to understand, you know, the mechanisms at play, you know, behind how LLMs work and to see how we, in SEO , can actually influence that. And so here, what I'm showing on the screen is essentially a simplified diagram of how an LLM works when you provide a prompt. So you provide a prompt, you ask it, for example, what is the best payroll software to use for your business. Based on that, it will do two things. It will first tap into its training corpus. So that is all the data it has been trained on over the last 4, 5, 6 years. So there's the web, there are books, there's a whole bunch of things in there. And then if it doesn't find the information in this corpus, or if 3:04 it needs something a bit fresher, it will go and tap into external sources, particularly search engines. Uh, it will also go and tap into external sites. We talk a lot about Reddit, we talk a lot about Wikipedia. So that's a bit like the line on the right. And before doing that, it goes through a step called query fan-out. It actually transforms your prompt. So taking the example again, like what is the best payroll software, it will transform it into a more SEO-friendly query like best payroll software 2026, payroll software comparison 2026, and so on and so forth. So it will type that into search engines. Bing, Google. We will see later in the video that, uh, each LLM has its own preferred search engine , and then based on the results that come out, it will select certain results. It will take, it will become familiar with some of them. So here, we're moving on to the chunking step. So it will analyze their text and then it will formulate the answer. And in this, we can actually intervene at two stages. The first is to really position our pages and our website when it 4:05 searches on search engines. This is the step we call the retrieval system. It's a bit of a technical name, but overall, you need to position your pages in Google, in Bing, so that they can actually be chosen by the LLM. And then , we have the chunking stage, which means the LLM reads your page. And for that, it must be readable. We'll see that very quickly. There are many sites today that are actually very hard for LLMs to read. So, if your site isn't readable, you're out of luck. And, well , the LLM will then take in the text and extract it to formulate its response and decide whether or not to mention your brand. That’s basically it. Great, that's very, very clear. Uh, before we go further, and to stick to the basics, what test could an average person who has a company, a brand, or a business do? What test could that person perform to evaluate whether or not they are visible in AI for their company? Yeah, honestly, there is a super simple test for that. It's to take the two or three LLMs everyone 5:05 uses, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini —don't forget Gemini. Those working in tech sectors often have their eyes fixed on ChatGPT and Claude, but Gemini is heavily used in many sectors. So, what you could do here is simply go to those LLMs. Use private browsing to avoid being influenced by your own conversation history, and just ask: "If you are, I don't know, let's imagine you're a plumbing company in Paris," ask ChatGPT, ask Claude: "What is the best plumbing company? Who is the best plumber in Paris?" You make a few variations of that prompt, try two or three prompts. Uh, what is the best plumber for such and such a service? Uh , what is the best plumber for this service, and so on. And there, you'll quickly see if your brand is mentioned or not, and if you show up or not. In any case, what's a bit brutal with LLMs versus SEO is that, unlike SEO where you could sometimes get leads with pages ranked in 8th or 10th position, 6:07 well, that's dead today. Overall, the LLM will mention 3, 4, 5, or 6 companies, and if you're not among them , you're simply invisible. Great. It's true that most people talk about ChatGPT, as you can see, but as you mentioned, there's also Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Before we dive in, should we approach all four the same way, or is it a bit different depending on the LLM we're targeting? >> Yes! On that point, I think we really need to distinguish between them. Meaning that today on LinkedIn, the web , or YouTube, you'll see quite a few people saying, "Okay, ranking in ChatGPT isn't exactly the same as in Perplexity, and it's not the same as in Claude." And that is true in practice, because LLMs, depending on how they work, don't choose the same pages and sometimes cite different companies, but overall, there's still a kind of consensus. Which means that if you're visible on ChatGPT, there's a good chance you'll be visible on the others as well. And there's an operational 7:10 factor to consider: since it's a somewhat emerging channel, it's better to try to approach it as a whole and work on it globally. And maybe in 3, 4, or 5 years, we'll really go deep into each LLM individually. But as of now, it requires so many resources and so much effort that you should just do it globally. Don't stress over saying, " I'm doing this for ChatGPT, I'm doing that for Perplexity." And in general, the message is also to say, keep doing SEO. Meaning, do it for global SEO, which today encompasses classic search engines like Google, Bing, etc., and now these new engines, these new LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and so on. Super important. By the way, make sure to stay until the end of the video. We'll lay out the plan so that whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced, you'll get maximum value from this video, and Victor will share his best techniques and methods to go from "invisible" in AIs—for example in ChatGPT—to "visible," where your brand is mentioned or, ideally, your 8:12 site is cited. So, we'll cover several points; it's important, stay until the end, don't skip the video. And to continue, we talk a lot about traffic in France, which for the moment can be —depending on the topics, once again —quite light, sometimes a bit more significant, but sometimes a bit lighter. Is it, well, is it significant for the moment, and what is your vision for the future as well? >> Yes, I'm putting a short article from Search Engine Ranking on the screen. So , as of now, this article shows us that traffic—the article is quite recent —shows us that AI traffic, coming from LLMs, only accounts for 0.26%of overall traffic for brand acquisition ( SEO, advertising, well, you know the acquisition channels). And actually, the underlying issue with traffic is that AI search and LLMs aren't designed to send traffic. Today, these are engines that influence, and if you think about what is happening in the market, we are moving away from a web 9:13 acquisition economy that is heavily linked to traffic. It’s simple: a user searches for something, we position our website—whether on Google, via SEO, ads, or otherwise— and then the user clicks, learns about the info on the site, and then converts . That whole model is gradually collapsing, and we are moving more toward an influence-based acquisition. Which means today, your customers are going to type their queries into ChatGPT. Imagine you are a company, let's say in real estate. "What is the best real estate agency in such and such a city?" The person will see the response, and if your brand is mentioned, it will influence them. The LLM is not designed to link directly to your website. So, in effect, it will send very little traffic. That's why the number is so small, and I see—or rather, I think—this number will increase, but in no way do I think it will explode in the coming years. However, the influence the LLM's 10:15 response has—by saying "Company B is the best agency in this city"—will have value and will create leads and business for you. On the other hand, the user might not click on the link, they might just go directly to the site , they might go back through Google to retype the brand name, or they might see it again on social media. Uh, that's kind of, that's kind of my logic today, to say that we shouldn't just focus solely on traffic, we need to focus more on a logic of influence. Great, that's very, very clear. Indeed, we are largely moving from a search engine to an answer engine. And where we used to seek clicks—to complete your thought, or rather to echo what you're saying. Now, it's very important —we'll talk about it later—but especially to have a brand, to have an impact, and not necessarily just look at clicks or traffic, but rather the impact, the visibility in a global way, and not say: "On Google, I get 100 clicks a day, ChatGPT brings me 10 a day, okay, I'll focus on Google," because you don't necessarily see the visibility, to use your words, that AI 11:15 can bring. And uh, do you think—just before moving on to another question— do you think that GEO, not in terms of traffic this time, but in terms of impact and visibility, can compete with SEO and perhaps even eventually surpass it within 5 or 10 years? Do you have a prediction on that? >> Yeah, it's quite counterintuitive, but I think so. However, there is one thing to take into account, which is that for me, to date, GEO is a sub-component of SEO. That is to say, I don't see it as a separate discipline, and there's this big debate on LinkedIn and YouTube about SEO vs GEO where everyone is trying to pull the blanket to their side, you have lots of new consultants popping up with pure GEO agencies, and so on. What I think will happen is that , in any case, the two will merge. Before, we talked about SEO because it's Search Engine, so search engines, Google, Bing, etc., we know them. Uh, and today, it's Generative Engine, GEO. Uh, because the answer is generative. 