SEO and GEO are different jobs now.
I used to do them in the same workflow. Rank for keywords, get clicks, count traffic. The end. That worked for fifteen years. Then ChatGPT and Perplexity started taking 12 to 18 percent of all English informational queries. Now half my work is figuring out whether AI engines mention my brand at all.
If you do this work for a living, you have probably noticed something else: most of the tooling has not caught up. The SEO tools you used in 2024 do not track AI Overviews. The "AI visibility" SaaS tools that launched in 2025 are expensive and walled off from your real workflow.
Hermes Agent is the first tool I have used that actually fits the new shape of the job. It runs on your server, it remembers what it learned, and through MCP it can pull data from any API you point it at. Including MentionsAPI, which I will get to.
This guide walks through what SEO and GEO mean in 2026, why Hermes is the right home for this work, and six specific automations you can run on it today.
What SEO and GEO actually mean in 2026
SEO is what it always was. Get your pages to rank in Google's blue links. Drive clicks. Track conversions.
GEO is newer. The acronym stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It means getting your brand cited inside the answers that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot generate. Some people call this AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Same thing.
Users increasingly never click through to a website at all. They ask ChatGPT a question. ChatGPT gives them an answer that mentions three brands. They pick one. The other two never had a chance to make their pitch.
The numbers are stark.
Per Scrunch's 2026 review, both numbers are likely higher by end of year.
The takeaway is not that SEO is dead. It is that "search visibility" used to mean Google blue links. Now it means Google blue links plus AI Overviews plus ChatGPT plus Perplexity plus four other surfaces. Six things to monitor instead of one.
This is where Hermes comes in.
Why Hermes is the right tool for SEO and GEO work
Three things make Hermes specifically useful for this work, in a way no other agent framework currently is.
First, persistent memory. Hermes remembers what it learned yesterday. When you run a daily citation check, the next day's run can reference last week's data without you wiring up a database. For longitudinal tracking (which is the whole job in SEO and GEO) this is rare and valuable.
Second, MCP support. Hermes shipped MCP OAuth 2.1 in its April 8 release. Any API that exposes itself as an MCP server can be plugged in with a few lines of YAML. MentionsAPI does. Major SEO platforms are starting to ship MCP servers. The integration cost has gone from "two-week project" to "fifteen-minute config edit."
Third, multi-channel delivery. Hermes runs on seventeen messaging gateways at once. Your daily AI visibility report can land in Slack, your weekly competitor share-of-voice can land in Notion, and your real-time alerts can ping Discord. One agent, multiple outputs, no extra services.
Six SEO and GEO tasks Hermes can run today
This is the heart of the guide. Six concrete automations you can wire up this week.
The simplest one. Pick five prompts your customers actually type. Pick the four AI engines that matter (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity). Run the prompts daily. Track whether your brand shows up.
In Hermes, this is a scheduled task that calls MentionsAPI's check endpoint with mode: all_live and the brand you care about. The output is a single number per day: percentage of prompt-engine combinations where your brand appeared.
Track that number over thirty days. If it drops, you have a GEO problem. If it climbs, your content strategy is working. Cost: about $15 per month for one brand.
More advanced and more useful. Run the same five prompts, but instead of just tracking your brand, capture every URL that ChatGPT and Perplexity cite as a source. Normalize them (strip tracker params, resolve redirects). Build a list.
Compare two things: which URLs cite your brand, and which URLs do not. The "do not" list is your citation gap. These are pages that AI engines treat as authoritative sources for your topic, and they are not mentioning you.
This is where you go for outreach. Comment on those pages. Pitch a guest post. Get cited. Six weeks later, run the check again. The pages that flipped from "no mention" to "mentions you" are your wins.
Pick five competitors. Track what percentage of AI answers mention them versus you. Hermes runs this daily, stores the percentages in memory, and flags when a competitor's share goes up or yours goes down.
The killer feature is the memory layer. Hermes will tell you "Competitor X has gained 12 share-of-voice points over the last 30 days, primarily on prompts about pricing." That kind of trend detection is exactly what SaaS dashboards charge $200 a month for.
Google AI Overviews now trigger on roughly 48 percent of all tracked queries. When AI Overviews trigger on a query you care about, the source URLs Google uses become disproportionately important. They are the new top three.
