The Invisible Shortlist: Your Buyers Are Asking AI About You

Buyers are opening ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and asking who the best options are in your category, and by the time your sales team knows they exist, the decision is already made. The question is no longer whether AI is shaping your pipeline. It is whether you are in the answer, and whether anyone in your organization would even know.

In this episode, Raja Walia and Akande Davis break down findings from The State of GEO in B2B Marketing, the new report from GNW Consulting and Demand Metric built on 225 qualified responses from B2B marketing and revenue leaders. They cover why generative engine optimization is already the competitive baseline rather than a leading-edge experiment, why this is a revenue problem and not a content problem, and why the pipeline you lose to an AI shortlist never shows up in your CRM. You were simply never part of the conversation.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• The buyer journey no longer starts with a search, a referral, or an outbound touch. It starts inside an LLM, where shortlists are built and vendors are eliminated before the first conversation happens. The report shows 92% of B2B organizations are already experimenting with or operationalizing GEO, with 40% experimenting and 44% fully operational. If your org sits in the 8% that calls this "not a priority," you are not being cautious. You are standing still while the market moves.
• GEO is not SEO with a new name, and handing it to a traditional SEO agency misses the point. SEO optimized for rankings and backlinks; GEO optimizes for citations, whether the LLM names you as the answer and treats you as an authority. There is no GEO without SEO, but the metrics are completely different, and if your company is not in the answer, you were never part of the conversation to begin with.
• Early investment is producing real, fast returns. 78% of B2B organizations actively investing in GEO report measurable ROI, and Expedia is paying $430,000 plus bonus for a dedicated GEO principal. GNW's own experience mirrors it: a single blog article was cited by an LLM within a week and drove referral traffic in days, a turnaround SEO historically took three to six months to produce.
• The trust gap is the new context. 73% of organizations track AI referral traffic at least occasionally, but only 34% actually trust the data they are collecting. That means a majority of the market is making a GEO investment on top of data they themselves do not believe, and waiting for a clean baseline, a repeatable process, and a mature measurement model before acting is a luxury this market is not offering.
• The ownership gap is the most dangerous finding in the report. 60% of enterprise organizations have fully operationalized GEO, but fewer than 15% have named anyone to own it. Citation visibility is driven by a cross-functional mix — content quality at 63%, third-party citations at 56%, brand authority at 55%, and community-generated content at 51% — and coordinating that mix is a leadership decision about ownership, not a tactical to-do handed to a content team and checked quarterly. Your brand already exists in AI, with or without your involvement. The only question is whether anyone is accountable for what it says.

Note: Signal & Stakes was previously published as Call It RevOps. The rebrand reflects a deliberate shift in the conversation, from tactical execution and operational how-tos to strategic decision making and the consequences that follow when senior leaders get it right or get it wrong. Same hosts, same honesty, different altitude.

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Signal & Stakes is a podcast for people who sit inside the decisions that shape how companies grow, compete, and survive. Each episode surfaces a real decision, the signal that was there, what was at stake, and what happened next. Not advice. Consequence.

Signal & Stakes is hosted by Raja Walia, CEO of GNW Consulting, and Akande Davis, VP of Operations at GNW Consulting.

Signal & Stakes is produced by GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing technology and revenue operations agency helping enterprise organizations make sense of their existing MarTech investments. Through the GNW Orchestration Framework, GNW Consulting helps companies connect board-level priorities to day-to-day execution, identify where AI creates leverage across go-to-market operations, and determine where human judgment should lead. Learn more

Subscribe to Signal & Stakes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop monthly. Follow GNW Consulting on LinkedIn for episode releases, show updates, and content on marketing technology and go-to-market strategy. Watch full episodes on YouTube.

-----------------------

Signal & Stakes is a podcast for people who sit inside the decisions that shape how companies grow, compete, and survive. Each episode surfaces a real decision, the signal that was there, what was at stake, and what happened next. Not advice. Consequence.

Signal & Stakes is hosted by Raja Walia, CEO of GNW Consulting, and Akande Davis, VP of Operations at GNW Consulting.

Signal & Stakes is produced by GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing technology and revenue operations agency helping enterprise organizations make sense of their existing MarTech investments. Through the GNW Orchestration Framework, GNW Consulting helps companies connect board-level priorities to day-to-day execution, identify where AI creates leverage across go-to-market operations, and determine where human judgment should lead. Learn more.

