Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Neymar have a lot more in common than a penchant for scoring goals.
Each is famous for on-field histrionics, notably taking dives to get penalty calls when it gives their teams an advantage.
Does anyone really like this behaviour? No. Does it ruin football’s appeal? A little, for some. Mostly it is annoying bullshit we could all do without.
But these all-time great players know it works. And, for my money, their behaviour has done little to nothing to taint their legacies as winners and legends.
The GEO parallel
There’s a close parallel to this in the GEO world.
I am talking about company-produced listicles. For those who don’t know, these are articles where a company writes a “best of” type list and puts itself in the top position. The tactic’s been around awhile, but it’s enjoying a renaissance as it appears LLMs fall for this shit.
This burgeoning preponderance of listicles has the AI and marketing intelligentsia up in arms:
Blair Enns, whose work I love, leads the charge with a Boy Scout-esque cry that exhorts us to eschew “unseemly practices such as creating top ten lists with ourselves at number one (or included at all).”
Chris Penn, perhaps best described as your favourite data nerd’s favourite data nerd, has written about how listicles don’t work and actually benefit competitors.
The normally insightful Neil Patel makes the most bizarre argument of all, effectively saying listicles are bad but that marketers find them useful anyway.
I appreciate these intellectuals hectoring us about deploying a tactic that can feel a little greasy – even if everyone’s doing it.
The idolatry of victory
However, in business, as in football, no one gets paid for long if all they do is lose games. Clients mostly just care about winning. That’s why, sometimes, if there is a chance to embellish a little inside the penalty box after contact, à la Suarez, most of us do.
So while I appreciate Enns’ colourful polemics, the cold, hard, data-backed, facts should win out. If I look at our own GEO program, 4 of our top 10 most scraped articles are listicles. I can tell you this is not an uncommon scenario with other companies whose data we see daily.
And though Penn and Patel may argue that this tactic doesn’t work, it HAS been working for us and others. Which is probably why a lot of companies do it. In our case, we have citation-level data to prove it, and bigger business outcomes, including a 5x increase in inbound leads.
The primacy of YOUR data for YOUR GEO program
All of which gets at the bigger picture of GEO now. There’s an over-abundance of generalized advice based on aggregate data and the early theories of experts. Some of it is useful, but only in a limited way.
If we know anything about AI search, it is that it’s highly variable and subjective. That means your data, and what will work for you across your tracked prompt universe, is unique to you. The best advice is what you see in your monitoring console. Not what you read in the headlines, not what big tech says, and certainly not the content about big-picture GEO trends that inundates LinkedIn.
Will listicles be effective for GEO programs forever? I have no idea. No one does.
But for now, if your data says theyare driving action for you, especially around top of funnel discovery prompts, by all means write the fucking things. I am sure you will sleep fine at night if you are making a giant pile of money due to increased visibility.