1. What should a CMO watch before approving a GEO retainer?

SEO, AIO, GEO, your site, & third-party support to optimize for LLMs

Who: John Mueller and Danny Sullivan, Google Search Central. Format: Search Off the Record podcast, available on YouTube. Published: 8 January 2026. Evidence reviewed: official video description. (youtube.com)

Why it earns a place: It addresses the purchasing decision directly: whether to hire an SEO professional, how to evaluate one, and how to interpret third-party tools.

Key takeaways:

• The discussion centres on evaluating professional help rather than accepting a new acronym as a reason to spend.
• Sullivan discusses third-party domain scores and their interpretation.
• The episode cautions against breaking content into small fragments simply to appeal to language models. (youtube.com)

Buyer application — our recommendation: Ask each shortlisted agency to divide its proposal into existing SEO work, genuinely additional AI-search work, measurement and implementation. Require a reason for every new deliverable.

Important limitation: This is Google’s perspective, not an explanation of every assistant. Cross-check technical proposals against Google’s current AI-features documentation, which says that AI Overviews and AI Mode require no special additional optimisation or dedicated schema. Eligibility still does not guarantee inclusion. (developers.google.com)