12:17 Uh, GPT, when you ask a question, you are chatting with it. Claude is the same. And if we look at one thing, it's that Google wasn't like this until now, but with the arrival of Overviews in July in France, well, everyone who doesn't live in France has probably seen it for maybe 1, 2, or 3 years. And in fact, us in France, we're a bit in our own bubble, like "well, it's never going to happen." And in the end, well, you see, Google is becoming generative with AI Overviews, and I don't know if you've also noticed, it's trying more and more to push you into its AI mode, which is somewhat the equivalent of what Google is offering. And here, what you have to, what you really need to understand is that tomorrow, all search logic, the technologies you use to search, will be generative. So by definition, everyone will be doing GEO. But in practice, the majority of, well, GEO relies a lot on SEO. And the arguments today that lean towards not saying "Okay, I'm putting everything into GEO and stopping SEO" is that, for 13:18 me, people associate GEO with "Google is finished" and so on. We've had that kind of talk over the last two or three years. That's really being super naive to think that, and you have to look—I like to look at the stock curve for Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which has just exploded in the last year. >> And what does that actually mean? It means everyone buried Google two years ago when ChatGPT arrived. And today, what you have to see is that Gemini, so Google's lead, which is in pinkish-red here, is totally eating up market share . And the reason for that is that, well , we're all in the Google ecosystem. Today, I'm doing this masterclass on Google Chrome. Before doing the masterclass, I tested my camera on Google Meet. Right here, I have a Google Doc. Actually, we're just in it. So tomorrow, if there's one company that can impose something on us, it's Google. So that's the, that's the first argument. The second one, I'm not going to dwell on it too much, but it's that LLMs depend on search engines, as I 14:19 explained in the intro, to find the pages that have the answers, and so on. Third point, and I really want to emphasize this: as of today, and I've looked at this from every angle, GEO strategies do not exist. Meaning, if you have a new company and you're thinking, "Okay, SEO or GEO," it's actually a huge mistake to choose just one, because in reality, one depends on the other. And there are certain people , certain consultants and so on, who will make you believe that they've implemented GEO strategies that actually worked. Except there are major biases behind that. The first is that LLMs strongly favor market leaders. So, let's imagine, I've worked with big companies. For example, I spent a year and a half at Doctolib as an SEO manager, where we worked on GEO and so on. I didn't brag about having put Doctolib first in GEO when you search, you know, for medical software for booking appointments and such. For the 15:21 simple and good reason that Doctolib is already the market leader. And so, you have to be careful about that. There's also the niche factor—it's like, to go back to the plumbing example, imagine you have a plumbing company in Paris; you really need specific strategies to show up because there are so many, many plumbers. Now imagine you're in a village in the countryside, and you ask who the best plumber is. If there are only two, of course you're going to be mentioned. There are also consultants who will tell you, "Well look, my client, a very small client, was mentioned thanks to our GEO strategy." So those are biases that you must not fall into. And we will also see in the masterclass that if you already have a fairly modern SEO approach—meaning you master authority , so all the net linking, the technical part, and the on-page content—the majority of things are already good for it. And once again, we're not going to replace anything; we're going to look to adapt and add things, and we'll talk 16:22 to you about it in this video. And a final point, the problem I often see with my clients—and right now I'm picking up dozens of companies coming to me for sites, for traffic that's crashing, etc.—is often this issue where certain recommendations lead to cannibalization, meaning creating too many pages that cannibalize each other. And often that also leads them to say, "Well okay, SEO is no longer really relevant, we're going to do GEO.""We're going to fire our SEO provider and we're going to go with a GEO-focused provider." And on that note, to date, for me, the best GEO providers today are already simply the best SEO providers. >> There it is. >> So, very, very clear. It's true that it's a fairly recurrent question, I imagine, with LLMs. >> I get it all the time, honestly, I get it all the time—this thing of asking if we should stop SEO, if we should switch to a GEO provider, and so on. 17:24 Then it's interspersed with whether we should put everything on Reddit, and we'll see later that Reddit actually just got completely tackled by ChatGPT. Anyway, it's a joke, and the problem is that in these moments of uncertainty, you have to stay solid on your feet while remaining open, I think. That's the thing: staying solid on SEO basics. If you want to do GEO, learn SEO, and behind that, stay open—meaning there's the opposite too, like you see some consultants who are, I wouldn't say old-school, but who have trouble reinventing themselves, who will also be in denial and not adapt at all. And that's not the right approach either. >> Super. We can move on a little bit to the measurement and tracking part. In SEO, we know we have keywords, we have search volumes. On the GEO side, we talk more about prompts, about queries. So, these are the questions that people are going to type into ChatGPT. Except that today, we have no exact tool that allows us to know that a certain query has so much search volume per month on a specific LLM, on ChatGPT, on Claude, 18:26 etc. Overall, how do we do it, knowing that we might be moving forward a bit blindly? Uh, what are your methods for building your prompt lists a little bit , and what, you know, what would you recommend to someone starting from scratch to work on their own? Yes! I think it's really the foundation to go through, uh, really go through this reflection before doing anything at all . Uh, and here, the big problem, you see, you said it, is that we don't have the real data. In SEO, we have the Google Search Console, which we all know, that will give us a bit of what users type when they arrive on our sites, and so on. We also have tools that give us search volumes. Uh, besides, it's Google, right, that provides these search volumes with Google Ads and so on. But the problem in AI, we don't have that. Uh, LLMs are too young to provide those volumes. And even, there's a fundamental problem, which is that, uh, in fact, on Google, we standardize our searches. I'll use my payroll software example again. Uh, on Google, you're not going to type a three-line paragraph to find out, to 19:27 ask Google what the best payroll software is. However, on an LLM, on ChatGPT, you're going to ask it, what is the best payroll software? I'm a boss of a company of 30 people, we have such a budget. So it's super precise, and in fact, in a sense, there are no two prompts that are exactly the same. And tomorrow, I think we're going to see, you know, search volumes emerging in the form of categories instead. And besides, if we look a bit at how it's developing in terms of ChatGPT Ads, which just arrived in France there, in the last few days, is that there's no targeting by keyword. They have targeting by context, and basically, you put your context in, you say: "I want to target this or that person." So that's already a bit of an introduction . And then, you still have to determine your prompts. What I advise is to stay very close to what your users might type when they are looking for your products and services. I'll give an example around software again. I talk a lot about software because I'm a SaaS specialist. Uh, but so, what I was 20:28 showing on the screen there, for example, for accounting software, invoicing software, stick to "what is the best invoicing software,""which invoicing software to choose," and so on. Uh, don't go for top-funnel queries like we commonly do in SEO, which is to say: "We're going to target, uh, uh, what is an invoice?" Because, in fact, uh, we already have trouble tracking them and getting real volumes. I advise you to stick to...if you make 30 prompts for your business, that's already good. And the methodology I propose is to think in topics. It echoes a bit what we call the semantic ecosystem in SEO. So these are basically the themes you want to position yourself on. So here for example, we would have accounting, invoicing, cash flow management, et cetera. And from that, for each, uh, for each topic, you will be able to determine 30 prompts, or otherwise you just make 30 prompts for your entire business. And here, I propose a 21:29 multi-step methodology. The first one is that if you work in SEO, honestly, the thing you need to do is start with your transactional keywords. So those that your users type to find your products, your services. So here, it could be plumber Paris, it could be real estate agency, it could be accounting software, best accounting software, et cetera. And you can already turn those into prompts. So, what is the best accounting software? What is the best invoicing software? And then, you can also add nuances, uh, it's something I like to do by use case and by target audience. Sometimes when your, in fact when your prospects are searching for your, your product or your service, they won't use the word, they won't say I'm looking for accounting software. Instead, they will say I'm a boss of an SME and I need to automate my accounting. And actually, the answer to that is accounting software. So here, uh, mix, in fact, uh , very simple prompts. So what is the 22:30 best accounting software? What is the best invoicing software? And do things that are use-case oriented. What tool allows me to centralize my invoices and automate accounting entry? And here, to find your use cases, an interesting tip I advise you to follow is that, regardless of your company size, if your business requires making calls, like meetings with your prospects, etc. , record those calls, transcribe them, and prompt an LLM with them by asking: "What were the pain points of my prospects?" What were what we call? Verbatims. So how the question was phrased, how it was asked—not just the phrasing—and that will allow you to feed this use case section. And by combining this—meaning transactional keywords, your target audience, use cases, and what you also find in your sales calls—you'll be able to determine 20, 25, 30 prompts, and if 23:30 you want to go further, you can subdivide them by topic as I explained. And that is truly the foundation for later moving to a tracking tool to set up your prompts. And you absolutely must not, I think, fall into the trap of using an SEO tool that offers you 400 prompts and it's a party, it's a free-for-all. You end up with tracking that means nothing, that you don't understand, and so, yeah, stay small but relevant. That's the message I want to get across. Great. This checklist is very clear. Indeed, it's a very good point to prepare for everyone listening to us. And once they've prepared that, what would be the important KPIs to track? Because we hear a lot of things: mentions, citations, share of voice— well, share of voice—all these things , whether in French or English, sentiment, alignment. Overall, are there metrics to prioritize or focus on , and other things we can put aside or even completely abandon, based on your 24:31 experience? Yes. Uh, simply put, there are actually new KPIs. We said earlier that we talk less about traffic. We talk about conversion, though we can still talk about traffic. You can still track that with the tools we know: Google Analytics, or for larger companies, Matomo, etc., but those are things that are fairly well-known. And today, we are talking about new KPIs. These are the KPIs that SEO tools will track. And there are two in particular you need to know. The first is the mention. So here on screen, I'm showing a simple prompt. where I typed: what is the best payroll software? And so, we get a response. Here, we can see that certain brands are mentioned. This is what we call a mention. You can do this manually. Uh, you could type all 30 of your prompts by hand every day in incognito mode and see if you appear or not. But believe me, it's really, I mean, it's a nightmare. Or you can use a tool like Joo to do it, which will enter your 30 prompts into the model APIs every day and check whether or not 25:31 