The GEO industry is right to be skeptical of itself. That doesn't mean marketers can sit this one out.
A few weeks ago,Digiday published a piece that captured something a lot of people in the GEO Industry have been saying privately for months. Marketers are paying real money for AI visibility tools, getting inconsistent results, and starting to ask whether the category is a strategic necessity or the latest ad tech grift. The piece quotes agency leaders from VML, Markacy, Noise Media Group, and /prompt, and the consensus is striking. Three tools, same prompts, three different answers. Point-in-time snapshots dressed up as ongoing measurement. Prices that don’t yet match proven value.
I want to be transparent about something. Parsnipp is a GEO Industry vendor. I’m the CEO. So you’d expect me to push back on a piece like this. I’m not going to.
The article is mostly right.
Why we built Parsnipp after the first wave, not during it
We didn’t start Parsnipp to ride the GEO wave. We started it because we thought the first wave was getting the problem wrong, and we wanted to wait long enough to be sure we weren’t getting it wrong too.
Most of the tools that arrived first treated GEO as SEO with a new vocabulary. They swapped “keyword” for “prompt,” ran millions of single-turn queries, counted brand mentions, and called it visibility. That methodology produces data, and the data looks compelling in a dashboard. But it doesn’t reflect how people actually use AI to make purchase decisions. Real shoppers don’t fire off one prompt and accept the first answer. They describe a situation, get a recommendation, push back, narrow down, ask follow-ups, and arrive at a shortlist three or four turns into the conversation. If your measurement methodology can’t model that, you’re not measuring AI visibility. You’re measuring something that looks like it.
That’s the gap we built Parsnipp to close.
The leading GEO Industry vendors are overpriced and underdelivering, and brands are paying the price
The bigger problem with the first wave isn’t just methodology. It’s that the leading vendors are charging premium prices for products that aren’t yet delivering premium value, and they’re doing it without offering brands any real practitioner perspective on what to actually do with the data.
This is the gap that nobody is talking about clearly enough. A marketer buys an AI visibility tool, sees that their brand shows up in 12% of queries versus a competitor’s 18%, and then what? Most of these platforms hand over a dashboard and offer to generate content. Buyers are left to reverse-engineer a discipline that the vendor themselves is still figuring out, while paying enterprise prices for the privilege.
Brands don’t know how or where to start with GEO. That’s not their fault. The category is new and moving fast. But the answer can’t be that they pay hundreds to thousands of dollars a month for a dashboard and a polite suggestion that they “optimize their content.” They need partners with an actual practitioner’s view of the space, not just a sales motion dressed up as a strategy.
The channel itself is not optional
Here is the part of this I want every marketer reading to internalize, even if you take nothing else from this post.
The fact that the first wave of GEO Industry tools are imperfect, overpriced, or inconsistent does not mean the channel is overhyped. It means the tooling is immature. Those are very different statements.
AI is earning more of the customer journey every single quarter. Pew Research (cited in the Digiday piece) shows that users encountering an AI summary click through to traditional results at less than half the rate of users who don’t. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude are increasingly where product research starts and, more and more, where it ends. If you sell goods or services and rely on the internet to do it, you cannot opt out of the question of how your brand shows up in these environments. You can opt out of any specific tool; you cannot opt out of the channel.
The marketers who treat the GEO industry like they treated mobile in 2010, or social in 2012, or programmatic in 2014, are going to look back and wish they’d started earlier. Waiting for the category to be perfectly measured before you engage with it is how you fall behind.
The benchmark data isn’t perfect. It’s still important.
I want to be unequivocal about this, because it’s where I think a lot of the current skepticism in the GEO Industry overshoots.
The way AI visibility data is collected today by simulating thousands of interactions between synthetic customers and AI models, is not direct usage data. We’ll get direct usage data eventually, as the LLM providers open up more measurement infrastructure and as ad and commerce ecosystems mature around these platforms. We’re not there yet.
But the benchmark data we have today is still important. It’s directionally correct, with some vendors more directionally correct than others, and while it’s not definitive, it absolutely needs to start influencing how brands think about marketing in 2026 and beyond. Knowing that your brand shows up in 12% of relevant AI conversations versus a competitor’s 30% is not a vanity metric. It’s a real signal about how the AI layer is currently representing your brand to potential customers, and it’s a signal you can act on. Imperfect measurement is still measurement. Directional truth is still truth.
The right posture isn’t “the data isn’t perfect, so I’ll wait.” It’s “the data is directionally useful, so I’ll use it, while pressing my vendors to keep getting better.”
How we think about pricing Parsnipp, and why it matters
Here’s where I’ll be direct about what we’re doing differently, because the alternative is dancing around it.
Parsnipp is free to test with and $39 a month after that. That’s not a promo price or an early-stage discount we’re going to reset later. It’s the price because we think it’s the right price for what AI visibility data is worth to a brand today. The GEO Industry category is real, the data is directionally useful, our methodology produces a more accurate read on actual shopper behavior than most tools we’ve seen, and the product is genuinely useful right now. You can buy it today and get value today. But we don’t think AI visibility tracking is a thousand-dollar-a-month problem, and we’re not going to pretend it is to justify a fatter price tag.
Visibility data should be inexpensive, and it’s going to get better and cheaper as the LLM labs share more direct usage data with the ecosystem. The real software value is going to be in what brands do with that data, how they manage + optimize for agentic commerce, how they participate in LLM-native advertising as it emerges, and how they adapt their content and brand strategy to a world where AI is the front door. That’s where we’re building toward.
For now, what we’re providing is AI visibility tracking and recommendations that are easy to use, easy to understand, priced to match the current maturity of the data in the GEO Industry, and accurate enough to actually inform real decisions. As the category evolves, we’ll evolve with it, and we’ll help the brands we work with become subject matter experts on this discipline alongside us.
