GEO audit: 4 steps to prepare your business before Google’s “Switch”

Is it worth investing in AI visibility right now?

That’s the question behind this episode of Luis M. Villanueva’s podcast with Alex Novoa, published in April 2026. They start from something they keep seeing: brands that never cared about SEO are now obsessed with GEO (Generative Engine Optimization, optimizing to appear in AI answers), spending large amounts on it and forgetting that SEO is the base that GEO stands on.

Their answer is yes: the sooner you start, the better, but in a controlled way. Below I go through their reasoning, the data behind it (I checked the original studies), and the 4-step audit they propose. If you need the basics first, start with how to increase your visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI.

AI traffic is small today, but it’s growing fast

The hosts share their own numbers: among their clients, the business that comes directly from an AI (someone clicks a link in ChatGPT and buys) is between 1% and 2%. Colleagues in other sectors report 3%, 4% or 5%, and some verticals even more. Small numbers, which is why many brands conclude it isn’t worth the effort yet.

The problem is that this figure is only the tip of the iceberg. The episode quotes growth of 7x and 10x in a year; the studies I could verify point in the same direction:

The invisible journey

There’s a second reason not to judge AI by its referral traffic alone: a lot of decisions are made in the chat, and the purchase happens somewhere else. One of the hosts told how, on a trip to Madrid, he planned everything with Gemini. When it recommended a comedy show, he searched for the show and the theater on Google, entered the website and bought the tickets. Google Analytics would credit that sale to Google, but the decision was made in Gemini.

That’s why they recommend also watching your brand searches. If they were flat or growing at a steady rate before AI tools took off, and they’re growing faster now, there’s at least a likely connection.

The real problem: demand you can’t see

More than the traffic AI sends, what should worry you is the traffic it takes away from the searches that make you money. It happens in two ways:

• AI Overviews answer the question on Google itself. The hosts’ example: if you search “how much creatine to take” and the AI Overview answers it, you no longer click any website.
• People stop searching on Google altogether. They plan trips, workouts or purchases in ChatGPT. According to the hosts, Google Trends shows searches like “what to see in Madrid” rising until 2022 and falling after ChatGPT came out. Those searches didn’t disappear; they moved to an ecosystem where you may not be.

The second one is the hardest to see, because it doesn’t show up as a drop in your rankings. You keep ranking first for a search that fewer and fewer people make.

Look up your main keywords in Google Trends over the last five years. If a search that brings you business has been falling since 2022–2023, part of that demand probably moved to AI. Also give priority to valuable keywords that don’t trigger an AI Overview yet.

The “switch”: when AI becomes the default search

This is the core of the episode. Today you can still get a lot of business from classic SEO. But there may be a moment, a “switch”, when Google makes AI Mode its default search, or when ChatGPT becomes the default search on millions of devices. What happens then to all the clicks you’re getting? If you don’t appear in those answers and your competitors (or players who never appeared before) do, you can disappear overnight.

They also mention agentic browsers, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, and reports that Samsung had talked with OpenAI about making it the default browser on its phones instead of Chrome. Nothing like that is confirmed, and there are laws and rules about default apps, but it shows the direction things are moving.

Where Google is as of October 2026

The episode is from April 2026, so here’s an update. At Google I/O on May 19, 2026, Google announced what it called “the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years”, an AI-powered search box rolling out in every country where AI Mode is available. It also said you can now ask a follow-up question right from an AI Overview and continue the conversation in AI Mode, which has “surpassed one billion monthly users”.

AI Mode is still not the default results page, though. In June 2026, after a Chrome test sent searches from the address bar to AI Mode, a Google vice president said it was an error and that they’re “not planning to make AI Mode the default for Chrome searches”. The switch hasn’t happened, but every step brings it closer.

You can’t do GEO without SEO

Brands that lived for years on PR campaigns, advertising and sales funnels now want to “do GEO” without ever having done SEO. The hosts are blunt about it: GEO isn’t like social media, where you post something and see if it works. To have a good chance of being cited you need history, authority and trust, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

There was even a small debate at the end about whether traditional rank tracking tools still matter. They don’t measure your presence in AI. But one host still uses rankings as an internal filter: if you’re not in Google’s top 10–20 results for a keyword, don’t even bother tracking it in AI, because you’re unlikely to be cited there either.

The 4-step GEO audit

This is the roadmap they propose to find out how exposed you are and to prepare before the switch:

1. Audit your exposure in Google Search Console.
2. Test your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Mode.
3. Calculate the clicks and demand you’ve lost.
4. Monitor what matters and prepare for the switch.

Step 1: Audit your exposure in Search Console

The idea is to find searches where you keep the same position but get far fewer clicks. If you’re still first and lost thousands of clicks, something is taking them, usually an AI Overview.