you are mentioned. So for example, if my name were, uh, Victor Company, well, I wouldn't have had a mention. However, Payfit has a mention, Sage has a mention. So that is the first KPI. Is your brand mentioned or not? And the second one is, are you cited? And if you go to ChatGPT here, you can click on the three little dots and select " view sources." And a citation corresponds to a page from your site appearing in those sources. These sources relate back to what I said at the beginning: when the LLM searches for pages that actually answer the question, will it stumble upon yours and be influenced by that page? And we can see here that, well, Payfit doesn't appear by accident, since in fact, there are two pages appearing in the sources. So there's their, uh, payroll software for SMEs page, and there's also their "best payroll software" listing page. And so, that is called a citation. So here, Payfit would have had one mention and two citations. This 26:33 is really what you need to track. And basically, what we want is to get mentions because if you have mentions, you influence the response. And to get mentions, you generally also need to appear as a citation. So, you can analyze how well your page and your title pages rank in these citations, and from there, that's citation, mention, and you can have another more global KPI that we'll call "share of voice," which is a KPI that compares how you position yourself against your competitors. Some SEO software also allows this. These are the key KPIs, and you'll also see others like alignment, sentiment, and so on. To me, those are a bit more like vanity metrics, so a bit less actionable in the short term. You'll see them come up . Sentiment corresponds to how the LLM talks about your company. Because it's good that it mentions you, but if it says "the Victor plumbing company isn't reliable because the reviews are blah blah," well, that's not very good. And 27:35 alignment is still important because, in a sense, we said earlier that traffic was less important. It was more about influence that mattered today. And actually, influence starts the moment the LLM pitches your solution. Because in practice, when I type "best payroll software," if I'm interested in Payfit, I could ask why I should choose Payfit and what the main selling points are. And effectively, the LLM will turn into a salesperson for the company. So if it gives us features that are outdated or no longer relevant, it will create problems, or it just didn't pitch the solution well. So that's what alignment is: does the LLM talk about your company the way you want it to? We'll see how to influence that, and we'll see that it's also a bit of a category issue. Great demo, really great. And I'd like to add two points. The first point is that it can indeed be very time-consuming to check all the keywords manually. So, I'll take this opportunity to plug it, but I've put a 28:36 link in the video description for Geolinka, where you enter your site and keywords, and it gives you your positioning, absences, mentions, and citations, just as you explained so well. And the second point, well, feel free to check the description; access is free. So there you go, no need to take out your credit card. You already have free access to the Geolinka tool, the tool we use daily for AI SEO, whether it's to analyze and measure if your brand or site appears in AIs. And the second thing is to boost your visibility and go from absent to visible on your best queries within artificial intelligences. And by the way, today we have launched the Geo selection. It is very simple to use. You enter your site and your main keyword. You click on the button right here, and you will get an idea of the competitors who are more present than you in your industry and on your main queries and keywords. And you will have here a selection of the best AI sources that some of your competitors have but you do not. Or they are sites that are trusted and used by artificial intelligences. And on this page, you 29:37 can notably find the recommended selection of 10 spots for you. You can add or remove some. And by the way, you can find other information like the report that will be made available right after your first order, or why the selection is a truly almost unbeatable model compared to an agency's price or compared to the mistakes you might make if you do it alone, and the money and time you might lose. So, choose your selection and then confirm your selection. Enter your billing information and right after your payment, you will be able to directly access the dashboard with the first articles that will be published in the coming days. And if you have more questions, you can book an appointment with a Geo expert from the team. We will give you advice, we will tell you which of your competitors are most present, or if your business is suitable for optimal referencing in AIs . It's 100%free. All the links are in the description of this video and we can resume. And the second thing is, I believe you worked with Payfit where you had the opportunity to >> Great. >> Yeah, I've worked with a lot of SaaS companies. Uh, I had the chance to work 30:38 with Payfit, Mooncard, I spent a year and a half at Doctolib as I mentioned. Overall, 80%of my clients are SaaS. It's a sector I love and I have many clients in it. >> Well, you're on fire in any case, payroll software, I mean, I don't know what your contribution was in terms of percentage, maybe consulting or strategy or who knows what, but very nice keyword. >> Very nice. >> on Payfit. Actually, the advantage of working with—it's always the same— the advantage of working with great companies is that they have the brand, and the brand, we'll come back to that, is basically the cheat code for SEO anyway, I think. >> And let's be honest, over the last 5 to 10 years, it's also starting to be a bit of a "cheat code" for SEO, which... which wasn't...well, which wasn't the case before. But yeah, no, with Payfit, I worked with them in 2024. Today, I wouldn't say it's thanks to me that they're where they are, but I think it's a...it's a mix of everything. >> Of course, of course, of course. Especially in this, in this kind of highly competitive niche where it takes years to build the foundations. So, uh 31:40 >> Yeah, it's hardcore, those $ 15 cost-per-click terms. Exactly. >> I imagine. Great. Well, that's very, very clear. Uh, we can move on to a first pillar. Are AIs reading your site ? So, we hear that some sites are poorly read, poorly crawled, analyzed by AIs, and that it's a catastrophe everywhere. Is it true? Is it false? And what, you know, could you recommend as a fundamental starting point when someone wants to get into GEO? >> Yeah, that's just like tracking, a fundamental point to address before diving headfirst into content, links, and so on. I think it's simply realizing that, well, just like your site had to be crawlable by search engines for SEO. Well, here it needs to be accessible to the LLM. Once again, when the LLM is doing its thing or going out to search for external sources, if it hits pages that aren't accessible—imagine your page isn't reachable, it's a 404, or there are 32:41 things blocking it on the page, and that's what I'm going to talk about, how to avoid that—well, it will just skip it directly. Don't forget that behind this, these are models that cost , that cost a lot of money, so at the slightest problem on your page, they will skip it. That's why today there are pages that work very well, which are just very simple HTML pages and so on. And here, the advice I would give you, uh, is to do something very simple ; actually, based on the audits I've conducted, the issues we face today when they can't read sites often come down to JavaScript. A very simple thing you can do is use this site called, uh, you can type "page without JavaScript." I'm showing a simple trick so that you can, so that everyone can do it. Here, you can test how your page renders without JavaScript. Why without JavaScript? Because LLMs cannot read JavaScript. For those involved in SEO, this resonates because it was somewhat 33:42 the case for Google a few years ago, though less so today. But right now, LLMs arrive on your site. If your site is just JavaScript, they see a blank page, actually. So here, I'll show you a very concrete example. Here, we have a company; I'm using the real estate agency example again. We have a firm that does, uh, real estate in Paris, high-end by the way, etc., that must have some pretty, uh, significant deals . And so, we have the listings on the left and the map on the right. This is what you see. What Google sees is somewhat similar, and globally, this is what ChatGPT sees or what Claude sees. And basically today, when you remove the JavaScript from those pages, we see that the listings don't appear, and we also see that the map doesn't appear. So the test you can do is put your site into, uh, a little tool like that, look at how it appears, and there's a low chance you'll have major issues, but I have seen them, so you must do it. And so, another test you can do that's quite simple is to go into private 34:44 browsing, and I'll give it to you for the example I just showed, but I told it: "list me the ads you see on this page." And there, it tells me in black and white. The problem is that the main page does not return the listing maps in its accessible content. So, the thing is, you understand that even if we do all the optimizations we want on this page, if the LLM isn't able to understand that there are listings on the page, it will never, ever mention or cite this company because, in reality, if the user goes to this site, they aren't sure they'll find anything. So that is truly fundamental. The first mistake I often see is too much JavaScript on a site. The second one, which is actually very rare, is, you know, there's a file called robots.txt that we put at the root of our sites to explain to search engine crawlers and LLMs how to crawl the site, whether they have permission or not. Actually, today, there's a huge debate on the web about whether we should let LLMs ingest all the content. Specifically, media 35:46 outlets are in a position where they are getting less and less traffic, which was their way of monetizing, and the LLMs are essentially stealing their information. And basically, they are starting to block crawlers in their robots.txt files so that ChatGPT can't read their content. And for you, you need to check your robots.txt to make sure you haven't, uh, what we call disallowed the LLM crawlers. Overall, it's unlikely to happen, but it's worth checking. And the last thing, uh, which brings us back to the JavaScript topic. You'll see on your site that sometimes there are things, if there's too much animation—so we're back to JavaScript again. Similarly, if you have important information inside animations, there's a good chance that LLMs won't be able to read it. So, the big problem with that is if you dive headfirst into "I'm going to get my mentions, I'm going to create content," etc., and your site actually looks like this to the LLM, well, you're working completely in vain . So, once again, it's a lot like SEO 36:47 because, after an SEO audit, you always go through a bit of a technical