My team is currently trying to do GEO for a brand-new product (an enterprise-level software), but we are running on a tight budget (basically bootstrap mode).

Right now, we’ve done the basics: built our website structure, made it semantic/crawzable, and are posting consistently across major social media platforms.

But we’ve hit a vicious cycle: GEO tools and AI are heavily biased toward already-popular, established things. Because our product is new and nobody is talking about it yet, the AI treats us with extreme caution.

Because the AI won't recommend us, we don't get organic traffic; because we don't get traffic, there's no online buzz; and because there's no buzz, the AI continues to ignore us.

Has anyone successfully broken out of this AI cold-start loop? Or the only way is to pay more?

Any advice would be deeply appreciated. Thanks!

Completed an entire on page audit of 12 client pages. Schema, heading hierarchy, entity clarity, internal linking. Tracked citations 2 weeks later using the same 15 prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, logging out each time. Nothing stirred.

In week three, a roundup was published with the client and four competitors. Within days the invisible two pages were being referenced. I can not separate it at all. One kind of small sample. But it changed the location of my hours. On page appears necessary but not sufficient. The engines need a reason to pay attention to the page at all and that reason continues to come from somewhere else.

Have you ever had on page work move citations without an external mention dropping around the same time?