Size GEO investment around the opportunity and required work while preserving SEO activities that support discovery and revenue. There is no universal budget-transfer percentage. Distinguish work already benefiting both areas from work that must be added.
Start by inventorying spending, assets and outcomes. Cutting technical maintenance or useful content to fund another report can remove the program’s own foundation.
Shared work versus additional investment
| Area | Relationship to SEO and GEO | Budget approach |
|---|---|---|
| Access, performance and served content | Supports discovery and use of pages | Preserve the foundation and fix gaps |
| Decision-useful content | Can serve search and generative answers | Improve before duplicating production |
| Identity and public evidence | Helps others understand and assess the company | Assign responsibilities across teams |
| Answer capture and classification | Adds presence and SOV measurement | Size the universe, frequency and review |
| Ongoing strategy and execution | Turns diagnosis into interventions | Define deliverables, owners and capacity |
Vercel’s AI crawler research matters to the first row: content must actually be accessible. Do not assume everything visible in a browser is available to every mechanism.
A five-step allocation process
- Protect existing value. Identify pages, journeys and activities responsible for demand and conversion.
- Measure the AI opportunity. Examine hiring questions, alternatives and requirements related to the offer.
- Identify the constraint. Access, identity, content, evidence and commercial fit require different actions and costs.
- Fund an executable cycle. Include software, analysis, asset creation or improvement, approval and remeasurement.
- Set the review criteria. Agree in advance what justifies expansion, adjustment or stopping.
This may call for incremental spending, reallocated effort or both. Know which work changes rather than simply renaming a budget line.
What to present to the board
Show the SOV baseline with its formula, market, language, questions, engines and period. Explain the intentions where the brand is losing ground, proposed interventions and execution cost.
Separate completed deliverables, visibility changes and commercial consequences. Publishing pages is a deliverable. More recommendations within the common universe is a visibility signal. Qualified opportunities require additional analytics and CRM monitoring.
Research, including the founding GEO paper and review arXiv 2607.14035, informs intervention hypotheses. Its percentages are not forecasts of financial returns on your budget.
Avoid paying twice for the same work
If the content team already produces comparisons and cases, GEO may contribute prioritization and better evidence. If SEO owns access, share findings and responsibilities rather than selling the same fix twice.
A SWAS scope combines software and service. Check whether a proposal includes observation only or strategy and execution too. Account for approvals and dependencies on your team. A lower price transferring all execution to the buyer may represent a different scope.
Appropriate contractual commitments
Targets and, in eligible models, an SOV-growth guarantee can be agreed. The contract should define the metric, baseline, assessment period, scope, conditions and consequence if the commitment is unmet.
That differs from promising sales, financial returns or a fixed position in every answer. Compare proposals using matching units and conditions.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a standard percentage to transfer from SEO?
No. Size the opportunity and intervention cost while preserving activities supporting discovery and conversion.
Which expense is genuinely additional?
It depends on existing capabilities. Answer capture, classification and SOV-led strategy and execution are common additions. Some content and access work may already exist.
How should a pilot be justified?
Define the hypothesis, baseline, actions, owners, budget and review date. Explain which decision the next measurement will enable.
Who should execute it?
An owner should coordinate content, technical, brand and business work. Execution can be internal, specialist or shared, with explicit responsibilities.
How murmur works
murmur works through a SWAS model, combining proprietary measurement software with specialists who diagnose, plan and execute GEO to grow Share of Voice (SOV). Eligible contract models may include an SOV-growth guarantee, with the metric, baseline, period, scope and conditions agreed in writing. This does not guarantee an individual answer, a fixed position or sales.
Author: Mateus Gomes, murmur operator. This article explains our approach and discloses our commercial interest.