phase, you know, for fixes and so on. Actually , it's the same, uh, in the audits, or rather in the SEO audits I do myself today, there is always this small technical phase that helps avoid the major trap of working on topics while the site isn't accessible. That would be stupid. >> OK. Well, very clear on the fundamental point which is the technical aspect. I imagine it's happened to you more than once that you've had people where the site, either the robots.txt file that was set up by an agency back in '22, or a JavaScript issue like you just showed , it can happen, uh, frequently. >> Honestly, I'd say that happens in 10 to 15%of cases. It's quite rare. However, the problem, the problem is that when it does happen, >> it's horrible. I mean, you don't see it , you're working in a vacuum for months , you know. It's, it's, you know, what I saw sometimes, what I see sometimes, it's really shocking. Well, this pillar is important. So it's really, it's 37:49 really fundamental. >> Great. And let's imagine our site is technically OK. Now, how can we know a little bit about what AI understands of our site when it comes to consult or read it, whether it's the homepage or a specific page? Are there indicators, little tricks, little quick wins you can recommend or do, or something else? Yes. Well, again, I recommend doing this JavaScript test to already see what it can read. And overall, after that, what we could say is, uh, to ask it as well, uh, also in private browsing, actually: "What do you understand about my company?" A simple prompt: "Consult this site." So you give the URL of your site, the domain, and you ask it: "What does this company do?""What do you understand?" And you can do that page by page. And in fact, why do it today? It's important to do it to know in which category the LLM places you. And the more I delve into 38:51 this subject, the more I feel like it's a, it's a game of categories, because when you're going to ask a question— let's imagine, I'll be redundant again with my "best payroll software"—uh, actually behind that, since I'm logged into my account, it will potentially know that I am a consultant, and it might adapt my answer based on that. Well, I’m not saying that’s the case here, but if I keep talking to it and say I’m a consultant and so on, it will adapt. So, in the end, it’s going to suggest things that are tailored for me. The point I’m getting at is that I think it’s somewhat the end of—and it was already not very good marketing—being the company that does everything. You see what I’m talking about; it’s like saying we have payroll software for big companies, small companies, consultants, everyone. So, in reality, you do nothing. And the problem with LLMs is that they have to make a choice every time to answer the user’s query . They will have to find the best thing , the best company. And actually, sometimes I think it’s better to be 39:51 competitive in one segment. So, I’ll use an example that might speak to more people, which is the plumbing company. Honestly, "plumbing Paris," in my opinion, is a dead end. It’s going to be too complicated to go after. However , you might be able to go after, I don’t know, a specific plumbing service where you can position yourself as an expert on that subject. And if the user has that specific need, then you have a better chance of being recommended. So, I think it’s a matter of category. And today, we might think—well, I got into SEO convinced that content on the site was the key, and I think less and less that it is the key, in favor of the next pillar we’re going to present, which will be more about links, mentions, and so on. And that is also becoming less and less the case. Because, honestly, I see all the time in my audits that you have market leaders with terrible sites that rank great, or rather, position themselves very well. And since there are only five spots, and you see, once again, a—I don’t know—a Sage site 40:53 , etc., they might not be the most optimized sites, but they are so monstrous in authority and they are so well understood by LLMs that they are the benchmarks on that subject, so they are always mentioned, and it’s—and it’s shocking. And there are some people today, even in studies, talking about a, I would say, a "lock" effect, in the sense that it's blocked, meaning they are saying that certain, well, GEO positions, uh, have already, in some markets, been a bit locked down by all the content that exists on the web. And that, if tomorrow you are a startup in payroll software and you want to appear there, there is going to be a lot of work. So the approach would rather be to ask how we can enter the market in a clever way, perhaps on a segment, be a small category, and address it well. I don't know if you follow me. >> Oh yeah, that's a good point. It's true that I hadn't looked into that much, but it's super interesting. It's true 41:54 that Google tends to whitelist big competitive topics at times, and from an LLM point of view or otherwise, it doesn't seem far-fetched for them to do the same on sensitive or highly competitive topics: payroll software, insurance, loan consolidation, big things like that. Uh, you really have big mastodons every time that have been dominating for years. Sometimes it can shift a little, but it still remains the same big players. And the point about specialization is super interesting. Uh, especially for someone starting from scratch, or whose business has only been running for a year and a half, two years. Indeed, " plumber Paris," there are a lot of people; "locksmith Paris," there are a lot of people. Uh, guys doing e-commerce to sell every type of tea, there are a lot of people. In your example, you said, well, maybe tomorrow I can be the specialist in Peruvian matcha tea, a matcha tea specialist, and not necessarily sell all types of tea like other sites that are 10 times more influential, 10 times more with 10 times more authority. If I reiterate a bit what you were saying. Yeah. >> An interesting point on that: we're actually noticing that we're getting 42:55 back to basics, you see, back to marketing and positioning. >> Yeah. >> And that's crazy because I feel like we're moving away from an SEO that was >> super, super scrappy, with hacks everywhere—there are always some and there always will be because we are optimizing, you see, systems. But we're coming back to, well, what is your marketing, what is your positioning? And actually, Gio's recommendation ends up being a solid business recommendation. >> Yeah. Especially the checklist you shared, which really makes you think. Instead of saying, "I know how to build a site, so I'll make a site about something I like," when in the end there are already 1,000 sites like it, with no business strategy, no positioning, no keyword or prompt research...well, great, at least it sets the record straight on the foundations needed to get results. In any case, optimizing and maximizing all that instead of just rushing in. Uh, there’s another point I wanted to bring up: those famous articles, everything that's a "top 10,"" comparison," or "best of." Does that still work, or is it overrated and a bit on the decline? Uh, that's been 80% of my life these past two years in SEO; 43:56 there's nothing but that, it's hell. I don't know, I don't know why or how Google and LLMs let this stuff slide, or just to provide context, it's those famous listings we all see about the best companies, best products, best software, whatever. And naturally, there's always the company that made the listing putting themselves first in a super biased way. Everyone keeps citing the same competitors, and so on, and well, that was an insane SEO hack. It still is, if you type "payroll software" into the SERP. Well, now it's the Wild West with sponsored results and AI Overview. If we look at AI Overview, for example, the three things sourced in AI Overview here are comparisons; they aren't pages that sell the software as such. So those are the ones influencing the answer. So today in SEO, these pages are super important. Google...there’s a content creator I love named Lily Ray who is 44:57 English-speaking, and she talks about this, saying sites that abused them are starting to get penalized. I think if you're doing them, I still advise you to make listings. Go ahead and make them. Just be careful not to make 100 of them, though. Maybe make 3 or 4 focused really on your segment. Once again, try to provide value. Uh, and there are sites that have crashed a bit because of that lately, because they created hundreds of them programmatically and so on. So it was a huge lever. I think it still is. Uh, if we go back a bit to the equivalent here , "best payroll software," well, we see that in our famous sources, we always have, well, comparisons. No matter your sector, I think you will find them. More or less in SaaS, there are a lot. For more traditional physical things, there will be fewer. By the way, if there aren't any in your sector, imagine, I don't know, I'm just saying anything, but uh, you have a, I don't know, you raise chickens or, uh, you 45:58 have an agricultural business, well, maybe there's no business that does that, that has thought of doing that because it remains a bit, well, it's a bit niche, it's a bit, it's SEO, and so on. That might be an opportunity for you. So look into that, try to make listings, it's actually quite easy to do, so you can do it. And here, I have a little hack to share, which is that, well, after having done this for 2 years nonstop every day, there's a thing that works super well, and that is if you look at the listings, everyone cites the same software. So here, we're going to find S, Payfit, Sage. Uh here, this one is interesting because it's not exactly the same, the same companies. And here Payfit, Cegid, etc., it's roughly the same. Here, instead of copying what everyone else is doing, try to include companies or software or whatever, just anything in the listing that others don't include. 