Most GEO literature is offensively oriented: how to be mentioned more, how to grow your SoV, how to increase your citation rate? But there’s an equally important other side: what if you’re already being mentioned — but incorrectly?
Offensive GEO is about becoming visible. Defensive GEO is about being correctly represented. Both are equally essential.
The reality of AI misrepresentation
AI systems hallucinate. They make mistakes. They reproduce outdated information. They synthesise sources in ways that lose nuance or even pervert it. And they do that about your brand — to users who are about to make a decision.
Concrete forms of AI misrepresentation:
- Factual errors: incorrect interest rates, wrong product features, outdated prices
- Categorical misplacement: your brand is placed in the wrong category
- Negative bias: consistently negative framing based on outdated or one-sided sources
- Competitive disadvantage: a competitor is consistently positioned as better
- Fabrication: answers that attribute products or statements to your brand that don’t exist
Why this is urgent now
A user who receives incorrect information about your product via an AI assistant makes a decision based on that incorrect information — without you seeing it. Rarely a misclick, rarely a complaint — at most a trace in AI referral traffic nobody links to the answer. Just a missed or wrong conversion.