Subscribe to Signal & Stakes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop monthly. Follow GNW Consulting on LinkedIn for episode releases, show updates, and content on marketing technology and go-to-market strategy. Watch full episodes on YouTube.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So something has changed in how B2B buyers are finding vendors. And I don't think most senior leaders have really absorbed what that means yet. It used to be this buyer journey. You start with a search, maybe somebody refers you to a company, you get like an outbound touch from your sales team, but that's really not where it starts anymore. In fact, I think buyers are opening up ChatGPT, they're opening up Claude, Gemini, Copilot, whatever they're using, and they're asking who are the best options within that category? Uh from there, you can imagine there's a list that's built, and before the conversation happens, they already know who they're going to go with and what they're going to do. So before the sales team even knows the buyer exists, they've already identified where they're at.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

For CMOs and CROs sitting in a boardroom, most orgs have no idea whether they should provide the answer or how the answer is getting to them, or if these, you know, LLM models, like these language models is the word that I was kind of thinking of, are just making stuff up for them. You know, for example, like if you ask ChatGPT or Claude about what the price of a product is, and they are, and you don't have pricing on your website, they're gonna give you an answer. Whether that answer is true or not, it's gonna try to find something, it's going to produce content, it's going to, it's going to do something. And those conversations are happening without you knowing it. And that's actually what's shaping now buyers' consideration. That set is happening somewhere. Where, you know, they're not measuring it. You know, most companies have no idea how to measure it. And in many cases, like some aren't even present. And we're talking about like very big companies or notable companies that have spent so much money on SEO. Now the buying behavior, just like back, you know, when we first started, it's changing. And people are no longer validating in LLMs, but they're actually saying, taking what they are saying as some fundamental source of truth to shorten the list, kind of like what you said, Akande, to figure out where should they start. And if you're not on it and you don't know you're on it, what do you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Yeah, the the market has moved. Buyers are moving with it. And I think that's really kind of what fueled what we did internally, which is GW Consulting partnered with Demand Metric to actually dive into this really deeply and look at what leaders are doing. So we we partnered with Demand Metric to publish the state of GEO and B2B marketing. We got 200, over 200 qualified responses for B2B marketing and revenue leaders to really understand what they're seeing in their market, what they're actioning on, and what the results are. Because, you know, again, when you think about the state of GEO, how it's cannibalizing SEO, the conversation we hear all the time is 50% of our traffic from organic search is gone. Well, that's because Google's reclaiming it, or Chat GPT is where your buyers live now. At a high level, some of the most interesting things that we saw was 92%, like I mentioned before, B2B orgs are already experimenting or actively operationalizing GEO. That means 40% are experimenting and 44% are fully operational. Now, if you think 8% is where you want to be in that bucket that says it's not a priority, you might be behind the curve in a in a very meaningful way.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah, and you know what that number tells you where the competitive baseline already is set. I mean, this is no longer a should be invest in this. This is not a leading edge question anymore. Like the orgs that are treating GEO as something that to evaluate later and run the same playbook, um, you know, they're not being cautious. They're just they're going to be stagnant. And they're standing still, and actually you're standing still if your org is not doing it. Well, 92% of the market moves. And when we talk about the market moving, we're not saying that just because everyone is doing it, you should do it, but you have to follow buyer trend. And buyer trend, very, very specifically in the state of GEO report, says that across every industry, like something as if you wanted to buy a house, you know, evaluate a market. If you wanted to buy a product, people are going into these LMs and saying, Show me the best glasses. Hey, I want these pairs of sunglasses at the most basic level. You know, show me what else is out there. Now imagine that in a B2B mindset is where you're evaluating companies and you know, it amplifies. And that's why we say it's like you have to move where the buyers are moving. And if you don't, and if you think this is something that you can pawn off later, is you know, you're already playing catch-up.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah, and I think, you know, we kind of dove into this topic without maybe clarifying some terms. So let's talk about what GEO and AEO actually are. A lot of people might say this is the same thing as SEO, just a little bit different. But really, what's that conversation at the executive level? Like, why is that important and what is it?

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah, and you know, I think at this point, like, you know, we're recording this in June of 2026. At this point, if we have, if you are hearing this for the very first time, that GEA is generative engine optimization or answer engine optimization, uh, you know, I think it you have a lot of work to do because there's no way in 2026 and June, no one should not know, or anyone should not know, I think, what GEO is. And you know, it's it's structuring your content and presence. So AI, and when we say AI, I'm really just talking about LLMs, cite you as a source of either truth, response, or bring you up into the conversation. Like these LLMs are think about them as like I know this sounds really bad, but think about them as people. Like they're your referrals, they're the people that say, hey, you know what, you should really go with a conde or Raj because they really have this really cool podcast and all this other stuff. They're the ones mediating conversations at this point.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Well, and it's not that weird because if you think about it, many people trust the LOM that they work with as being a reliable source that they can go to for everything.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Some people have relationships with them, you know?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