Run a daily Hermes task that checks whether AI Overviews trigger on your priority queries. When a new query starts triggering, alert. When the source URLs change, alert. When you enter or drop out of the source list, alert.
This is the closest thing to a real-time SEO alarm system that exists in 2026. And it runs on a $20 VPS.
You probably have keywords you optimize for. You probably do not have a list of the prompts users actually type into ChatGPT and Perplexity to find products like yours.
Use MentionsAPI's discover endpoint, feed it your brand and category, get back ten to twenty real prompts users have submitted. Run those through the AI engines. See where you rank. Optimize. Repeat.
The first time I did this for one of my products, half the prompts in the list were ones I never would have guessed. None of them showed up in Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs. They were too long-tail, too conversational.
For advanced use. You shipped a new piece of content. You want to know whether it improved your AI visibility or did nothing. Run the same query set before the change and after the change. Diff the citation lists. If your new page shows up in the "after" list, you won.
Hermes can run this loop on autopilot. Give it the URL of the new content and the query set. It runs the queries on day zero, day three, and day fourteen (citation indexing is delayed). It reports the diff.
This is content marketing's missing feedback loop. Most teams ship content and never know if it moved the needle. Hermes gives you the answer in two weeks.
Why MentionsAPI is the data source for these tasks
You could build all six of these without MentionsAPI. You would write provider-specific clients for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity, plus scrapers for AI Overviews and Bing Copilot. You would build your own brand-extraction layer. You would handle URL canonicalization across providers. You would maintain rate limits, retries, and fallbacks.
This is the picks-and-shovels argument. There is a gold rush happening in GEO right now. Profound, BrandRadar, Otterly, Siftly, HubSpot AEO, Conductor AgentStack, all built on AI visibility tracking. They are the gold-mining tools. MentionsAPI is the shovel they should be calling. Or that you can call directly when you want to build something they have not.
What this stack costs vs. doing it manually
Real numbers. Six tasks, daily runs, one brand plus three competitors, twenty queries:
- Around 800 to 1200 MentionsAPI calls per month
- Cache hit rate around 60 percent
- Mixed mode pricing, average cost ~$0.10 per call
- Total: about $80 to $120 per month
Compare to SaaS:
- Otterly: $49 per month, single brand, limited queries
- Frase: $45 per month, bundled
- HubSpot AEO: requires Marketing Hub Professional at $890 per month
- Profound: enterprise pricing, "contact us"
- Conductor AgentStack: enterprise pricing
For a single brand and a small query set, Otterly is competitive on price. The moment you want multiple brands, more queries, custom workflows, or any of the six tasks above, Hermes plus MentionsAPI is the cheaper option. And you own the workflows. You can change them. You can hand them to a junior dev and have them iterate.
Patterns that work (and ones that do not)
Three things I have learned running this stack.
Start small. One task, one brand, one week. Get a sense of the noise level before you scale up. Teams that launch all six automations on day one tend to abandon the project two weeks later because the Slack channel is unreadable.
Use Hermes's memory aggressively. The whole point of the stack is longitudinal data. If you are not telling Hermes "compare today's result to yesterday's and only alert on deltas," you are missing the killer feature. Most SaaS tools cannot do this because they do not have a memory layer. Hermes does. Use it.
Send alerts to a dedicated channel. Brand monitoring alerts feel important on day one and become noise on day fifteen. Put them in a dedicated #brand-watch Slack channel. Set notification preferences to only ping you for high-severity events. Otherwise the alerts will get muted, and that is the same as not having them.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SEO and GEO?
Can Hermes Agent actually replace SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush?
Do I need to know how to code to set this up?
Does this work for Bing Copilot and Google AI Overviews?
How long until Hermes Agent matures further?
What if the API is down?
What to do tonight
Pick one task from the list above. Probably the daily AI visibility check, which is the simplest. Wire it up. Let it run for a week. Look at what you actually learn.
If the data is useful, add a second task in week two. If it is noise, change the prompts or the alert thresholds.
The mistake most teams make with GEO and AEO tooling is treating it as a "set it up once and forget" project. It is not. It is closer to growth analytics. The value is in the iteration. Hermes plus MentionsAPI is cheap and flexible enough that iteration is fast.
Start with one task. Add the next one when you are ready.