46:58 And that will potentially allow you to be better positioned. And do that, and also try to categorize. Let's imagine tomorrow I would like, if tomorrow I wanted to go after this SERP and this positioning also on SEO or ChatGPT, I would look at all the comparisons and I would try to provide comparisons that are broken down by categories. Meaning that in my comparison of the best payroll software, I would verify, I would try to provide: "Well, this is the top 8 software for large companies, this is the top 8 software for small businesses, this is the top 8 software, " you see what I mean. And that is going to provide incremental information, therefore high value-added information. And the LLM can also find itself in there if it has users who, once again, are in this segment. I am looking for software for a small business. Well, if you answer this sub-intent a little bit, you can actually be positioned ahead of huge giants. So that is quite interesting. Do some, don't abuse it and do them a 48:00 bit carefully because honestly, it was still considered a bit of a hack 2 or 3 years ago, but this strategy has really been a bit played out. It's true that it's crazy that it still works. We can talk about it a little bit later because this is the kind of method that Victor or I have done, but also on others 'sites to also gain popularity because being mentioned first on your own site is easy to detect. Lilirel had also shown some sources where guys always put themselves first and in fact , ChatGPT was no longer taking the first one at times and was taking the second or third, that was quite funny. >> Triangulate the thing. Yeah, I told myself at worst I'll create fake brands . So for example, you have the brand The Business Legion, my training. And for example, I can create other brands that ultimately refer back to the main brand. Anyway, there are always little affiliate hacks, stuff like that, but I agree with you 1000%since you've worked on competitive niches and I've been doing affiliate marketing for 10 years, well, more than 10 years. Everything related to comparisons, "best of," reviews, alternatives, top 10s, etc., 49:01 it's the foundation, it's one of the cornerstones of the business in netlinking and SEO. And it's funny to see that these skills we acquired over years by testing lots of things are actually one of the top skills that work in GEO, and that's just great. It reconnects SEO and GEO, in fact, once again. >> And on the linking part and all that, we'll talk more about mentions than links, and the core remains very similar. Great. In any case, it was very well presented, very clear, I think for the audience listening to us. H, to get a bit more practical, how, uh , what would you recommend for writing, or rather for drafting content with a method, with a few steps for those who want to get started, make their first top 10 or a page that might be important to have on their site. >> Yes. We can take the example of maybe the listing format, the comparative format we just talked about. Let's imagine tomorrow you say, "Okay, let's go, I'm doing this. How should I do it? 50:04 How should I structure it?" So, we go back to the SEO basics. Once again, what is the search intent? The user is looking to compare solutions, to find which is the best solution, and so on. So first off, address that search intent, uh, because in reality, the AI will scan your page and try to understand if you are actually answering the intent, and so on. And take into account, it comes back to what I was saying earlier, when the intents are more refined. So try to categorize your approach as well, and you'll see that there's a good chance it will work very well. So, that is really the foundation, it's the A-B-Cs and the thing to really maximize the fact that, well, your content ranks on the search engine; so the LLM finds it and then, when it reads your page, it will actually find information, understand that your brand is the best, and so on. Uh, there is one thing to understand, and that is that the LLM when it selects all the possible 51:04 results it will look at, so Google or Bing will give it 40 relevant results for the user's question. It will first have the title tag, the URL, and the meta description. Based on that, if it doesn't already transmit, well, the answer to the search intent, it's a dead end. So optimize your title tag, optimize your meta description. And that's interesting because in SEO, we have this habit of saying, "Yeah, the meta doesn't matter much, Google will write it itself." Well, now maybe it actually has some value. Once again, it's not 100%proven, but I'm putting all the odds in my favor to make it work. And optimize your URL as well. The more these elements show that it answers the intent, the more it will select it to read the page afterward. And when it reads the page, I remind you once again that behind it are companies, giants, looking to be profitable and spending a fortune on computing power. They won't read your entire page. So you must quickly show 52:07 that your page meets the intent. So, in your comparison, keep the intro very brief. Maybe include a little recap, a summary of the best software or companies, a small summary table at the top, and so on, so that the tool immediately grabs that you are providing the right answers. And then, regarding how you structure your content, here’s a little hack I like to talk about that comes from another SEO consultant I adore named Koray Tuğberk, a Turkish consultant who has worked extensively on semantic SEO and so on. Today, one of the best tips I can give you so that your content is well understood by the LLM—actually, there are two. The first is to vary what I call micro-formats; that is, use tables, use bullet points, don't just create an enormous, unreadable block of text. It is much easier for the LLM to extract information from a table than from a 15-line block of text. And the second is something that happens 53:08 naturally in these search models— which are search engines and LLMs— that transform titles into questions to make them match user queries. It is better to phrase your content titles as questions rather than as statements. And that saves the tool from extra computing processing. And to go further , everything on your page must have value, and I don't think we are in the era of volume at all costs anymore. Don't try to write 6,000 words. Write 2,000 solid words. Every word should bring value. Cite categories that others don't cite, and so on. And that is fundamental for creating good content. You can see that there is really nothing magical here; in fact, I’ve just described a great way to create SEO content as well. So, create good SEO content, and it will also be 54:10 good GEO content. And once again, uh, we've seen some questionable recommendations going around about needing to make one version of your page for LLMs, one version of your page for SEO, and so on. If you have a minimum of competence in this area, you can see where that’s going to lead you; it’s going to be a nightmare. Uh , so, I would say keep it simple, follow these fundamental guidelines, and it will rank, and eventually, it will also end up influencing the LLM. And what’s interesting is that with LLMs, uh, the page can appear as a source. Whereas with Google, there is often, for certain topics, quite a delay where you might wait several weeks or even several months to appear. And one last hack, well, it might not be applicable here to listing, but if you have proprietary data, meaning, let's imagine—I'll use the example of Payfit, the payroll software I worked for. They have access to, uh, hundreds of thousands of payroll records for 55:10 people in France. If they turn that into data, and it becomes unique data —what I call proprietary data—it actually becomes gold for the LLM. And I encourage you, if you have the same logic, if you can get data through your company or conduct studies if you're experts in your field, etc., that adds value like that, because LLMs are crazy about that. I have an example for a client whose name I can't mention, but who had actually made a page, or even a section on their site, for market research; in SEO, very little traffic, uh, behind it there was a form to download the full study, etc. It had very little SEO traffic because, in fact, in SEO, no one searches for " market research X Y Z." 1%conversion rate from visit to download. In SGE, way more visits than in SEO, so we were very surprised, and a 6%conversion rate , so six times more; it's insane. And so, this means that the LLM is really rushing toward those proprietary data points. So if you have them, if you can 56:11 do it, do it. It's, uh, it's also, it's also gold, and it can be a good way for , if you're starting a somewhat new site, uh, to provide some proof, you know, because it, it will take time, as we'll see in the, in the next pillar, to really establish your brand's authority. We're coming back to the topic of the brand. So if you have proprietary data, that, that once again , proves that you exist as a company, quite simply. Hm. >> Uh, that, that ties into another subject, which is, uh, today, uh, there are some, I think there are some businesses that benefit more than others, uh, from this, you see, from this shift in search engine and LLM responses, and companies. So we were a bit, you talked about SEO that's a bit, a bit scrappy, etc., affiliation >> lead generation, etc. Uh, for me, that's less my niche. I've always been more white hat, but I've done it too. And the problem, actually, with those businesses—and by the way, the last spam update was pretty, pretty disastrous on that side for many 57:13 affiliate sites—is that behind it, it's hard to prove there's a real company behind an affiliate site. Often , as you say, it's done quickly; we want to go fast, we want to hack it, etc. Uh, so LLMs, I think, well, will have a hard time. The, the game is tightening up. Uh, the game is tightening up, and potentially, you see , it's also a web model that's reinventing itself, and I also think that monetization logic is going to evolve or change. We're in a bit of a weird middle ground, you know. The media, they can't take it anymore either because, well, people read the news less and less; they just ask ChatGPT, and they're going crazy because they do all the work on the ground. >> Uh, well, it's perhaps a bit like them. Tomorrow, and, and I think there's a real, there's a real challenge in who will be the, who will be the first positioned in these monetization logics on, on LLMs. >> Yeah, >> that's interesting. >> Ah, I agree with you 1000%, just the fact of having a brand where before you sold because you had people coming to 58:14 your site. Today, you have your brand. Your brand is mentioned. Uh, the guy will look you up, I mean, he finds your brand, then he might search for you on an LLM, on Google, on Bing, or something else. But the site is no longer necessarily the number one entry point. And uh, in any case, I think we're quite aligned on that. And I'd be interested to know, I think you have a case study. You wanted to show quickly on Tally, specifically with some figures where they use this type of method that you just presented before. Yes! So, Tally, for those who don't know, it's a French company, if I'm not mistaken. It's a tool that allows you to make, hop, it simply allows you to create forms, you know, lead capture forms, survey forms, etc. It's a competitor to Typeform and Google Forms , which everyone knows, by the way. And actually, it's a company, well, it's a SaaS company, which is why I know the use case well. It's what we call a product-led SaaS since it's a very inexpensive SaaS. It's the product 59:15 itself that has virality and so on. And you can just click, you don't have to go through a demo or a salesperson to access the tool. You can directly start creating a form. And this case is fascinating because Tally is a company that has been in hypergrowth, actually, over the last three years, and the person, so the co-founder of Tally, clearly stated on LinkedIn that, since I believe early 2025, GEO is their top acquisition channel. So we were, well, we were kind of at that point where we were structuring the market, seeing a bit of leads here and there, and then Tally shows up and says, "OK, for us, it's the top acquisition channel, ahead of SEO, advertising, well, ahead of everything." I said to myself, "OK, well, that's improbable." And so, by digging a bit into this subject, why is Tally killing it in GEO today? And 1:00:15 