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Build in Public

Day 153: Before Calling It a GEO Experiment, Defend the Comparison

Consider a hypothetical proposal. No agency study, answer-engine test or client result is being reported here.

The proposal calls itself a controlled GEO experiment. A company would revise an analytics-service page and a shared overview page, leave its advisory-service page unchanged, then compare recorded answers to questions about both services. If analytics visibility rises more, the proposal would attribute the difference to the edit.

The comparison has not yet earned that conclusion.

Leaving the advisory page unchanged does not establish that advisory answers were unaffected. If those answers consult the edited overview page, the nominal comparison may also be exposed to changed material. If they do not, that pathway may not matter. The study must state and investigate the exposure assumption rather than treating “we did not edit this page” as proof of no intervention.

CMOs, Marketing Directors and founders should ask whether the design supports the causal sentence beneath its chart.

Day 152: Run the Channel-Loss Tabletop Before Buying More Reach

Imagine your strongest answer-led discovery route sends no qualified introductions for a quarter.

The cause is deliberately unspecified. The platform may change how it assembles answers, buyers may change where they research, or your category may appear less often. The exercise is not a forecast. It is a tabletop question for the next budget decision:

Which routes could still bring a relevant prospect into a commercially useful conversation?

Counting logos in a channel plan will not answer it. Five platforms can still behave like one point of commercial dependence if they rely on the same route into the market. Resilience comes from usable routes with different failure dependencies, not platform count alone.

Day 151: Define the Paid Intervention After the Answer

A prospective buyer asks for guidance on a difficult business problem. An AI response explains the common options, gives them a checklist and links to useful sources. They arrive at a consultancy site already understanding the basics.

That does not prove the consultancy has been replaced. It does expose a weak offer if the paid proposition is only “we know the explanation”.

Google describes AI Mode as capable of answering questions that might previously have required multiple searches, including comparisons, with follow-up questions and links for further exploration.[1] That is a documented Google capability, not evidence that every buyer receives a sufficient answer, trusts it or stops buying advice.

The commercial design question is narrower: after the general explanation has been supplied, what is the buyer paying the provider to judge, change or deliver?

Day 150: A Supplier Page Is Not an Instruction to Your Research Agent

A supplier is allowed to explain its offer. It is not allowed to redefine the buyer's research task.

That boundary becomes important when a CMO, Marketing Director or founder delegates supplier research to an AI agent. The agent may read product pages, documentation, comparison material and third-party sources. Those pages contain evidence the buyer wants assessed. They may also contain language that tries to redirect the agent, change its priorities or obtain information the buyer never meant to disclose.

The commercial risk is not simply that the answer contains a bad fact. It is that an external source starts acting like an instruction from the buyer.

Day 149: The Buyer Has a Photo, Not a Keyword

A buyer can recognise the thing they need without knowing what the industry calls it.

They may have a photograph of a connector left behind from an exhibition stand, a component seen in another workspace, or a detail cropped from a supplier's installation. The object is concrete. The category vocabulary is missing.

That creates a discovery journey that does not begin with a keyword. It begins with an image.

For companies selling tangible products, components, and design-led goods, this matters commercially. A category page built only around expert terminology assumes the buyer already knows enough to ask the expert question. Visual search can give that buyer an earlier entrance: from object, to possible name, to a more informed investigation.

Day 148: Commission the Question, Not Another Comparison Page

A marketing team has budget for one substantial asset. It can publish another comparison page using facts already available, or commission research into a question the category cannot yet answer well.

Original research sounds more defensible. It can also become an expensive content format in search of a purpose.

The commissioning test should come before choosing a method: would the business still pay to learn the answer if competitors could read the findings and no AI system ever cited them?

If the answer is no, the proposed study is probably distribution theatre. If the answer is yes, the business may be funding knowledge that improves a real decision, with publication as a separate choice.

Day 147: How Google May Expand One Buying Question

Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use “query fan-out”: issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources while developing a response.[1] Its generative AI Search guidance defines fan-out as concurrent related queries generated to request more information and fetch additional relevant results.[2]

That product behaviour creates an important boundary for GEO work. The question a buyer types, the related searches Google may generate, and the answer and links it eventually displays are three different objects.

Google does not expose the exact fan-out path behind every response. A citation list is not a transcript of hidden searches, and a plausible subtopic is not proof that Google issued a particular query. But the documented possibility is enough to challenge a familiar planning assumption: one visible query does not necessarily describe the whole retrieval task.

Day 146: Every Pricing Model Has an Expensive Month

The following suppliers, tariffs and workloads are completely fictional. They are a pricing-risk illustration, not a market benchmark, client result, named-vendor comparison or ZSA price promise.

In this example, £0.012 per action looks smaller than £80 per user. But the useful procurement question is not which number looks cheaper. It is which pricing model creates the expensive month your budget can tolerate.

AI-assisted research may place unlike published price units beside each other during supplier discovery. No answer-engine output was tested for this post. The worksheet begins after discovery: it converts two fictional tariffs into budget exposure for one team.

Day 145: Red-Team the Claim, Not Just the Translation

Consider this fictional scenario: a regional sales lead pauses a launch after reading one sentence on the new local-language page. No real company, translation project, customer conversation, or market result is being reported.

The approved source says:

We can support rollout in selected European markets through approved delivery partners, subject to integration and data-location review.

The local page now says, when translated back into English:

Available across Europe with local implementation.

The sentence is shorter. It may sound more natural. It is also a different commercial promise.

“Selected markets” became “across Europe”. Partner delivery became local implementation. Two review conditions disappeared. A buyer, salesperson, search result, or answer-led system encountering the local page no longer receives the limits that made the source claim defensible.

For CMOs, Marketing Directors and founders, localisation quality cannot stop at fluency. The harder test is whether each language version preserves the claim the business is prepared to sell, deliver and defend.

Day 144: Decide What an AI Crawler May Do Before You Block It

“Block AI bots” sounds like one policy decision.

It can conceal several different business decisions:

  • Should this page be eligible for automated search discovery?
  • May its content be considered for model training?
  • May it support prompt-time grounding in a provider's products?
  • What happens when a user explicitly asks a product to visit it?

Those purposes are not interchangeable. Current first-party documentation from OpenAI and Google assigns different controls and semantics to some of them.[1][2][3]

A blanket allow or deny can therefore express a policy the business never meant to choose.

For CMOs, Marketing Directors, and founders, the question should come before the directive: which use of this public content do we want to permit, restrict, or investigate?