There’s a discussion running through SEO circles, burning like a wildfire over a desert of pine needles started by someone trying to light their farts on fire.
I’m not even talking about whether “GEO” is different from traditional “SEO” (a reverse Interstellar topic where every hour spent discussing it feels like 7 years have passed)– no I’m talking about whether or not we should call “SEO for LLMs” “GEO.”
What Does GEO Stand For?
Generative Engine Optimization
And just what the hell, exactly, is a generative engine?
That’s the main problem with “GEO”– no one is walking around this dying planet calling LLMs “generative engines.”
If you head over to Google and search (an increasingly rare thing it looks like) for “generative engine” or “what in the blue fuck is a generative engine,” there are NO ANSWERS without the addition of “optimization” stapled on.
Generative Engine, as a complete and whole concept, doesn’t exist.
It does exist, I guess, as a contrived academic concept, but not as a common phrase people in any adjacent industry use.
So why are people who discuss such things dying on the GEO hill?
The Arms Race to Name a Thing
Brian Dean (of Backlinko) got a lot of mileage from coining the phrase “Skyscraper” as a link building technique.
Everyone would love to have the Cool New Thing attributed to them in some way, turning that notoriety into consulting dollars.
Or people like me that tried to get as close to the exact-match dot com of something as possible.
GEO, a 3-letter .com first registered in 1997 that already means something else?
Fuggedaboutit
So aside from the possibility of owning a 7-figure domain name that defines a new industry, and aside from trying to grab the glory and prestige of being the person that named a lucrative new industry, why did GEO win out over all the other losers:
- AIO
- LLMO
- LLMSEO
- AEO
- AISEO
- etc.
???
How Did We Get To This Stupid Place
Look, I think it’s so dumb to call this new “industry” (is it one????) GEO, and I thought I was the biggest hater until I read Dejan’s tweet:
That guy *really* hates GEO.
The turning point of when GEO went from a thing some randos wrote about in a paper and SEOs like me got super grumpy about probably happened this May, when A16Z published an article called How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Rules of Search.
Is it a GOOD article?
Well. No.
Here are a few reasons why:
It makes claims that aren’t true (though this might have been true at the time, this is a fast-shifting situation which is PART OF THE CRITICISM HERE)
Google’s distribution chokehold is in question. The foundation of the $80 billion+ SEO market just cracked.
- it is not in question, ChatGPT is literally using Google’s index, citation 1 | citation 2
- it didn’t crack, GEO is mostly just SEO (via Ahrefs)
So maybe the article was a little premature in talking about how GEO is a separate entity from SEO?
Another thing from that article:
Today, with LLMs like GPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude acting as the interface for how people find information, visibility means showing up directly in the answer itself, rather than ranking high on the results page.
Okay cool, and how does one show up in the answer itself?
Oh, it’s using Google’s index of ranking things to decide what shows up in the answer?
Are LLMs referencing any absolutely wet-pants websites with shit content and aren’t ranking well in Google? Consensus seems to be “no.”
We’re seeing the emergence of a new kind of brand strategy: one that accounts not just for perception in the public, but perception in the model. How you’re encoded into the AI layer is the new competitive advantage.
And promptly features this tweet:
Wow that’s so cool and it’s kinda unbelievable that it has no association with traditional SEO at all…
touches earpiece: wait, I’m being told…
Yeah, Vercel is absolutely crushing with regular ole SEO, not just some new, magical AI mentioning special sauce. They’re winning with AI the same reason they’re winning with SEO: they have a popular product that a lot of people are using and searching for and talking about.
Anyway, my point, several hours ago now, was: this article is a fucking mess but it did a whole lot to really push “GEO” as the name of a concept into the main stream of businesses… the business stream.
Life is crazy sometimes…
And just recently, NYMag, a well-respected publication with two feet firmly grounded in important, nuanced stories:
Get it? Two feet firmly grounded? It’s a pun that I made…
They just published an article titled SEO is Dead. Say Hello to GEO.
Is it a GOOD ARTICLE?
I mean, it’s fine…
It makes some decent points.
But it’s a bit sensational and gleeful about calling a time of death for SEO, as if SEO is completely divorced from what it takes to do well with LLMs (and as I said… there’s a whole lotta overlap–will it always be this way? Will this article look stupid and outdated in a year or… more? or LESS??? Probably, but this is an article of the times).
It calls SEO a $75B industry, it’s gonna take awhile for so valuable an industry to die and become fossilized and turn into the oil that another lucrative industry uses as its foundation like ACTUAL oil.
But speaking of dinosaurs (actually fun fact: it was a bunch of trees that became oil, not dinosaurs), GEO is hitting the mainstream.
It’s in your A16Zs and it’s in your New York Magazines and those stories are gonna inspire even MORE stories, so it’s time to suck it up, buttercup.
Why You Should Embrace GEO As The One True Acronym
I have to admit–as much as I hate to–that GEO is the nom de victoire in the discussion around what to call SEO for LLMs.
Why?
It’s because your BOSS or the CEO of your next big client has read these stupid articles.
And has seen their traffic drop like a slow motion cookie into milk on a chips ahoy commercial.
They are scared, and they need something that’s gonna stem the loss, and here’s A fricken 16 Z talking about GEO and NY Mag talkin bout SEO is dead get GEO or become irrelephant. 🐘
This was encapsulated very smartly by Bryan Casey, VP of Inbound at IBM in a thread:
Go read the whole thread, but it basically says what I said above, but in a smarter and Enterprise-y way.
So if you’re an SEO agency, tell your clients yep you can do GEO, and then just rank the shit outta them like usual.
If you’re a CEO looking for help, yep, you need GEO, that’s what people are calling it these days, but SEO isn’t dead, it’s just wearing a GEO costume don’t fire your SEO team for the love of God, just have them look into ranking on LLMs.
Hope this was a helpful discussion, but I get it, it’s bullshit all the way down.
If you’d rather die than read anything more about this, just remember, our universe might exist inside the black hole of another universe, so SEO vs. GEO doesn’t really matter when you step back and think about it…