Send us Fan Mail Buyers are opening ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and asking who the best options are in your category, and by the time your sales team knows they exist, the decision is already made. The question is no longer whether AI is shaping your pipeline. It is whether you are in the answer, and whether anyone in your organization would even know. In this episode, Raja Walia and Akande Davis break down findings from The State of GEO in B2B Marketing, the new report from GNW Consulting and Demand Metric built on 225 qualified responses from B2B marketing and revenue leaders. They cover why generative engine optimization is already the competitive baseline rather than a leading-edge experiment, why this is a revenue problem and not a content problem, and why the pipeline you lose to an AI shortlist never shows up in your CRM. You were simply never part of the conversation. Key topics covered in this episode: The buyer journey no longer starts with a search, a referral, or an outbound touch. It starts inside an LLM, where shortlists are built and vendors are eliminated before the first conversation happens. The report shows 92% of B2B organizations are already experimenting with or operationalizing GEO, with 40% experimenting and 44% fully operational. If your org sits in the 8% that calls this "not a priority," you are not being cautious. You are standing still while the market moves.GEO is not SEO with a new name, and handing it to a traditional SEO agency misses the point. SEO optimized for rankings and backlinks; GEO optimizes for citations, whether the LLM names you as the answer and treats you as an authority. There is no GEO without SEO, but the metrics are completely different, and if your company is not in the answer, you were never part of the conversation to begin with.Early investment is producing real, fast returns. 78% of B2B organizations actively investing in GEO report measurable ROI, and Expedia is paying $430,000 plus bonus for a dedicated GEO principal. GNW's own experience mirrors it: a single blog article was cited by an LLM within a week and drove referral traffic in days, a turnaround SEO historically took three to six months to produce.The trust gap is the new context. 73% of organizations track AI referral traffic at least occasionally, but only 34% actually trust the data they are collecting. That means a majority of the market is making a GEO investment on top of data they themselves do not believe, and waiting for a clean baseline, a repeatable process, and a mature measurement model before acting is a luxury this market is not offering.The ownership gap is the most dangerous finding in the report. 60% of enterprise organizations have fully operationalized GEO, but fewer than 15% have named anyone to own it. Citation visibility is driven by a cross-functional mix — content quality at 63%, third-party citations at 56%, brand authority at 55%, and community-generated content at 51% — and coordinating that mix is a leadership decision about ownership, not a tactical to-do handed to a content team and checked quarterly. Your brand already exists in AI, with or without your involvement. The only question is whether anyone is accountable for what it says.Note: Signal & Stakes was previously published as Call It RevOps. The rebrand reflects a deliberate shift in the conversation, from tactical execution and operational how-tos to strategic decision making and the consequences that follow when senior leaders get it right or get it wrong. Same hosts, same honesty, different altitude. ----------------------- Signal & Stakes is a podcast for people who sit inside the decisions that shape how companies grow, compete, and survive. Each episode surfaces a real decision, the signal that was there, what was at stake, and what happened next. Not advice. Consequence. Signal & Stakes is hosted by Raja Walia, CEO of GNW Consulting, and Akande Davis, VP of Operations at GNW Consulting. Signal & Stakes is produced by GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing technology and revenue operations agency helping enterprise organizations make sense of their existing MarTech investments. Through the GNW Orchestration Framework, GNW Consulting helps companies connect board-level priorities to day-to-day execution, identify where AI creates leverage across go-to-market operations, and determine where human judgment should lead. Learn more Subscribe to Signal & Stakes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop monthly. Follow GNW Consulting on LinkedIn for episode releases, show updates, and content on marketing technology and go-to-market strategy. Watch full episodes on YouTube. ----------------------- Signal & Stakes is a podcast for people who sit inside the decisions that shape how companies grow, compete, and survive. Each episode surfaces a real decision, the signal that was there, what was at stake, and what happened next. Not advice. Consequence. Signal & Stakes is hosted by Raja Walia, CEO of GNW Consulting, and Akande Davis, VP of Operations at GNW Consulting. Signal & Stakes is produced by GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing technology and revenue operations agency helping enterprise organizations make sense of their existing MarTech investments. Through the GNW Orchestration Framework, GNW Consulting helps companies connect board-level priorities to day-to-day execution, identify where AI creates leverage across go-to-market operations, and determine where human judgment should lead. Learn more. Subscribe to Signal & Stakes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop monthly. Follow GNW Consulting on LinkedIn for episode releases, show updates, and content on marketing technology and go-to-market strategy. Watch full episodes on YouTube.
