How Eleven folded GEO into SEO: six decisions and the part nobody can measure yet

Who should read this: agency owners deciding whether GEO is a separate product or part of the organic offering, and in-house teams working out what they can honestly promise their board about AI visibility.

TL;DR

Eleven is a digital acquisition agency working with mid-sized and large companies across Latin America. When AI Overviews rolled out in 2025 and organic traffic dropped, the agency spent months trying to reverse something that could not be reversed. What came out of that period is a service design, not a new product line: GEO goes inside SEO, always, absorbed in the price, run by the same organic specialists, monitored week after week in LLM Pulse, and reported through five imperfect signals instead of one broken attribution chain. Today 100% of Eleven's consulting proposals include GEO.

About Eleven

Eleven is based in Buenos Aires and works with clients across Latin America, Europe and the United States. The team covers SEO, paid media, ASO, link building and AI visibility for companies such as Mercado Libre, Despegar, Ualá, Coppel and Telecom. Its founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Andrés Kloster, hosted La Máquina del SEO, organizes SEOcamp in Buenos Aires, and teaches the executive program "Traffic acquisition in the AI era" at UCEMA.

The gap that started everything

Something strange shows up in Eleven's monthly client reviews. Clients spend between 30% and 40% of the meeting talking about how they appear in AI. In the traffic reports of those same clients, visits from AI platforms are always under 2% of the total.

Under 2% of the traffic. Between 30% and 40% of the conversation.

There are two ways to handle that gap. You can ride it: promise visibility in ChatGPT, charge the retainer, hope the hype lasts. Or you can do the harder thing: tell the client which part of the effect will show up in their dashboards (a small part), which part never will (most of it), and why the work is worth doing anyway. Eleven picked the second one.

First they spent months fighting the tide

The trigger was the AI Overviews rollout in March and April 2025. Organic traffic fell across the board, informational content worst of all, and every client wrote in at once.

The agency's first reaction was the wrong one, and it was probably half the industry's reaction too. Weeks of audits, hypotheses and tests, treating a global change as if it were a problem with each individual site. There was nothing to reverse. Google was keeping a large share of the traffic in the middle. People kept asking the same questions, but the answer increasingly resolved without a click: when an AI Overview appears, 83% of searches end without a visit to any site (SparkToro and Datos, 2026).

The one kind thing about that period is that the drop hit a floor. By the second and third quarter of 2025 traffic settled at a new, lower level. The universe had shrunk, but at least it had stopped shrinking.

Two other things were happening in parallel, and the first one started before the shock. Consultants had begun to notice traffic arriving from ChatGPT. Small volumes, badly labelled. GA4 filed much of it as direct, and there were no decent tools for looking at what the models were answering.

"The first time I saw traffic from ChatGPT was in late 2024, early 2025, in fintech. My first thought was that a new channel was opening, that this was the tip of the iceberg. It was not exciting: very few visits. But when I looked closer I realized Analytics was not measuring it accurately, and that is where the need for more specific tools came from."

Martín Noziglia, Senior SEO Manager, Eleven

The second thing: clients started asking the same question, all in the same words. How do I show up in ChatGPT? The first time was a fintech, in the middle of a monthly SEO report, an off-hand question that interrupted the usual presentation. A few months later, that question was the report.

The six decisions

1. GEO always goes inside SEO

Eleven sells GEO inside organic consulting, never as a separate service. 100% of its consulting proposals include it.

The reason is technical before it is commercial: the overlap in tactics between SEO and GEO is 80% or more. A crawlable site, clear content, a healthy architecture, off-page authority. When a client asks for SEO, they get GEO inside it. When a client asks for GEO, they get SEO inside it. GEO exists as a discipline, with its own metrics and its own levers. As a service, splitting it out invents a border the actual work does not have.

Clients do get explicit GEO deliverables: a specific audit (where they stand, where their competitors stand, which prompts hold opportunity, how their customers talk to the models, how much traffic arrives) and permanent monitoring in LLM Pulse, the same way the agency handles ASO or local SEO.

It does not weigh the same everywhere. In B2B, where research runs long before a purchase, and in fintech, GEO changes the client's life. In ecommerce the operation runs through other levers. Part of the consulting job is deciding how much push each surface deserves for each business.

2. It is absorbed in the price

The question arrived fast, from real clients: can we take the GEO part out to lower the fee? The answer has always been no. You cannot take GEO out of SEO, the same way you cannot take mobile SEO out of SEO.

The client buys customers, sales and leads. The channel label in Google Analytics is not the point. Pricing follows that logic: GEO is absorbed inside organic consulting, with no line item to add or cut. And if demand migrates to another surface tomorrow, the agency will go there too without renegotiating the contract, because the job is to make sure people find you.

3. Organic specialists before a "Head of GEO"

Against the fashion in org charts, Eleven did not hire GEO specialists. Same team, same roles: organic specialists who work every surface.

There was a retraining effort: internal training, new tools, new deliverables. Today's dashboards look nothing like the 2024 ones. And some things the team already knew moved up the list. The clearest example is schema. For years it was a nice to have that got done if a sprint had room. Today it is mandatory for the surfaces that lean on Google's index (AI Overviews, AI Mode) and for anything product related. Those surfaces still stand on the same index, and the index does read the markup.

The underlying bet: the knowledge that lasts is knowledge of the mechanism, a search engine that indexes and ranks. An organic specialist can be retrained. A platform specialist ages with the platform.

4. Reddit: official account yes, guerrilla no

This is where Eleven parts ways with a lot of GEO advice, ours included. Community (Reddit, forums, YouTube) is one of the big off-page lines in GEO and almost nobody works it. Eleven decided to stay part of that "almost nobody" in the guerrilla version: no simulated users, no seeded threads, no accounts built to recommend clients.

