Gaetano DiNardi
Offsite AEO Is Broken
Key Takeaways
Paid Mentions: Gaetano argues that GEO outreach services for brand mentions are link building 2.0. Brands pay publishers for each mention, often on sites already full of paid links, and those fees are billed on top of the agency retainer.
Disappearing Placements: Most pages carrying paid placements are gone a year later. Gaetano sees the same pattern with links bought through link building agencies.
Programmatic SEO: Programmatic SEO only works when you have a dataset that fits it, like long-tail ETL connectors the bigger tools don’t offer. Without that, thousands of pages are just keyword variations, and they get penalized.
Self-Promotional Listicles: If your brand isn’t strongly tied to a category, AI can cite your self-promotional listicle and recommend your competitors instead. The page can still rank without changing who gets recommended.
Summary
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, joins growth advisor and experienced SEO leader Gaetano DiNardi to examine what is real in AI search and what is being amplified by incentives, executive pressure, and short-term performance.
The AEO tool itself is inconsequential. The work you’re doing is everything.
Gaetano DiNardi, Growth Advisor
The conversation begins with AI-search research and the claim that third-party content drives most brand recommendations. Gaetano explains how that framing can push marketers away from their own landing pages, then shares what he found while auditing GEO outreach vendors selling paid brand mentions.
Guest
Gaetano Nino DiNardi is principal consultant at Marketing Advice, advising B2B SaaS companies like Gong, Semrush, and Demandbase on AI SEO and inbound growth. He previously led marketing at Nextiva, Pipedrive, Aura, and Sales Hacker.
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