Welcome to Episode 61 of The GEO Show, the daily podcast on Generative Engine Optimization: how brands earn visibility, mentions and citations inside AI answers.

In this news roundup, Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, covers 10 stories, led by a big one for attribution: links inside ChatGPT answers are reaching websites without their referral data.

In this episode:

• 🔗 ChatGPT referral data goes missing
  Links inside ChatGPT answers (not the citation panel) are reported to arrive without referral data, so analytics undercounts ChatGPT traffic. Bug or permanent, it makes attribution even harder.
• 🏷️ Brand names in fan-out queries
  Research from Chen and Koudas across 158,000 AI answers found retrieval explains about 32% of citation variation vs 2.8% for page characteristics, and ChatGPT sometimes adds brand names to its searches.
• 🛒 Shopping buttons favor big retailers
  Wislr found 56% of ChatGPT shopping buttons linked to major retailers and about 5% to brand-owned stores.
• 🤖 Agentic orders up four-fold
  Forter reports agentic orders up more than 4x since August, while Product.ai finds almost 90% of AI shoppers still verify recommendations.
• ⏱️ Supervising AI agents
  G2's 2026 AI Agents Report: 31% of B2B software buyers say employees spend 6+ hours a week supervising agents.
• 🤝 Agent to agent
  Spangle Halo lets a merchant's agent negotiate with shoppers' agents, and DeepLumen charges commission on AI-attributed Shopify orders.

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💬 Question: Has your ChatGPT referral traffic dropped in the last few weeks?

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2ZY0naQ7bCg