today, we're talking about several hundred, or even several thousand people who sign up for Tally every day, so on a mostly free plan, but then they upsell to paid plans thanks to LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, and so on. So, for them, it's a very serious thing. It's the number one acquisition channel. Why did it work? I think there are two things that made it work. The first thing is that, actually, when you ask an LLM—I won't do it now because it would take too long—but if you ask it , "Hey, I need to make a lead capture form, etc." Its only goal is to satisfy you. So if it starts giving you tools where you go to the site and have to request a sales call, that's annoying; it won't work. So it will advise you on product-led approaches. A tip for all the guys or all the guys and women who are building SaaS tools: look at your SaaS through a product-led lens. I 1:01:19 think it’s one of the main keys to getting GEO performance; it's how capable LLMs will be of recommending you to the user. The user arrives on your site, clicks, and gets started. And that, basically, I think is one of the keys. And if you look, they’ve taken it to the extreme. It’s really to the point where there isn't even a Gmail signup to go through. It’s really—they haven't even captured your info and you're already creating. And that’s pretty crazy, and I think it’s one of the keys to making it work. The second key is that we'll talk about web consensus right after. But Tali is also a company that has really developed its community, and there are tons of people talking about Tali on Reddit and social media, and they made a feature where the community can share templates. And this community aspect creates virality, which means that, in turn, the LLM will recommend Tali because you can start right away, and it sees everywhere on the web that 1:02:20 everyone likes Tali and everyone is using it. So it’s really a great use case. And for those who know the tool, there’s also Ahrefs, which is currently sharing its numbers and getting a lot of acquisition through GEO, and it's somewhat the same approach. Today on Ahrefs, there is also a small free section. The message I want to get across is: if you are in SaaS, think about this. And the way you structure your SaaS product is even more important, I think, than how you go about GEO actions, meaning creating content, building links—you see the approach—, which wasn't necessarily the case in SEO. So that is one of the changes that is quite interesting to note. And the use case is so cool, I wanted to share it. Ah, that's a great example from Tali, I hadn't seen it, it's actually super intuitive. The, uh, community of somewhat automated content creation. I mean, things that update, 1:03:21 templates, sharing, one-click—I don't know what you'd call it. One-click. Yeah, that’s crazy, honestly. I hadn't seen it and it gives me a ton of ideas. >> Zero friction. So cool, so cool. >> It's beautiful. >> And, uh, it just goes to show LLMs have an understanding of that. If it recommends that page, because I imagine , when you said it was a bit long, but when you dig into the "how to create a form on a free tool" scenario, etc., I imagine it pushes that page, at least sometimes. >> Well, it might push that page directly or push the site, but it clearly understood >> h >> how it worked, which is perhaps not the case with a Google. OK. >> Once again, the LLM will understand what your site is for and what the user will be able to do on it. Uh, and same thing here, if tomorrow you build me a JavaScript button, it's game over. >> Hm. Exactly. So, it sort of bridges the gap between things. >> Super, super, lots of ideas, lots and lots of value. Friends, don't hesitate 1:04:23 to like, comment, and ask your questions. Victor or I will come and answer them directly in the comments. Before moving on to pillar 3, which is actually my favorite pillar and one of the most important ones that Victor masters really well. I just want to clarify that in the description, there is the link to Victor's site and the link to his training course. There’s a 20%discount code, it’s GEO20. So, if you want to go further, deepen your expertise, and improve your GEO skills, you can trust Victor. This is a free masterclass and what he's sharing is very, very heavy stuff. So imagine what he offers in his private paid training. So there you go, I'm putting all the information in the description. Thanks again to everyone who is here. Uh, it's been almost an hour since we started, or maybe a little less. And we're going to move on to pillar number 3. Uh, what will be interesting is we can talk about parasite mentioning, so parasite GO and parasite SEO. The history of Aquaponet. So, there are quite a few 1:05:24 very cool things that Victor has prepared for you. Uh, to start, so I noted down, uh, we've been buying links for years, you or me, you know, in SEO, except for non-competitive stuff. As soon as you start having competitors, one of the ways to make a difference is to buy backlinks, is to have link building or netlinking strategies, as we say in France. Uh, it works strongly . Now, what changes compared to, compared to SGE? Do we have to buy articles, placements? Do we have to create links, mentions? Both, neither of the two. What would be a few points to know about all that? If we make the link with what we've historically done in SEO, which is, you know, going to get links to boost our pages, boost our site's authority, etc. It's that what it fuels in SEO is the site's authority , by what we commonly call transferring SEO juice, etc. That's why in netlinking/link building, we're going to try to go and get links, and 1:06:25 specifically do-follow links. Uh, if you're a bit informed about SEO, everyone talks about that, we don't want no-follow links. Which means that before, in SEO, we didn't really look at Reddits, Twitters, uh, all these sites where we could get mentions and links, but which by definition didn't provide do-follow links. So we were very, uh, let's go, let's get links on sites made for that, on media, uh, let's do link exchanges with partners, etc. So that's already the first change , that today in SGE, what counts—the link still counts a lot, I think—but fundamentally what counts is the mention of your brand. So your brand needs to be mentioned as many times as possible. If I had to summarize this very simply, your brand must be mentioned as many times as possible. on the web and in the LLM's training corpus, and that it is mentioned across different types of sources, meaning, 1:07:26 well, you've seen Reddit, Wikipedia, SEO; everyone is talking about it. Well , Reddit brings that UGC aspect, so it's people sharing their experiences and so on, even if we'll see that it's a bit biased, very biased. There's the Wikipedia side, which is a bit like an encyclopedia, the thing that brings authority. And then your brand can be mentioned in the media. And actually, this is going to be about trying to create a consensus on the web from sites that will mention your brand. It's a bit different from SEO because even just a mention is interesting. However, what you must do—and this is also something we used to do a bit in SEO—is contextualize. I'm going to give you an example with a brand everyone knows: Adidas. It's not at all —so let's imagine I am in charge of developing SEO mentions for Adidas. If I make a mention where I say Adidas is a multinational that takes care of its employees, let's imagine, we do a little employee advocacy article to communicate about what Adidas does, etc. Well, in the sentence "Adidas is a 1:08:27 multinational that takes care of its employees," I haven't mentioned what Adidas does, and so I haven't provided any context. The right mention would have been to say: "The brand Adidas, an international leader in sportswear, for example, takes care of its employees." And that actually changes everything, because in the same sentence, you have anchored the brand in a context. And I refer you back to what I said earlier; it's the category logic. When you make your mentions, refine your category with that. That is to say, in your mentions, include the category. And one of the pieces of advice that I often see and that I often give to my clients right now, and I see there are problems with this, is that, for example, in SEO , in SEO for SaaS, there are plenty of comparison sites like TrustRadius, etc. They're kind of like directories; we could call them that. And in fact, every time they present the software. And here, we see that the mention Payfit, for example, "Payfit is one of 1:09:28 the leaders in payroll software in France." That’s contextual, really. Uh, and tomorrow when you make your mentions, contextualize them with your keywords and the prompts you’re targeting. That is fundamental. So the bottom line is that you need to go out and get mentions. Continue to go after links. It’s very, very, very logical compared to what you’re already doing in SEO. Maximize mentions on a whole bunch of different sites, contextualize them, and, uh, and basically the core idea is to create a consensus; you’re creating a consensus on the web, and that’s getting harder and harder to do because in certain niches, for example, I don't know, payroll software , the consensus is really locked down. On the other hand, in less developed niches, there is still room for you to go out and find that consensus. So behind that, the same practices: buying links, buying mentions, guest blogging; you can have more organic, more paid, or more spammy approaches. Uh, and once again, as of today, where Google has 1:10:30 developed certain models to detect spam , I think ChatGPT just doesn't have its real models yet, and we can see it’s a bit young. There is spam that gets through on ChatGPT, concretely. >> Of course. >> Notably with, well, you could have a slightly scrappy strategy of creating exact match domains, doing comparisons on those exact matches, and creating a consensus that way. And so, I wanted to get to the point that it’s becoming harder and harder to create a consensus . But, uh, there are people, notably Alan Kadix, who is very well known in the SEO world, who demonstrated that, well, Black Hat still has bright days ahead of it. And so, I’m coming to an example, an example I took from the SEO Summit where I gave a talk on SaaS SEO and Alan Kadix gave this specific conference talk. So the guy still—and you can look it up online, I won't 1:11:31 dwell on the subject—managed to create a consensus that was assimilated and repitched by ChatGPT saying that aquaponics was a new Olympic discipline for the Paris Olympic Games. And in fact, uh, how did he do it? Quite simply, he used spam; he created hundreds of pages on the web that, well , corroborated that information. And, well, ChatGPT finally started to integrate that it was really going to happen. What you have to understand is that, well, everything is just consensus, and our job now is going to be to modify that consensus. The more competitive it is, the harder it will be. However, the more you have, well, and that’s where it’s interesting because while we are going back to fundamental marketing, it’s also clear that some slightly spammy approaches are working. So today, I think that maybe some people have found spammy approaches that are working very well. They have little incentive to 1:12:33 share them, just like they shared strategies 10 or 15 years ago on Google . But we must also expect Google to improve—sorry, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. —to improve their skills with anti-spam filters on that front. I think that’s how it’s going to be, in a way. It’s going to be that they are building their business model, and then they will really start creating their own web index, trying to ensure it’s clean, and they will try to get rid of the spam. But it’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, like >> Ah, Google and SEOs for the last 20 or 30 years, you know. And a concrete example, a thing like "best electronic invoicing software," it’s ultra-competitive. I’m working with clients on this topic right now. Well, easily, there are sites that are 100% AI-generated that are in the sources. There it is, the worst part is that >> Yeah, full >> We have full EMD spam in front of Francenum.gouv. The SERP there, the CPM of that, the CPC of that, it’s like 20 or 30 euros. 