Ross Hudgens: GEO Is CRO and the Versus-Page Signal

Ross Hudgens founded Siege Media, and his Wiley book Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO is out October 12, 2026. His sharpest finding: brands with versus articles were the most likely to get AI search traffic. Read the full episode recap.

Siege Media started as a content marketing agency almost fifteen years ago, repositioned as an organic growth agency, and now calls itself a full-service GEO agency. It added affiliate partnerships and community management because third-party citations keep showing up in AI answers. Ross calls the change foundational. He and Jeremy get into what moves LLM visibility, and why so much of it looks like conversion work.

In this episode

Versus articles as a signal. A correlation study Siege ran with Claude across its clients' transactional URLs found a 0.56 Spearman correlation between having versus articles and getting AI search traffic.

CRO is GEO. The reframe came from a talk with Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media. Case studies, data points and reviews up front help buyers and LLMs alike. Jeremy adds how Matt Brooks at SEOteric puts it: train your off-site customer service representatives.

Long-tail use case pages built from the words customers already use in reviews, to educate the robot buyer.

Tracking AI traffic. How Eric Wu at Ramp treats non-branded URLs that arrive as direct traffic as likely AI visits, and how Jeremy cross-checks direct traffic against Microsoft Clarity's bot flags.

"Best overall" loses. A client listed across page one of a best-X search still missed the AI Overview. Ross's thesis: claim a specific "best for" and let other sites cast the co-citation vote.

From network to service. Doing Reddit really means community and reputation management. Jeremy compares it to how Gisele Navarro rebuilt HouseFresh on Reddit and YouTube.

SEO meets PPC. Lisa Raehsler, host of AI, Ads & Beyond, flagged that Google's AI Max picks landing pages from your site, so organic page work now reaches the PPC budget.

Affiliate, measured like SEO. Ross checks traffic to a page before chasing a placement on it.

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