1. In Search Console, open Performance → Search results.
2. In the date filter, choose Compare and compare the last 3 months with the same period last year.
3. Turn on Clicks, CTR and Average position, and open the Queries tab.
4. Look for your main queries where the position barely changed but clicks and CTR dropped.
5. Classify them as transactional or informational. Prioritize the transactional ones, but don’t dismiss the informational ones: that traffic gets to know you, browses your site and can be reached later with retargeting.

Step 2: Test your brand in AI by hand

Take your top 20 queries and ask them in ChatGPT (the most used), Gemini and Google’s AI Mode. For each answer, write down:

• Whether they mention you, and whether they cite your website with a link.
• If they talk about you, what they say.
• Who they recommend instead: which competitors, outlets or directories appear in your niche.
• Whether the AI answers from its own memory, without citing anyone. Their example: a fitness site that published many training plans. If AI answers those questions directly, that’s demand you’ll keep losing little by little.

Step 3: Calculate the clicks and demand you’ve lost

Add up the clicks you lost in step 1 on queries where your position didn’t change: that’s the impact of AI on Google itself. Then check your main keywords in Google Trends to see which searches are losing volume over the years. That’s the demand that moved to other ecosystems and that you won’t see in your analytics.

Step 4: Monitor what matters and prepare for the switch

Forget about a single “share of voice” number and track these instead:

• Mention frequency: run the same prompts many times and measure the percentage of answers that mention you.
• Citation frequency vs. competitors: how often they cite you, and how often they cite each competitor.
• Visibility by platform: where you appear more, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or AI Mode.

And answer the question that matters most: if Google turned on AI Mode as the default tomorrow, would your business appear? And if ChatGPT became the default on mobile phones? For most businesses, the honest answer today is no.

Why AI visibility tools can “lie”

They don’t really lie, but AI answers are so volatile that what you see today may not be true tomorrow. A small change in a prompt changes the citations completely. And the prompts any tool tracks are invented: nobody knows exactly how real people ask. That’s why a stable “ranking” in AI doesn’t mean much. The useful metric is the percentage of times you’re mentioned when the same prompt runs many times.

The data on volatility is striking. Profound compared the domains cited for the same prompts in June and July 2025 (about 80,000 prompts per platform):

In other words, 40–60% of cited sources change from one month to the next, and between January and July the change reached 70–90%.

The first answer matters most

The hosts found this the craziest point. In another Profound study of about 730,000 ChatGPT conversations in the US (October to December 2025), the first turn of a conversation was 2.5 times more likely to include citations than the tenth, and almost 4 times more likely than the twentieth. Once the AI has searched and picked its sources, it tends to stick with them. If your product isn’t in that first answer, it’s very hard to get in later, unless the user asks for more options.

Start now, but start with the base

The episode’s conclusion: optimizing for AI is no longer optional, the demand is already moving even if you don’t see it in your analytics, and the switch could come at any time. But GEO is built on SEO. Don’t throw money at AI visibility while your site still has the basics wrong, and avoid the habits in the worst SEO strategies in 2026.

basicseo.net crawls your site for free and shows you page by page what’s missing: titles, meta descriptions, H1s, image alt text and broken links. It’s the base AI search engines read too. Request free access.

FAQ

What is GEO?

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is optimizing your website and your brand so that AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode can find, understand and cite you in their answers. It builds on SEO; it doesn’t replace it.

How much traffic does AI send to websites?

Still a small share for most sites. SE Ranking measured 0.32% of traffic in 2026, and the podcast hosts see 1–2% of business coming directly from AI among their clients. But it grew about 16x between 2024 and 2026, and many decisions made in AI end in a Google or direct visit that analytics doesn’t attribute to it.

What is Google’s “switch”?

It’s the hosts’ name for the moment AI answers become the default way to search, for example if Google made AI Mode its default results page. As of October 2026 Google hasn’t done it and has said it isn’t planning it for Chrome, but it keeps bringing AI Mode closer to the search box.

How do I know if AI is taking my clicks?

In Google Search Console, compare clicks and CTR for your main queries with the same period last year. If your position stayed the same and clicks fell, an AI Overview is the most likely cause. Then check those keywords in Google Trends.

Sources

• Auditoría GEO: 4 pasos para preparar tu negocio antes del “Switch” de Google (podcast, in Spanish) (Luis M. Villanueva and Alex Novoa, YouTube)
• AI traffic grew 16x from 2024 to 2026 (SE Ranking)
• AI Traffic Has Increased 9.7x in the Past Year (Ahrefs)
• AI Search Volatility: Why AI search results keep changing (Profound)
• How ChatGPT sources the web (Profound)
• A new era for AI Search (Google)
• Google Chrome won’t make AI Mode the default search experience (Search Engine Roundtable)