And that's obviously like a very extreme case, but like that's the level of involvement and engagement that these LOMs have. So, like, you know, GEO cannot exist by without SEO. And that is a true statement, right? There is no GEO without SEO, but GEO optimizes for completely different metrics, right? Like when we talk about citations, and you're gonna hear that word a lot, is how much are you being cited in responses and LLMs? That is what the goal is. It's not first page, seven page, 10 page like it was with SEO. And honestly, if your company is not in that answer, you are never part of the conversation to begin with.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Yeah, and it let's take a step back as well and look at some of the numbers. So I think it's important to highlight what our actual findings were. Uh, a key one that sticks out in my mind is that 78% of B2B organizations are actively investing in GEO and they report measurable ROI. Uh I think the way that this kind of started is um our CSO chief strategy officer, Andrea Lechnerbecker, actually saw Expedia was going to pay $430,000 for a GEO principal. Now, with that in mind, plus bonus.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Plus bonus.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

I mean, if if they're paying the money, it's because there's value there. Um, and especially with an emerging discipline, like having an ROI climb above 90% is pretty high, maybe even unusually high.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Yeah, and you know, we got to take a little of those numbers with a grain of salt, right? Like any emerging, you know, strategy that is compounding visibly right in front of your eyes is going to have a higher percentage. Why? Because what is higher than 0% or 15% or 13%, right? Like, so it is going to aggregate out. However, the organizations that are kind of building this discipline earlier, not just breaking even. Like, they're seeing return. And that's, I think, the bigger thing to take away is that are you seeing return immediately? And, you know, we we released this one article. It was like the state of like, you know, we received this report or released this report. We also wrote this one blog article. Um, at that point in time, Andrea Lechnerbecker, like you mentioned, our chief strategy officer, wrote it. It was cited in an LLM within a week. That one citation drove five, you know, uh five impressions or traffic to our website. Now that is within a week. SEO and all of these other components usually took three months to six months. And I know when you think about it, the number looks really small, right? Well, what do you mean, just five people visited your website? From when we posted the blog to when it got cited in an LLM to have five visitors already hitting our web page in probably less than a week is the fastest turnaround in any of these initiatives, right? Just from an impression standpoint, just from a click to an impression cited click. Why did they click? Because they thought that this they know that this is valid information that LLM is spitting out. That that is what the buyer is saying. If the if an LLM has cited our article, a buyer is automatically saying, Oh, let me click this and check it out because what you're providing is valuable to me based off on the question that I have said. And once again, you look at the number, you're like, that's very small. Well, you know, we're a 25% organization. So if one of those people convert, it's good for us. Now, let's kind of you know increase that to be to be organizations that are investing to Akani's point, half a million dollars on a full-time position plus bonus to make sure that they're like make sure that they are being cited not once, but hundreds, thousands, millions of times in all of these LLM engines. Like that's generally the goal. Like that that is what you're kind of competing against in the B2B world.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

And and this it might be just to back up a little bit, you know, the terminology there, impressions, visitors, site traffic, it makes it sound like it's a marketing problem, but I mean, really, Roger, this is a C-suite problem in conversation. Can you maybe speak to why that's the case and why it's not just a marketing or content thing that they have to deal with?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

