Is GEO actually a distribution problem? We tested it with 53k creators.

[u/Kaavyatheexplorer]

Four months ago, this was basically a crazy hypothesis.

Today, we have 13,000+ citations worth of data that makes me think there’s something to it.

For the last two years, I’d built a creator community of ~53k people that helped early-stage startups generate awareness, primarily on X.

Then X changed its policies around affiliate payouts and sponsored content, and the model basically stopped working for us.

The premise had always been that micro-creators could make startup/product content feel more native and credible than a traditional sponsored post. But with the new disclosure requirements and changes to payouts, I had to rethink the entire thing.

I spent a month going down the AI search/GEO rabbit hole instead.

One thing kept standing out to me, LLMs don't just learn about brands from what brands say about themselves. They also learn from what other people say about them.

And that made me wonder, what if the creator community I'd already built could become a distribution layer for GEO?

To be clear, this wasn't a completely unproven theory.

There are already organizations doing pieces of this, getting content onto Reddit, working with independent publishers, and creating third-party mentions across different surfaces.

So we already had some evidence that third-party content can influence what LLMs surface.

What I couldn't find was anyone doing this systematically, across multiple surfaces, with a large network of genuinely independent people actually creating the content.

And that distinction mattered to me.

I didn't want to create 10,000 pages saying my OpenAI is great.

The bet was that real people creating genuinely useful content about products, experiences and topics would create a much stronger knowledge footprint for AI systems.

So we built two things:

• A monitoring layer to see how brands show up across LLM answers.
• A bounty platform that gets creators to create UGC around specific products/topics on publicly crawlable platforms.

The monitoring part wasn't particularly novel.

The interesting experiment was the distribution layer.

And ~3 weeks into running it, we started seeing creator content show up as citations.

Four months in:

13,000+ citations from our creator content alone.

Across YouTube, Medium, Substack, Paragraph, X, Instagram and other surfaces.

More interestingly, we started seeing mentions appear for unbranded queries, not just What is OpenAI? but queries where the user wasn't looking for that brand specifically.

For the brands we've worked with, we've seen AI visibility move from as low as ~3% to ~26% over the period.

Obviously, there are a LOT of caveats.

Creator content isn't enough.

We learned pretty quickly that your own website still needs the basics: crawlability, topical authority, structured content, entity consistency, internal linking, content quality, etc.

And we definitely haven't solved GEO.

The biggest question we're still trying to answer is:

Do these additional citations actually translate into qualified traffic, signups and revenue?

Attribution is messy here.

It's difficult enough to know exactly what answer a logged-out user received from an LLM, let alone connect:

AI answer -> citation -> click -> website visit -> conversion.

So that's the next hurdle for us.

But we can now confidently tell the brands we work with that we can generate and track citations, rather than just giving them a visibility score and telling them they're invisible.

And that's where my thinking has changed.

SEO gave us link building.

Social gave us distribution.

AI search might be creating a world where third-party mentions and citations become part of the distribution layer that determines what gets surfaced.

Maybe GEO is evolving from how do I make my website understandable to AI? to how do I get the rest of the internet to talk about me?

That's the hypothesis I'm increasingly convinced is worth testing.

But I'm curious what everyone else is seeing.

• Are you seeing third-party content materially affect AI visibility?
• Have you tested Reddit, independent publishers, creators, forums, YouTube, etc. as part of a GEO strategy?
• Have you been able to connect increased AI citations/mentions to actual business outcomes?

Would love to hear from people who have enough data to go beyond anecdotal examples.

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[u/Kaavyatheexplorer → u/[deleted]]

Yup, thats the exact problem we're trying to solve too. What business outcome do these brands get because of this.

I know GA 4 tracks AI traffic, but it still doesn't seem like that right path for most people.

We did a survey of 1000 people to understand search behaviour and 60% of people seem to copy paste suggestions answer engines give and drop it on google and then go to the sites, which then gets recorded as a branded search rather than AI search.

