GEO hype fuels shady tactics as agencies chase AI visibility wins

Gaetano DiNardi put a price tag on the GEO rush on June 26, 2026: agencies and vendors are selling brand-mention outreach as AI visibility work, and some of the inventory looks like old link spam with a fresh label. In his audit of top-rated GEO vendors, DiNardi found premium-priced placements that included selective studies used to sell aggressive mention-building, paid-link inventory dressed up as partnerships, brand mentions sold on private blog networks, topically irrelevant placements, and Reddit astroturfing run through aged accounts.

The sharpest warning in DiNardi’s piece is that paid brand mentions can be black-hat link building by another name. He said PBN brand mentions were being priced at roughly 10 to 15 times the cost of a typical SEO backlink, a spread that turns “visibility” into a procurement problem for agencies that have to justify every dollar to clients. He also said Reddit campaigns often rely on old accounts and are frequently removed within 30 days for violating community guidelines, which makes the tactic fragile even before anyone asks whether it belongs in a compliant media plan.

Google has already given the issue platform-level stakes. Its spam policies now explicitly cover attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search, and the company says violating pages can be pushed lower in rankings or omitted from results entirely. Google also says those decisions can involve automated systems and human review, which means the risk is not theoretical for teams trying to game AI visibility with low-grade placements.

The pressure feeding those sales pitches is real. Seer Interactive published a January 7, 2025 study that analyzed more than 300,000 keywords in finance and SaaS, then narrowed the set to 10,000 relevant questions for GPT-4o testing. Seer said brands ranking on page one of Google showed a strong correlation with LLM mentions, while backlinks had little to no impact in that study. Seer later said Botify and DemandSphere found AI Overviews were more likely to cite pages in the top 12 organic positions, reinforcing why agencies now see off-site authority as a lever worth selling.

Search Engine Land had already flagged the darker side of the trend in an October 23, 2025 piece on black-hat GEO, citing fake E-E-A-T signals, synthetic personas, fake reviews, and mass AI-generated spam. DiNardi’s audit shows how quickly that playbook has been repackaged for the next budget line.