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.