Two Dozen BrightonSEO Pros Name GEO's Most Overrated Tactics

Welcome to The GEO Show, episode 57, the briefing on Generative Engine Optimization and AI visibility. Brought to you by GEOforge. This episode is a special: Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, takes the show to the exhibition floor at brightonSEO in Brighton. On day two, Friday October 9, 2026, he asked the same three questions of 29 guests across 26 interviews: GEO or something else, what is the most overrated tactic, and what is the most underrated one? In this episode: - **📉 What's overrated** Listicles and Reddit take the most heat (five guests each), with llms.txt, schema markup, backlinks and one-prompt tracking also named. Guests disagree on llms.txt and schema. - **📣 Off-site is the sleeper** Seven guests point to digital PR, reputation and third-party mentions as the most underrated lever. As Daegan Price of IDHL puts it, what others say about your brand matters more than what you say about yourself. - **🔄 Refresh and freshness** Cecile of AirOps says content refreshed within three months was three times more likely to be cited, and that 85% of AI visibility comes from off-site sources (AirOps research, as stated on tape). - **🧭 Entities, structure and facts** Entity gap analysis (Ryan Law, Ahrefs), entity maps (Dixon, WAIKAY), facts pages (Patrick, Rankscale) and internal linking (Marcus, Conductor). - **🤖 Test your site with agents** Josh Bliskul of Profound argues teams should usability-test AI agents on their own sites: can they transact, add to cart, and read the page. - **💼 SEO plus social** Rosa and Charlie of Connective3 say combining SEO and social teams pays off, and cite a roughly four million citation B2B dataset where LinkedIn posts overtook LinkedIn articles after early August. - **🏷️ What do we even call this?** Roughly a third of guests said GEO, a smaller group preferred a rival label, a few said AI search, and many shrugged. Several said the market, not practitioners, will settle the name. Paris also gave his talk "Information Gain: The Missing Metric in Every GEO Content Strategy?" at brightonSEO on October 8. Subscribe to The GEO Show wherever you get your podcasts. 💬 Question: Which GEO tactic do you think is overrated, and which one is your sleeper pick?