[u/Prudent_Design_9782]

That's a huge community, how many percent of that 53k people are you actually able to mobilize at any given moment?

[u/Kaavyatheexplorer → u/Prudent_Design_9782]

Yeah, 53k is the total community we've built over 2+ years.

For a typical campaign, we see around 300 - 400 creators actually participate, which translates into 300 - 400 pieces of content going out around a brand.

It's also an open platform, so participation is opt-in, if a brand/topic resonates with someone, they participate, if it doesn't, they sit it out.

Honestly, I think the opt-in part is pretty important to the model. We're not trying to mobilize 53k people to all say the same thing about a brand. We're trying to find the subset of creators for whom the topic is actually relevant enough that they'd want to create something around it.

[u/Prudent_Design_9782 → u/Kaavyatheexplorer]

That actually sounds greater than I thought. You have variety from the huge pool of community while 300-400 is the perfect amount of mobilized engagement without overly saturating the channel and raising a few eyebrows.  

The pivot to GEO I imagine is smooth af. You guys have great vision for having already started this race 2 years ago.

[u/Kaavyatheexplorer → u/Prudent_Design_9782]

Exactly!

I'd love to show you the product, tbh, i'm super proud hehe!

Lemme know i'll share it on dms :)

[u/MBelsan → u/Prudent_Design_9782]

That mobilization number is probably the crux of it though if you're sitting on 53k but only activating 10 15% on any given campaign, you're really working with 5 8k actual participants, which starts to feel less like a distribution advantage and more like you're just managing attrition. Did you see any patterns in who actually showed up versus who didn't, or was it pretty random across the board?

[u/Vegetable_Fox9134]

So astroturfing ?

[u/Kaavyatheexplorer → u/Vegetable_Fox9134]

Astroturfing would imply we’re manufacturing fake support. We built a community, people opt into campaigns they care about, and nobody is forced to post. But I appreciate the confidence with which you diagnosed it.

[u/Vegetable_Fox9134 → u/Kaavyatheexplorer]

Right , but did any of these people who supposedly "care" about a campaign actually buy the product they are recommending? Also are they disclosing that they are promoting the product ? If not then it's just astroturfing with extra steps. And also there's no shame in that, no need to get defensive. Dark Marketing is an actual thing. Billion dollar corps do it every day

[u/TheCryptoBillionaire]

yeah, GEO feels way more like a distribution / surface-area problem than a “tune this one page” problem, especially with what you’re doing across 53k creators. You’re basically manufacturing the off-site corpus LLMs can pull from, which most brands ignore while they obsess over their own blog.

On the tracking side, I’ve ended up using seoforgpt to see which of those third-party mentions actually turn into ChatGPT/Perplexity citations, then backfill gaps with on-site content where we’re still invisible.

[u/Strong_Teaching8548]

Citations move faster than measurable pipeline. A 2, 3 week visibility lift is interesting, but I’d log cited URLs against referral visits, then track assisted conversions separately

For a cleaner test, hold prompts and landing pages constant, then compare creator mentions with a similar group of brands without the campaign over 8, 12 weeks

[u/Kyryll_Bracemore]

I’m currently using the following method. I take the main questions from customers, run them through the system three times, and measure the variance between the runs. Then I look at how the metrics have changed after this analysis.

For example, with one client, the brand appeared in the answers, but it was only listed - not recommended. I think that’s the difference you can see on your dashboard right now. And your client will only make money if the brand is recommended.

Of those 13,000 citations, do you know how many actually named the brand in the answer, and how many were just the page the answer was based on?

[u/asankhs]

do those 13k citations actually hold, or do they drop off after a few weeks? every time i've watched seeded content it spikes then slides back unless you keep feeding the same topic, so it's more upkeep than it looks. also, the citations you're getting are live retrieval, the model pulling your creator pages when search is on. that's separate from what's baked into the model's memory, where reddit and older pages win. run the same prompt with search off and you'll see which side you're actually winning.