The first reason is that it does not scale. The cost per planted mention is high and the output is handmade. The second reason carries more weight for them: the shelf life of the tactic. It rhymes with the years when half the industry was obsessed with manipulating CTR in the SERPs. It worked, until it stopped working, and the agencies that built a service on top of it were left selling something with an expiry date. Reddit also has its own immune system: you get banned, karma buries you, and other users throw you out before a moderator arrives.

What does work, and what the agency does, is official presence: a brand account that says it is the brand, announces, answers and takes part in the open. It is slower and less exciting than astroturfing. It will still be alive when the guerrilla version dies.

5. What they promise to measure: five signals

The number one objection in every sale is always the same: how do we measure this? The answer is uncomfortable. Most of the effect of GEO is branding, and it will not show up in a conversion dashboard. GEO looks more like putting a billboard on the highway than like performance marketing, even though the working method is the one from SEO.

So Eleven stopped promising the full chain (click, session, conversion, attribution), because that chain is broken for this channel. What the agency promises instead is to triangulate five signals:

1. Labelled AI traffic. Low volume, but people who arrive already convinced, converting well above the site average.
2. Share of voice in the models, measured on a fixed set of 20 to 50 prompts taken from the client's real journey, run on a cadence.
3. Brand search and direct traffic, against a baseline. The trail the highway billboard leaves behind.
4. Off-page mentions. Where and how the sources the models cite talk about the brand.
5. Self-reported attribution. The "how did you hear about us?" field on every form, which captures the "I saw you in ChatGPT" that no tracking records.

It is the logic the team already uses day to day. As Martín Noziglia puts it: "A user who discovers you in AI searches for your brand afterwards. They may not click straight away, but you build very strong awareness that often turns into a click later on."

No single signal is enough on its own. Together they tell a consistent story. If marketing in 2019 was chasing perfect attribution, in 2026 it is triangulating imperfect signals.

6. Link building evolved

Eleven has historically been strong in link building, so this decision touched the business: what do you do with that muscle when the game changes? The answer was to evolve the mix the way the discipline evolved. In the GEO mix, brand links (the ones that consolidate the entity instead of pushing a URL with exact anchor text) weigh more, and above all so does presence in the third-party content the models cite: the "top 10" lists, the "best X on the market" roundups, the comparisons on sites that already have earned citability.

It is the PR and mentions line, executed with link building infrastructure: prospecting, relationships, editorial production. If 96% of citations live on third-party websites, as LLM Pulse data shows, the job is to be on the guest list.

Where LLM Pulse fits

LLM Pulse is the monitoring layer under all six decisions. Every client is a project inside the agency's account, and every week the same questions get answered with the same numbers:

• The fixed prompt set. 20 to 50 prompts per client, taken from the real buying journey rather than from keyword volume, tracked across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. Because the set is fixed and the cadence is weekly, movement means something.
• Share of voice and Brand Visibility against the competitive set, read on non-brand prompts, which are the ones where a brand can actually win or lose ground.
• Citations and sources. Which third-party pages the models quote for those prompts. That list is the target list handed to the PR and link building team, so decision 6 runs off data instead of instinct.
• AI traffic. The labelled slice of signal 1, separated out from the direct bucket where analytics tends to file it.
• A dashboard the client can open, which replaced a slide deck that went stale the moment it was exported.

The agency's own reporting rhythm sits on top: the weekly numbers feed the monthly review, and the review is where the 30% to 40% of AI conversation finally has something concrete to point at.

The channel that brings Eleven its own clients

Eleven is its own best example. A growing share of the leads that reach the agency answer the same thing when asked where they found it: through ChatGPT. The agency knows because it eats its own cooking. The self-reported attribution field is on Eleven's own forms.

A few weeks ago Andrés Kloster gave a talk in Pichilemu, a surf town on the Chilean coast. Eleven has no clients in the area and he had no presence in that region. Zero. When he asked how they had found him, the answer was that they searched for "AI specialist" in ChatGPT.

No analytics system recorded that. No click, no session, no attributable conversion. And still, the organizers reached him with the decision already made.

Nobody will ever attribute that trip to Chile to a keyword, a ranking or a campaign. But the mechanism behind it is the same one the agency runs for its clients: be in the answer when somebody asks. If the channel did not work, Eleven would be the first to know. Its own pipeline would say so.

The G came back to SEO

In March 2025, weeks before the shock, Kloster closed a talk at SEOcamp in Buenos Aires with an idea: take the G out of SEO. The G for Google. The argument was that you can do SEO anywhere there is a search engine that indexes objects in a category and ranks them by parameters: Google, the app stores, YouTube, TikTok, the Mercado Libre search box. The matrix was already drawn. AI only added a row.

The industry took the advice in its own way. It pulled the G out of the middle and put it in front: GEO. Except the G is a different one now. It used to be Google, now it is Generative. That change sums up the decade: the discipline stopped being about one company and became about a mechanism.

The mechanism is the same as always. Demand survived AI Overviews and it survived ChatGPT. The path used to be Google and then your site. Today it is sometimes Google and staying in Google, or a model and staying in the model. But at the end of the journey somebody buys from you, or buys from somebody else, exactly like before. The job is to make sure it is you.

Want to run the same play?

If you are a brand in Latin America looking for an agency that treats AI visibility as part of organic acquisition rather than a separate line item, Eleven is a good place to start.

And if you are an agency building this kind of offering, talk to us about the LLM Pulse agency program, or start a free trial and put your own fixed prompt set under weekly tracking.

This case study is adapted from the article Andrés Kloster wrote for Seopatía.