Moved $400/mo from Google Ads to GEO experiments. 90 days later, here's what I can actually report.
I run paid + SEO for a B2B SaaS. Convinced the team to carve $400/month out of the Google Ads budget to test whether GEO investments could produce comparable pipeline impact. That was 90 days ago.
Honest results, no spin:
What we did with the $400:
- $120/mo tracking tool (we use GEO Tracker, full disclosure)
- ~12 hrs/mo of my time on comparison pages and Reddit answers
- ~$80 on a freelancer to clean up our schema markup
- ~$60 on a small Otter.ai subscription to transcribe podcast appearances
What we got:
- Perplexity mention rate: 4% → 19% over 90 days (buyer-intent queries only)
- ChatGPT: 0% → 8% (slower, expected)
- Google AI Mode: 0% → 0% (we're in a niche that AI Mode still doesn't handle well, I think)
- 3 inbound demo requests that self-attributed to 'found you on Perplexity' in the form
What I still can't tell:
- Whether those 3 demos would have come from Google Ads anyway at a different attribution path
- Whether month 4-6 will compound or plateau
$400/mo from Google Ads didn't hurt performance metrics, for what it's worth. Jury is still out on whether GEO earned a permanent line item.
Anyone else running a structured budget comparison like this? Would love more data points.
5 replies
- Dave A.
The honest 'jury is still out' framing is refreshing. Most GEO posts are either breathless believers or full skeptics. The 0% movement in Google AI Mode for your niche is worth noting too — not every category is addressable by every engine.
- Marcus B.
Would you be willing to share which niche you're in where AI Mode returned 0%? Curious if it's topic-based or if there's something structural about the query types that makes AI Mode not useful.
- Petr VlčekFounder
Petr here — the 4% → 19% on Perplexity in 90 days is right in the middle of what we see for B2B clients who commit to comparison content + one press hit during the window. The ChatGPT 0% → 8% is a little above median (median is closer to 4-5% by day 90), which I'd attribute to the podcast appearance you mentioned. The 3 self-attributed demos is the part most teams underestimate when they pitch this internally.
- Nora
For devtools specifically, I'd add that the same $400 probably overperforms vs B2B SaaS because Reddit/HN/GitHub carry disproportionate weight in our category's training signal. We tried a similar reallocation last fall and the cheapest move (one well-positioned r/programming thread) outperformed everything else we paid for. Doesn't generalize, but worth knowing if anyone reading this is in devtools.
The 3 self-attributed 'found you on Perplexity' demos are interesting even if attribution is messy. That's 3 people who consciously remembered Perplexity as the touchpoint, which means it was meaningful enough to stick. Most attribution is invisible, so explicit self-attribution is the tip of a larger iceberg.