Transcript:

Hey, I’m Chris Long with Nectiv, and for today’s GEO tip, I want to talk about how AI search is blurring the lines between organic and paid results more than it ever has before — especially with affiliate sites. Affiliate sites have a lot of power when it comes to AI search.

So, let’s take a look at “best CRM software.” I search this in Google’s AI mode, and I can pretty quickly see that there are a few affiliate sites appearing here. We have Business.com. Scroll down — PCMag. These are both affiliate sites where, if I go to one of them, you can see that different technologies are included. And if you click one of these links, that site would earn a commission in exchange for referring the traffic.

These are, in essence, paid placements — but this is working for a lot of these sites because it results in brand mentions.

HoneyBook is a good example. It’s not necessarily the first thing I think of when I think of a CRM, but they’re not included in the first three — they are included in the first seven. And probably, their affiliate marketing initiative has helped them get that brand mention.

Let’s go to another example. I searched “best transcription software.” In this search, I clicked on a brand called Sonix, and we can see that Google is scraping this from some of the different responses it’s finding across the web. Here, it’s pulling in a YouTube video that references Sonix.

So, I go to this YouTube video, and what you can see is — this independent creator has a YouTube channel where he recommends different technologies. And of course, once again, there’s a referral partnership. If you click the link in the video description, it’s a referral link where the creator gets a commission.

Nothing wrong with that — but once again, a paid initiative is impacting what’s supposed to be an organic result.

In our AI tracker, we’re seeing evidence of this too. We track a lot of different queries related to software. And we can see that while some of these sources may be more organically given — community-driven like Reddit, or mixed like YouTube — there are others like Capterra (which can be paid), PCMag (which is paid), and TechRadar (often an affiliate site). These different affiliate sites have a lot of power when it comes to AI search.

They are blurring the lines between paid and organic.

This means, as marketers, we need to be aware of this and be working with affiliate teams — or advising our sites or clients on how to work with affiliates — because they are influencing the actual results that LLMs are outputting.