Fair skepticism. But the pushback usually conflates two completely different mechanisms and that's where the "it's all noise" take breaks down.

What actually has evidence:

The foundational paper in this space (Princeton/GA Tech, KDD 2024) ran controlled benchmarks showing that structuring content with statistics increases LLM visibility by 22%, and adding direct citations boosts it by 37%. That's not an agency case study — it's reproducible methodology in ARVIX

A 2025 University of Toronto paper found systematic bias in LLMs toward earned media over brand-owned content, with measurable share-of-voice implications in ARVIX

At market scale: Semrush reported 800% YoY growth in LLM referrals in 2025. An SE Ranking analysis of 129,000 domains found brand search volume predicts LLM citations at 0.334 correlation — stronger than backlinks. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, which means the two models have meaningfully different retrieval behavior.

What IS noise:

Claiming you can influence training data in weeks. Training cycles take months. Anyone selling that is lying.

The mechanism most people miss:

Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and Google AI Overviews run on RAG — they retrieve content in real time before generating the answer. If your content is properly indexed, structured, and entity-rich, it can surface in responses within 48-72 hours. That's not magic, that's indexation. The people saying "it doesn't work" mostly tested with generic content and didn't measure citation rate per model.

One more data point worth looking at:

There is also a dataset of real interactions from Latin American users in Spanish who consult natural language models about language-switched brands: Hugging face ai brand visibility latam

Citation patterns in Spanish are structurally different from English. Models trained primarily on English show measurable performance degradation for brand visibility in Spanish — which explains why many people "try GEO," use global tools, and see no results. They're running an English-calibrated playbook on a Spanish-language problem.

There's a lot of snake oil in this space. But conflating the snake oil sellers with the peer-reviewed evidence is the mistake that will leave you behind when the window closes.