WarsawJS #14112 August 2026lightning talk

GEO vs SEO:
what actually changed

SEO asks whether you rank. GEO asks what AI says about you.

scope every number in this deck was measured on warsawjs.com and on what ChatGPT says about it  ·  Piotr Zientara  ·  xfaang.com  ·  alfaumi.pro/monitor
the setupwhat we measured

We pointed our monitor at this meetup's website.

22 questions a real person would actually type, put to ChatGPT on a weekly cycle. 66 answers stored in full, with their sources.

# asked in Polish, translated here
> "Where does the frontend and JS developer community meet in Warsaw?"
> "Which meetup in Warsaw is best for the JavaScript community?"
recorded per answer: mentioned? cited? position among brands factually accurate?
source monitor_ai_probes  ·  project=warsawjs  ·  engine=chatgpt  ·  66 probes over 22 prompts  ·  2026-07-16 → 2026-08-07
win 01answer ≠ source
mentioned in the answer
82%
54 of 66 answers
cited as a source
38%
25 of 66 answers

Being the answer and being the source are now two different wins.

SEO counted one event: the click. GEO has two, and they move independently. ChatGPT recommends WarsawJS in four answers out of five, and links warsawjs.com in fewer than two. You can be the recommendation and get none of the traffic.

source monitor_ai_probes.state  ·  bit 0 = named in answer, bit 1 = domain among sources  ·  latest cycle 2026-08-07: 73%
win 02others define you

You are rarely the main source about yourself.

answers citing each domain, out of 69

SEO optimised your page. GEO assembles the answer out of every page that talks about you, and the third parties usually outweigh yours.

Domains cited, out of 69 answers
DomainAnswers citing it
meetup.com43
javascript.org.pl37
warsawjs.com25
crossweb.pl18
meetjs.pl15
source monitor_ai_probes.cited_domains  ·  69 answers (chatgpt + google-ai)  ·  2026-07-16 → 2026-08-07
the buga stale copy poisoned the truth
"WarsawJS, the largest JavaScript meetup in Warsaw, held monthly since 2013. It features talks, lightning talks and networking." [javascript.org.pl] answered in Polish, translated; the year is verbatim
✗ground truth: 2014. warsawjs.com says 2014 in its copy and in its JSON-LD. javascript.org.pl, a second site we own, says 2013.

The model did not hallucinate this. It quoted a page we own.

24 of 69 answers carried a false claim about WarsawJS. 18 of them were this one year.

And the correct page lost on retrieval, not on craft. warsawjs.com, schema-perfect, was cited 25 times. javascript.org.pl, one wrong sentence, was cited 37. On-page perfection is necessary. It stopped being sufficient.

source monitor_ai_probes.accuracy = -1 against a ground-truth snapshot  ·  answer translated from Polish, 2026-08-07 cycle  ·  citation counts out of 69
robots + measurementthe two practical bits

robots.txt is no longer only for Google.
It is also your AI crawler policy.

GET https://warsawjs.com/robots.txt → 404 no policy, no sitemap line
curl -A "GPTBot/1.1" https://warsawjs.com/ → 200 the CDN gate, this one is fine

Search Console remembers. Language models do not.

AI referral sessions
14
of 541  ·  2.6%
organic search clicks
72
same window
answers naming us
54
the leading indicator

Mentions lead. Traffic lags. Probe weekly and store the answers with their sources.

source live check 2026-08-10  ·  ga4 sessionSource + gsc clicks, 2026-07-16 → 2026-08-09  ·  AI hosts: chatgpt.com, claude.ai
checklistand the takeaway
  1. 1One canonical facts page, machine readable.
  2. 2Fix stale copies you own. That is where our false claim came from.
  3. 3Earn mentions where AI reads. For us that is meetup.com, not our homepage.
  4. 4Explicit robots.txt + sitemap, and check your CDN is not blocking.
  5. 5Probe weekly and store answers, with their sources.
SEO was about ranking pages.
GEO is about controlling the sentence machines repeat about you.

You cannot fix what you never measured.

PS. The 2013 fix is a one-line change in javascript.org.pl. The repo is ours. Pull requests welcome.
built with alfaumi.pro/monitor  ·  Piotr Zientara  ·  xfaang.com  ·  slides: geo.isy.sh
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speaker notes