So there's two there are two parts of this conversation, right? Um, one is C-suite ultimately has kind of the keys to the kingdom to invest into this kind of like growing space. And generally, when you invest in something, you have to see some sort of outcome result, or you have to see how the market shifts and is it worth investing in. And what we're saying right now is you cannot wait for that, right? We cannot wait for you to you, you you cannot wait for the market to aggregate out in this because it is moving so fast that if you're not already investing into it, and one of the numbers is 92% are the people who are investing in it, and the reason being is because they don't want to get left behind. And I think I think that's one portion of it. The second that a lot of C-suite, you know, that's not in C-suite conversations is that most organizations don't understand the buyer that is asking the AI who to consider in your category. And that sounds very kind of roundabout. And if you're not the answer in that, you don't know. And that eventually turns into a rev revenue problem, not a content problem. You know, we talk about buyer journeys, we talked about builds, we talked about short lists, and what we're really kind of saying in GEO, all of this stuff is happening with or without your involvement. It's happening, people are, you know, people are creating short lists of companies to approach. All of this is happening without your involvement. So when we talk about like this is not a marketing operations failure, we're talking about that from a very strategic perspective, that the leadership, leadership team is who owns it. They're the ones who own investment with X amount of dollars from a budgetary perspective to invest in this. And if you are not, that is a problem. And I think that's really what we're kind of referring to.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Yeah, something that should make, I think, senior leaders a little bit uncomfortable is another metric that we pulled out of the report, which is 73% of organizations track AI referral traffic, at least occasionally, sometimes they do, but only about 34% actually trust the data that they're collecting. So what that means is that a majority of the market that's making a GEO investment, they have data them that they themselves honestly don't fully believe. Um, that gap, I think, is now the new context. Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Yeah, I mean, I think we talk about operating models a lot, and we talk about investing in technology before the infrastructure is set up, or or if there's a trusty form of measurement, and or you know, like essentially from a leadership standpoint, people want reporting, visibility, they want some sort of inner uh infrastructure, they want some sort of repeatable cases, and then they go to the board, and the board says, yes, that makes sense. Um, what we're saying is that this foundation cannot fully stand behind that, right? This isn't a data problem. Like there, there's data that you use for different things. For this, very specifically, what the state of GEO report highlights is that data has very little to do with it. It's content and how the content is being cited and how the and how the content on the back end. I think we talked about Akana released a really good video on schema and how like schema affects the LLM's ability to leak to you know read the content and digest it and then serve it up from a citation perspective. I think that is realistically the gap. It's not so much, you know, the whole, like a lot of C-suite will say, well, you know, we need to have a process, an infrastructure, we need to have, you know, measurabilities, we need baselines, we need uh an operating model. And kind of like what we're saying right now in the in the world of AI, you're not going to get that. And I think that's why a lot of organizations kind of sit back and say, is this new thing? I'm not gonna call it a GEO, is this new thing something that we want to invest in? Let's wait until we have an understanding of a baseline, a middle point, a check-in, a process that we can kind of either repeat or or do. And right now, what I what we're saying is like all of these things that we're talking about from a buying behavior standpoint, where a person is going to an LLM and GPT and Claude are saying, you know what, even if you don't have pricing on your website, this is what the average cost is. This is what's going on. You should probably go and you know, uh look at this company or look at that company. All of that is happening without all of these governance items, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Yeah, and and 60% of enterprise orgs have fully operationalized GEO. However, fewer than 15% have a dedicated GEO role. So, in that description that that you kind of gave on even something as simple as simple as making sure the schema is updated on the website or you have things in place that need to be in place, who is that person that's owning that and defining the strategy and KPIs? A lot of that is just falling to existing teams rather than being owned by a single person specifically, which is kind of why I think the forward-thinking folks are leaning into that. And I mean, that feels like the signal. That feels like if you have an Expedia uh paying $430,000 for a GEO principal, that feels like a signal that we should be paying attention to.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Yeah, and and you know, and honestly, the ownership gap in this one is probably the most real of, you know, out of that entire 92% of the market or whatever is active in GEO. But the reality is fewer than 15% can even have named someone to own it. And that was also something that was discovered in the report, right? So all these numbers are from the report. We're not just throwing out random, you know, percentages. They're rounded up. I think it was like 15.2 or three, we're just we'll just say 15%. But they haven't named anyone to own it. And sometimes they're just having traditional SEO agencies manage it. And that's not the case because no one really truly understands what GEO is and how it works, especially more than especially SEO agencies. That means that most organizations are doing GEO work without anyone accountable for the outcome or even understanding what the main difference is, right? Like we're SEO and Nadi, obviously, you can talk about this a little bit more because we've done it before, really relies on meta tagging, backlinks, and all this stuff. GEO is really about how LLMs are digesting your content and what authority are they giving you. You could have the best article on the face of this plan. You could have the top-tier stance on whatever point that you're talking about. If there is no authority, and once again, SEO doesn't count about authority, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. You know, there's linking and backlinks and all that stuff that I don't know too much about. But for GEO, what I do know is that you have authority. You have to have authority as a company and as an org. And once you're a trusted authority, what you're saying, when it's true, that is what LLMs are going to cite because it thinks that you have some sort of authoritative kind of you know, priority over anything else that's there. And this is exactly how you get that 39-point trust gap, you know, that's inside the article. Like activity without ownership or motion, direction, or authority, it's not going to account for anything when it comes to GEO.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Yeah, and to kind of clarify too, and I think the report numbers are going to be important. Let's look at what the actual mix is based on what we found from those 225 responses. So we had content quality that sits at about 63%. That's the number one um uh piece that drives AI visibility. The second is third-party citations at 56%. So having those third-party citations from reliable sources, of course, not spammy records, that kind of thing, which you would typically see from SEO. Brand authority actually sits at 55%. So still very important, but surprisingly, it it factors into this whole overall mix. And then at 51%, we have community-generated content. So things like Reddit, um, uh not Discord necessarily, Quora, forums, peer platforms, G2, for example. The mix that you have will influence whether your AI model cites you in the in the in the broader scheme of what most organizations are building for. So if you're leaning heavily into one of those sections, there's about four other pillars that you should be evaluating.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah, I mean, and that's also where the authority comes from as well, right? Like, are you actually active or did you create an account to create an account? Like back when SEO, like for, I wouldn't say but back when SEO first came out, with SEO just in general. Remember like when Google had like their Google uh social media, I forget what it was called. Uh yeah. I forgot that yeah, yeah. Google something. Yeah, right. Like everyone was on Facebook, they had a Twitter, they had a they had a Google account, they had this, they had that. Why? Because SEO was like, hey, I'm checking all of this stuff. I don't care if you're active on it. I just want to know is there credentials associated with you having these accounts? And then I'm gonna serve up the fact that you have like you know 15 different social media sites. Well, the that entire thing changes, and that that that change has to be part of that executive conversation, right? Like, this isn't and and someone has to understand it. So this is not a task that you just hand to a contact content team and check quarterly and say, hey, you know, just let us know where we are. Like this is the signal, like this is what's going to determine whether an AI model recommends your company based off on, I don't know, content, PR, analyst relationships. What is your presence in all of these communities? What is your brand of authority? All of this requires cross-functional coordination. And someone, someone, hence the reason Expedia is paying someone half a million dollars plus fucking bonus to do it, is the person that's managing all of that. And that is the leadership decision. It's about ownership, not a tactical to-do, not a check-in, not a report, not a PowerPoint presentation, but someone fully involved, engaging in all aspects aspects of that. That is that is essentially the signal.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

