Paid media went from 0 to 20% of pipeline in six months, CPL dropped 30% from June to August while spend rose about 60%, and they killed a $5K/month agency reporting line. The agent lives in Slack, writes a Monday PDF per platform, and cannot edit Google or LinkedIn until a named reviewer hits the Block Kit card; code then applies the change and checks the platform.
Why it matters: Steal the approval path, not the stack: writes stay in code, judgment stays in Slack, and the wiki holds which source owns spend versus pipeline.
Wayfair's paid-media lead confirmed a limited Sponsored Agent pilot: the CTA is "Chat with us," and the click opens a branded chat inside ChatGPT with guardrails on product accuracy and human handoff. Accuracast compared it to Meta-to-WhatsApp; Zeno's paid-media SVP said ChatGPT ROI still hasn't been there, so this is OpenAI's bid to keep the shopper in-platform through Q4.
Why it matters: Treat this as a conversion-path test, not a new channel. Ask what lead or cart event the agent can fire, and who owns the chat transcript.
Dept found 61% of U.S. shoppers used an AI assistant for purchase research in the last 90 days, and CMOs in insurance, cars, and shoes are not waiting on GEO to save them. State Farm's head of marketing said ad spend has been static for years and AI-search leakage is now the argument for more upper-funnel; Mediaplus is putting share-of-model next to brand metrics to unlock the purse.
Why it matters: Pair the GEO work with a budget narrative: share-of-model plus a brand flight beats a standalone citation dashboard.
A consultant logged 775 citation events across two brands: listicles drove 72.4% of mentions, half the sources died within 30 days, and a cold-start SaaS shop went from zero to 298 appearances in 30 days after placing on sites the models were already citing (Indie Hackers mentions jumped 232%). One Perplexity referral, the lowest-volume platform, became a paying customer.
Why it matters: Build the outreach list from observed citations, not domain rating, and put a dedicated page on every high-value commercial query instead of hoping semantics covers it.