Gaetano DiNardi@gaetano_nyc
GEO vendors are pitching automated outreach for "brand mentions" which is basically link building 2.0
But the problem is that the link building industrial complex is dying.
So GEO outreach for brand mentions is just a bastardized version of the link building industrial complex.
Enter the GEO outreach industrial complex.
Vendors are using FOMO and hype (cherry picked data studies) etc... to trick marketers into believing they NEED an automated system to acquire brand mentions.
And while I agree it is important to expand into offsite marketing strategies, there are a few basic principles that brands should follow:
1. If you are the category leading winner, you do not need to do this. You would never see Ferrari asking cars dot com to include them in their listicles.
2. Domain age matters. If a website was spun up 3 months ago and blasted 100,000 pages into the index -- some of them will get cited by AI, but that DOES NOT MAKE THEM GOOD!
3. Domain Rating still matters as a proxy for outreach. I wouldn't reach out to any website under a DR 20.
4. Placements should come from a real business that sells an actual product (no content farms / no content mills).
5. Placements should come from websites that have topical focus and be topically relevant to your brand:
(no best VPNs websites with a one-off page about your product category)
6. The placements / links should not come from pages that look like 100% AI generated slop.
7. The primary source of traffic for those domains should be aligned with your region. If you sell to North America, there's no reason to chase websites with 90% traffic coming from Pakistan, India, Philippines, Vietnam, etc.
If any vendor has a problem with these VERY BASIC COMMON SENSE criteria, it's a grift and you should avoid working with them.
These outreach filters are not unreasonable.