So if the signal, if that's the signal, then what's at stake if if no one addresses it?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

The signal is that it's already shifted. That is the outcome. That is the signal based off on what's happening. The outcome is that you have to assign a person to be aware of this and acknowledge it and manage it. And the organizations that understand it and are building that discipline, not just activity or compounding visibility or treating it like some sort of tactical nuance that we're just gonna report on, they're the ones who have already are involved in it and are going to move on. Everyone else is arriving late.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Yeah, and I mean that doesn't show up in your CRM, right? If you're never a part of the conversation, no one ever reaches out and opens up that dialogue because you never showed up. You were never on the short list. It's not gonna impact your CRM as far as leads or closed loss opportunities, but it will impact your revenue because nothing will happen. It's gonna be difficult to diagnose something that you have no visibility into, right? So when you're thinking about that from that standpoint, that's where it becomes a leadership problem because it's actively impacting the bottom line.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

And honestly, like that is that is the signal, right? Like your brand exists in AI right now, whether you are involved or not. This is not SEO where if you don't meta tag correctly, or you don't let engines discover you, or you don't write enough content where you just don't show up on a Google search engine, or you're so nested on the 10th page that it doesn't matter. Your brand exists in LLMs right now, and you are actively being used with or without your knowledge based off on information that it can scan. You just don't know what it's saying. And it might be describing you accurately, it might be naming a competitor in your place. Like it's very much possible where someone's like, you know what, this company, not so good. You should really try them. Why? Because they have all of the citations, they have all of this authority, they have all of this brand. And honestly, it might be leaving you out entirely. And the funny thing about this is that might be the best case for you, right? The best case is an LLM doesn't mention you, but it's going to, right? Every buyer conversation that's starting right now is a query. And even if you look at it as a query that is doing it of that that is devaluing what it is, there are people asking questions in LLMs, and you are either being included in a conversation positively or negatively. There's very rare times where you don't exist that much where it will never mention you. But how you are mentioning or how you are being mentioned or considered, those are the items that you really should keep you up at night. Like that's like if you're a CMO and you're a CRO, the idea of people not understanding or idea of an LLM mentioning you and bringing up into conversation without you having any input in it, that's the scary part. And that's the part that you know is not going to show up on your quarterly report, or that's the part where you know it's not gonna be in like a CRM or a loss. That's the part that you should be afraid of.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

And that is signals and stakes. Every episode we surface one signal in the market that it's sending and name what's at stake if it goes unheard. The state of GEO and B2B marketing, the full report from GW Consulting and Demand Metric is linked in the show notes. Read it before your next leadership conversation about AI visibility. And if this episode landed, share it with the leader in your organization who needs to hear it. We'll see you next time.