GEO vs SEO: How CMOs Should Split Their Budget in 2026
Real cost data on GEO vs SEO budgets for 2026. Four allocation models, actual agency and tool pricing, and why 80% of teams still cannot prove GEO ROI.
Christian Lehman on what a CMO does when AI builds the shortlist
Chief Growth Officer, AuthorityTech
I write from the operator seat: what a CMO can actually do when buyers ask an engine to name a vendor, and the brand is either on that shortlist or gone. The writing works through the decisions that follow: what to spend and how to measure it, whom to staff, which publications to pursue, and what to hand sales.
Start here
How to Measure Whether Your AI PR Campaign Actually Worked
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How to Attribute Revenue to AI Search Engines in Your B2B Pipeline
AI search converts B2B leads at 5x the rate of Google organic, but 30-50% of those sessions are invisible in analytics.
AI Visibility: When to Buy Software vs. Hire an Agency
GEO budgets grew 340% year-over-year but most CMOs are buying the wrong thing. Here is the decision framework for software vs. agency vs. hybrid — with real cost benchmarks.
Topics
Budget and measurement
What a CMO should fund when AI builds the shortlist, and how to measure whether it worked: budget splits, attribution, and the numbers to report.
Which publications to pursue
Which publications AI engines cite for your buyers, category by category, and how to turn that evidence into a pitch list worth the budget.
What to hand sales
What marketing hands sales when buyers arrive with an AI-built shortlist: proof packs, claim checks, and the sentences a rep must not repeat.
Writing
All →Fierce Healthcare Is 2nd on News and 57th on Buying
A healthcare services pitch list read from seven published segments, and the gap between outlets that win industry news and outlets buyers are shown.
The Training Software Site AI Cites More Than Forbes
A pitch list for learning and training software, built from all six published buyer shapes, and the source-class label that hides the strongest target from anyone who filters on it.
Citation Growth Does Not Mean Sales Gets Named
Machine Relations Index data on 14,447 AI citations show why naming rate, not citation count, is what a sales team can act on.
Healthcare Software's Top Cited Source Isn't Press
In the Machine Relations Index's Healthcare Services segment, the top-citing 'editorial publication' domain is an EHR vendor's own site. Here's the pitch list the data actually supports.
Two Publications With the Same AI Citation Rate Are Not the Same Buy
Of the 99 publications the Machine Relations Index scores, the median one is in the cited set on 24 of 130 observed days.
About
The growth seat
I lead growth, revenue, client acquisition, and go-to-market execution at AuthorityTech, The World's First Machine Relations Agency. Jaxon Parrott, who coined Machine Relations, brought me on as chief of growth, and I learned the discipline under him until I ran its operating and growth side, which makes me one of its first practitioners.
Before AuthorityTech
Before this I rose from an entry-level seat to VP at AT&T, generating over $50M in revenue. That path is why this site talks about pipeline and shortlists instead of abstract thought leadership. Use /about, /contact, and /privacy when you need the person-level pages. AuthorityTech commercial work lives on authoritytech.io. Category definitions live on machinerelations.ai.