GEO numbers: market size, ROI and conversion
The GEO market is too young for any single figure to reliably capture its size or ROI. Cautious trends, not invented statistics.
The GEO market is too young and too fast-moving for any single figure to reliably sum up its size or return on investment. What can be said with more confidence are the directional trends observed by several independent players, and the methodological limits that call for caution around the statistics that circulate.
A market still taking shape, hard to measure precisely
There's no stable, agreed-upon definition of what "the GEO market" covers: some analysts include AI visibility tracking software, others add consulting and agency services on top, and others still frame it as a shift of existing advertising and SEO budgets toward new practices. Without a shared definition, market-size figures published by different sources are generally not comparable to one another, even when presented in the same unit.
Why comparing sources can be misleading
Two reports can show very different growth figures for the same period without one being "wrong" and the other "right": they often measure different scopes (global market versus a single country's market, software spend versus total spend including consulting), on different samples (large enterprises only, or all sizes combined), using different projection methods. Before adopting a growth or market-size figure, it's better to check exactly what it includes rather than comparing it as-is to another figure that appears contradictory.
What public trends suggest about AI traffic
Several publishers and traffic analytics vendors report a directional increase in referral traffic coming from AI chatbots and AI Overviews over recent quarters. This observation comes up often enough to be taken seriously as an underlying trend. That said, the precise magnitude of that increase varies significantly depending on the measurement method used, the period observed, and the industry involved, and for most sites this traffic still remains a minority in absolute terms compared with classic search. It's therefore safer to note the direction of the movement than to repeat the exact percentage put forward by any one source.
GEO ROI: why it's still hard to isolate
Measuring a return on investment requires linking an action (publishing a piece of content, earning a mention) to a measurable outcome (a visit, a conversion, a sale). But a large part of GEO's effect happens without a measurable click: a user who gets a satisfying answer directly inside ChatGPT or an AI Overview may remember your brand without ever visiting your site right away — an awareness effect that, if it converts at all, does so much later and through a different channel. Attribution tools capable of cleanly isolating this effect from the rest of marketing activity (classic SEO, PR, word of mouth) are still young and incomplete. A useful parallel here is classic SEO in its early days, where direct ROI was similarly hard to isolate from other marketing channels before multi-touch attribution methods became widespread over time. GEO is going through a comparable phase today: measurement tools exist but remain young, and a portion of the real effect will likely escape direct measurement for a while yet. That's not a reason to ignore the topic while waiting for perfect tools, but it does call for treating the available indicators as directional signals rather than definitive accounting proof.
How to evaluate your own return, without borrowed numbers
Rather than importing a growth percentage or an average ROI calculated on an industry or sample that doesn't necessarily match yours, especially since two businesses in the same industry can see very different results depending on their starting visibility, their content maturity, and how competitive their specific queries already are, it's more reliable to build your own baseline: track how your visibility score evolves per engine and per query over time, watch incoming traffic identifiable as coming from AI referrers where that data is available, and cross-check it against qualitative feedback from prospects ("I found your offer through ChatGPT"). A tool like Vurto, by measuring your before/after progress on specific queries, gives a trend indication specific to your brand, which is a far more actionable indicator than a generic market statistic.
Staying cautious about the statistics in circulation
A great many statistics circulating about GEO trace back to a single survey, often run on a small sample or an unpublished proprietary methodology, then repeated from article to article without the primary source ever being checked. Before repeating a figure, it's worth tracing it back to the original study, checking the sample size and method, and asking whether the context (market, language, industry) matches your own. One extra habit specific to market data: check the publication date of the cited study, since a market as young as GEO's can see its orders of magnitude shift significantly from one year to the next, which makes a two- or three-year-old statistic particularly fragile to reuse as-is. This need for traceability, covered more broadly in the lesson on citations, numbers and evidence, applies especially to market-size and ROI figures, which are among the most frequently distorted as they spread. The lesson on what academic research says extends this same caution to the more rigorous, but equally limited, ground of academic studies. When in doubt, a simple rule holds up well: the more precise and dramatic a GEO statistic sounds, the more scrutiny it deserves before you repeat it in your own content, and a round, headline-friendly number is often the first sign that it has been simplified somewhere along the way.