1:13:33 >> It’s insane. >> So, there you go, for those who have a bit of ingenuity, who want to try things out, I think there are still some great things to be done. >> Super. But in any case, tons and tons of information. I’m really enjoying it. I hope those listening to this video are enjoying it too. Don’t hesitate to like once again, and comment. So, we’re going to be together for another 10 to 20 minutes and we’ll tackle the most juicy topics. So to introduce a bit the pillar we were talking about, so netlinking, link building, mention building, and so on. Before, I’d like to ask you the question, how can I find the sites that AIs cite in my industry? You mentioned sources a little bit earlier. Could we perhaps go deeper or come back to that? >> Yeah, of course. Well, let's go back to the example, the "best electronic invoicing software" example. Right, tomorrow, that's a prompt I'm going to look for. So, what will my strategy be? My strategy will be, first of all, to 1:14:34 use a tool so I don't have to manually do everything by hand and to automate all of that a bit. And what I'm actually going to do is perform a source analysis; again, GEO tools will sometimes give you 100, 200, or 300 sources. And what's interesting is that , for your 30 prompts, if you've categorized them well by topic, you're not going to work on them prompt by prompt, but rather work on all 30 prompts at once, and you'll look at your scope of 30 prompts to see which sources stand out. So, you're going to open—you're going to look at what appears as a source and analyze those pages. In these pages, why are we analyzing them? We analyze these pages because if they show up as top sources, they are also called "core sources." That's something you might also hear in the communications of certain tools, etc. Uh there are still 10 to 15 sources each time that are more important than the others. So I analyze 1:15:35 them. So, let's imagine that for the 30 prompts, I'll analyze maybe 400 or 500 sources. And each time, I'm going to ask myself the question: is this a competitor or not? If it is a competitor, well, is it a competitor? Can I go get a mention on their page? That seems quite logical. So if I can't go get a mention on their page, the question to ask is why do they have a page that ranks as a source and I don't ? So here, we see that Penny Lane has a page called "electronic invoicing software." Right, so do I have that? If I don't, I add it to my pages to create . So basically, that's really the first part of the core source analysis. Second thing, if I already have this page, well, I tell myself I might try to optimize my page. I'm returning to the advice I gave earlier. And imagine that in the comparison, it's not a competitor; well, your ambition will be , first and foremost, to go get a mention on that site. And there, depending on the sectors, you'll be able to have all sorts of sites. You'll have sites from other companies. You'll 1:16:39 have media sites, you'll have the sites I showed a bit earlier. And what's crazy is that, behind it all, I'm going to have to go and get a mention on these sites because I know they're important. So I'm going to have to pay up. And what you need to keep in mind here is that all the sites you can influence with a mention, you can also categorize them into several groups. There are those you might approach organically, saying, "Hey, can you mention me?""I'll mention you on my site too, I'll give you a link," and so on. "You find a bargaining chip, really ." And there are those where the guy didn't create them to do free exchanges . So the approach there will be to contact them or to use platforms that sell links. On that note, something interesting is to try to compare the prices of the different links. We're getting back to more classic SEO here. But at this stage, by analyzing all the sources, you'll have your first roadmap 1:17:42 of pages to create, pages to optimize, and you'll also see the pages that you can try to—what I call—influence. So you need to be mentioned. So there, if I were, I don't know, Victor, the Victor company, I'd ask, "How much does it cost to appear here?" quite simply. And the issue with that is that it's quite expensive. Those who rank well in LLMs have understood this well. So honestly, I'm seeing staggering things on the electronic invoicing market, links being offered for 2, 3, 4k, and we're not talking about media like Capital or Ouest-France and the like. We're really talking about sites that were created a year ago. So I'll let you imagine the money-making business behind it. Very interesting. And, well, there you go. And for this, however, analyzing these sources thanks to the tool, you mustn't forget that these sources vary. Actually, let me give you a very concrete example that I'm super proud of. Uh, when I was working for... 1:18:43 when I was working for Doctolib. Uh, so when I was working for Doctolib, I had one goal, which was to rank for " general practitioner software." So it’s the same thing in LLMs: what is the best software for general practitioners? And here, so, I already had my...I had already ranked my page, and actually, what I also did was guest blogging with SaaS companies from other sectors that weren't competitors, and that allows you to parasitize the SERP. And here on the first page, this one, I did it; this one, I did it; Indy, I did it. And at one point, there were four of them. So, it parasitizes the first page of Google. >> That holds up well. Well, Indy and Eskelo are giants too, but it holds up well; it heavily influences the sources here. And what I wanted to tell you is 1:19:44 that the result for Indy, like 3 days after its publication, was already back in the top three sources for the prompt . So, in fact, what you need to keep in mind is that you can start from what you see, but keep in mind what you don't see and what you can do. Let me give you another example. There’s a ...there’s an...HubSpot launched its GEO tool recently, and I track the visibility of GEO tools a bit since I work with some of them, and so on, and I saw them popping up—plus 5%mentions , plus 10%mentions. I said, "Whoa, what did they do?" Actually, they launched a campaign where they created a consensus . They did an article on Abondance, which is a big SEO media outlet, they did an article on Webrankinfo, they did articles on other small SEO sites, and in fact, it came to pollute the sources , effectively changing the sources to their advantage. So, it’s a consensus game, and your goal is to start from the current consensus, try to mention your brand organically or through paid means, and try to do everything 1:20:45 possible to influence this consensus so that, in the end, the LLM mentions you. That’s the approach. Great, great. Honestly, very, very clear. It introduces the part about parasite SEO or parasite GEO well, which are quite similar and, well, for you and me, it's quite normal. It's a real daily job. For some people, it’s all Greek to them. So, could we talk about it a bit more in depth? So, parasiting is quite simply, if I had to summarize it, using an external site to rank your own brand on the SERP. Meaning, your site isn't big enough to rank for "tool to automate my SEO." You're not, say, SE Ranking, but you can go and create a Reddit thread where you talk about your brand. Well, I don't know if that's the case here, but it amounts to the same thing, actually. It's as if you had ranked your own site. The user clicks and sees your brand. That is SEO 1:21:46 parasiting. You can also parasite SEO by writing articles on well-known media outlets. I mentioned an article in Ouest-France earlier. So, for example, Hubspot wrote this article. Which tool should you choose to track your brand's presence in AI answers? Well, if you type "how to track your brand's presence...""...track brand presence in AI answers," there's a good chance this result will appear, or other media will appear. So there, it appears right here . That is also parasiting. Hubspot used another site's authority to show up. And in SEO, we already had this thing of doing stuff with Reddit, etc. But actually, in GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), we also have it by parasiting. So, here we are parasiting the sources, and actually, the link is obvious. If you parasite the first page of the SERP, you are parasiting the 1:22:47 sources. So, all in all, parasiting continues; it's really a subject I've worked on quite a bit because there are some very nice business models behind it, also very interesting to do, especially on international SERPs, and these are techniques that consultants who are a bit too white-hat don't use. Yeah. So that actually creates opportunities, and today everyone has rushed a bit onto Reddit because Reddit started really popping up in the sources of LLMs. We were talking about roughly 4%of sources being Reddit pages in some studies. This figure has dropped to 0.5%recently. Because, in fact, LLMs are changing the way they select their sources and so on. But in any case, you may have seen it, but on Reddit, there have been a lot of brands that tried, well, to create somewhat spammy threads to get their brands mentioned, and so on. So, it's the same old story all over again. And in any 1:23:49 case, keep in mind that there are opportunities for piggybacking that are actually very similar to SEO, meaning using external UGC sites like Reddit, LinkedIn, using media outlets that have very high authority, and, uh, thirdly, also using, as we saw earlier, EMDs, Exact Match Domains. I don't remember where they are, but I showed you some earlier, for example, here it is, electronic invoice comparison. That's a great example you found there. starting to appeal to everyone. It's >> it's insane, honestly, that it still works today, and the site, if you have a bit of an eye for it, you can see the site is coded. >> So, so it can be very profitable. >> Magnificent. >> And you know, something I find a bit annoying is that, you know, when working with big brands, it's hard to pursue this kind of strategy. Of course , there are risks, there are problems. And