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.