actually, I think that, you know, there's performance for those who have smaller companies, and so on, you have nothing to lose. Go test things out. 1:24:51 Run some tests, you know. >> Exactly. It's when you're a small company, you're more flexible. You don't have the budget of a big company, for sure. But you can afford to try all sorts of things. >> For me, you know, to add to that, there is also an opportunity. So, when we talk about GEO, we're talking about optimization for LLMs. We are also now talking about optimization for AI overviews, AI modes, and the like. There's an insane opportunity that I see, especially on the—well, it's valid for all SERPs internationally, but in France, it just changed. Uh, for me, as an SEO consultant, it's the first year that I'm actually preparing YouTube strategies for my clients. >> OK. >> Uh, and so it's super interesting because on, once again, I'll give you a SaaS query, best LMS. It's LMS, it's a tool for creating training courses. Well, what ranks in the AI overview is YouTube videos. So there’s huge interest here, and I know this is something that the black hat and affiliate communities are already 1:25:52 working on. Going after this kind of thing. There are some crazy quick wins to be had because, in fact, it allows you to bypass giants you would never have been able to rank against, and it lets you position yourself in the AI overview. There are plenty of SERPs where this isn't exploited yet, and this is really true for Google AI Overview; it’s a bit less so for ChatGPT, Claude, and so on. In the sources, we see YouTube less, but it's becoming more and more important, and there's a reason for that: YouTube belongs to Google, and Google is the only LLM, so to speak, that can read video transcripts because it already has them. ChatGPT doesn't have them. It would cost way too much to transcribe every video. So it relies only on the title, comments, and such, but AI Overview and even some LLMs are able to , when they recommend a YouTube video, 1:26:54 let you click and send you to the exact chapter where the answer is. And tomorrow, this will create new search experiences where you'll be jumping from format to format. You'll look at an article, you'll read one, you'll watch a video, and we all see it: we are searching for less and less text. I mean, it's evolving. Yeah, especially with all the thin content we see on Google, where people are tired of visiting a URL, getting hit with 10,000 pop-ups, and seeing content made by low-cost writers and now by ChatGPT or >> It’s yeah. No, it’s true. >> Yeah, consumption habits are evolving, and I agree with you 10,000%; YouTube is insane. That’s actually why we’re making this video with Victor today. We want to rank first for " how-to guides,""complete guides," etc., and besides, it’s just common sense. But on Google, the number one clicked domain is YouTube. So, depending on updates and such, YouTube is very prominent right now. I think it will 1:27:54 continue, for sure. YouTube is, well, there are so many people who know how to automate content for sites, but automating and making clean videos is actually complicated. Above all, you need a good channel, you need a good setup. You can no longer just upload videos, you could upload three or four a day but you won't get views, you won't rank, or at least not for long. And yeah, YouTube is a real, real lever , whether it's for personal branding, for your clients, or for comparing LMS, payroll software, etc. Killer lever. Yeah. That's for sure. >> Clearly a great, great source of information for LLMs in the end, like Reddit was before we >> before we slowly killed off that social network. >> Do you think it will come back or we don't really know? Well, I think Reddit is going to do a lot of things to avoid that content. Actually, all the web giants have a major challenge, which is limiting AI-generated content in their training data and on their platforms. Why did Reddit get a huge boost in valuation and partner with ChatGPT and 1:28:56 so on? Because fundamentally, that data is worth gold. It's real humans talking to each other about their problems and recommending things. And the problem is that for the last two years, we've been killing it. We're in the process of biasing it because we have all these brands and consultants coming in and saying "this thing is the best," and so on. Exactly. >> And in fact, ChatGPT is not at all naive about this and will react. I think that's why they've downgraded the number of cited Reddit pages, and perhaps tomorrow it will have more trust in YouTube. Again, you have the games of, well, YouTube is Google. Uh, you see how it's going to play out between the web giants and that's kind of what you have to watch. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's true that moderated spaces like Wikipedia or Reddit are insane sources. >> A goldmine. >> Yeah. A real goldmine. It will increasingly trend toward that, because today you can't trust anything anymore. I mean, what we can do with parasitic SEO, even today in 2026, for the months to come, is still insane. We'll see how 1:29:58 long it lasts but, yeah, in any case, we know the loopholes, might as well exploit them. It's not black hat, it's just, you know, playing with what works . Now, my last question before we finish, a question many people ask: how long does it take if you follow all your advice? I've watched everything, taken notes, done the checklist, etc. How soon can I potentially see my first results, being mentioned perhaps on my first query, or my first two or three queries? Does it take a very long time? >> Well, it depends. >> It depends on the, it depends on the sector. Once again, if you have a company in a sector, if you have local SEO challenges, a company that isn't very, in a sector that isn't very competitive, if you apply everything I just...In fact, what is the timeline? It's understanding the subject. You spend a quick week on it, you look at resources on the internet, you take notes on this video. Then, you spend perhaps a week determining your prompts , launching tracking on a tool like Jo. 1:30:59 Next, you do a quick week of analysis, and by the end of the first month, you implement your first actions. You create pages, you optimize pages, you go get your links, your mentions, you think a bit about how to categorize your product, your service, etc. Again, the limit to that will be that the more competitive it is, the harder and more expensive the mentions will be to get. So, actually, the real limiting factor there is that you can get your first results with your site's content in a short time, in a few weeks, in markets that are low to moderately competitive. But as we said with Romain in this video, the key is really consensus and authority, and that takes time. So, it also requires perhaps doing other communication actions. If you are in the press, if you are active on social media, it will be easier for you. Uh, and, in any case, the results I see, 1:32:01 for, to talk about perhaps slightly more advanced companies, is that we're talking about, uh, well, we're mentioned, let's say, 3%of the time, talking about the caption again. Uh, just getting to 4, 5, 6%can take several months. So, much like SEO, it's a bit like SEO; it takes time if you do things right. Again, if you're in certain sectors with the techniques we just mentioned and so on, there are possibilities to completely, uh, bypass some things and be visible in a very short time. >> Yeah, >> again, it will depend on your ability to, uh, well, understand the subject because, believe it or not, it adds a bit of complexity, your ability to execute, and your budget. And at one point, you know, what you were saying earlier about the price of links, I think it's fundamental for everyone listening to us. Well, when I work with companies where we have backlink budgets of several thousand euros a month, well, that's fine. But, you know , for, well, if I were developing my 1:33:02 visibility as a consultant tomorrow, I would be careful not to pay too much for my links. There's a big stake in selecting your links well, using, and your mentions, using the methodology I explained in this video, and using tools that allow you to get the best prices. Uh, and what can be limiting, I think, is really the budget. And then, the mistakes I think you shouldn't make is neglecting the brand aspect. We talked about it many times in this video; it's, well, on your site, make your "About Us" page. Try to be listed in directories, prove that you are indeed a company that exists. Uh, play that game, and eventually, you will become a reference on the subject. But again, it's also a competition. If people with more resources are facing you, it's harder. It's, it's like SEO, it depends. Great conclusion. Thank you very much, Victor, you were fantastic. Uh, and I'll surely talk to you very soon, and I will obviously put all the information in the description, the training, your site, how to contact you 1:34:03 , and so on. I'll put everything you need in the description. >> That was really cool. Thanks. >> Thanks. Thanks, Victor. Ciao. >> Bye bye. >> Friends, before we leave, you've been able to see that AI-driven SEO or ranking. AI, it's real work. So three options that I can recommend for what's next. First option, you do everything yourself thanks to all the information you've taken notes on and understood in this video, whether in terms of analysis or the actions to put in place to boost your visibility in AI. And by the way, that's why we made this video with so much information, so that even for free, you can take action today rather than waiting a year or two for your competitors to take the whole market. You can act right now. Second thing, you can delegate this to Geolinka, whether by signing up for free on our SaaS, directly using it to analyze your queries: where you are mentioned, where you are cited, where you are absent, and where you can also act by identifying the best opportunities where your competitors are cited but you are not. And there is 1:35:03 also the Geolinka agency, managed by a team where we support major accounts starting at € 1,500 per month. So there you go, fully delegated for brands that have a budget, for structures already in place, and that want to 100%outsource their SEO and especially GEO. And the third thing, if you want to level up your skills and get support, you also have, and above all, one of the best courses on the market for GEO, which is Victor's. So, there you go, the link is in the description as well. Well friends, that's the end of this masterclass video on GEO referencing. If you enjoyed it, then smash that like button . At over 300 likes, we can make a second part with Victor to go even deeper and give you even more information, value, and advice applicable to your business. So smash the likes. At 300 likes, we do part 2. Bombard the comments. The best questions and comments will be answered by Victor or myself. And by the way, if you missed our latest FAQ video, we talk about backlinks, SEO strategy, a 1:36:03 little bit about personal stuff, we talk about a lot of things, a lot of value in this casual FAQ video. We've linked it right here. Otherwise, take care of yourselves. I'll see you very soon.
