Good old ‘search engine optimization’ which focused on making you visible online and rank in that sweet first page is well-known. SEO is the ABCs of digital marketing, and every business, brand or company in search of public attention is investing heavily into quality content, readable websites and searchability. Enter ‘generative engine optimization’ or GEO, arguably SEO 2.0. My Linkedin feed is full of GEO tools that promise to bring today's no-name to the very top of ChatGPT responses. GEO practice optimizes content ‘so it is selected, summarized, and surfaced directly inside AI-generated answers’, as Perplexity puts it. I would put it in bolder terms still: when SEO gets you clicks, GEO gets you visibility. The question I had in mind when I started my interviews for this article was: is GEO revolutionary? Do we just leave SEO behind — or at least seriously take our attention away from it? is GEO revolutionary POV 1: SEO isn’t dead. It’s the new baseline Most forward-thinking SEO managers, copywriters and marketers are intrigued by AI and are using it actively across their daily tasks. Their take on GEO is: AI-search is the new normal but SEO remains a non-negotiable foundation for healthy and converting AI visibility. Blue Sitten from the Yoder Family brands oversees and manages all 9 of the company’s websites and Google My Business profiles in North America. When we talked, Blue explained that old SEO tactics ‘don’t work anymore’. She says that brands now need to look for new ‘formulas’ that make content LLM-friendly, while keeping ongoing SEO work in place. Tech hygiene, structure and clarity remain essential to fast sites and fruitful effort in online findability. Blue Sitten ‘LLM-friendliness’ was also spotted by Destiny Flaherty, the head of SEO at Princess Polly, a popular e-com women apparel brand. Her insight was: ‘Where previously technical foundations might have been or they might have been not prioritized, now it's a conversation to revisit’. Destiny sees ‘a 90% overlap’ between SEO and GEO, highlighting the importance of traditional technical optimization for search engines. Destiny Flaherty I think Katie Beirne beautifully summarizes these two ideas in her interview. Katie is a cybersecurity-focused content marketer who oversees broader marketing strategies as fractional CMO for clients. She shares the vision that GEO is layered on top of existing SEO practices. From experience, her approach to GEO today is like early approaches to SEO, before tools like SEMRush were a thing: query as the target persona, see what ranks, study top results and adapt those patterns. Katie Beirne POV 2: GEO as SEO’s high-intent, low-volume cousin But what is with GEO that everyone’s so obsessed about it? Why do so many startups spring up offering to boost brands’ AI visibility, if, essentially, you do well on AI if you’ve been careful with your SEO? Aurelie GiardJacquet, the founder of Business Crush SAS and an AI consultant, shares an intriguing statistic. She says overall website traffic is dropping across the board, but that traffic coming from LLMs converts far better than traffic from Google because people referred by AI typically have much stronger purchase intent (for example, someone asking 'what is the best plumber near me?' is highly likely to request a quote or appointment). Aurelie GiardJacque Aurelie also notes that B2B buyers and the younger generation of buyers are already used to conversational, assistant-style tools, so instead of 'googling and clicking blue links,' they go straight to LLMs to get synthesized, holistic answers. Brands now need to be recommended inside AI answers — where these buyers actually start and decide. Speaking of presence, companies “are expected to be everywhere in the digital ecosystem”, Katie Beirne notes. LLMs summarize what’s already out there (reviews, socials, media, owned content), so brand sentiment and narrative in those sources directly shape AI answers. She advises brands to deliberately get their content 'seen in AI search,' which in practice means feeding the models high‑quality, on‑brand content and reviews that AI can reflect back in summaries. POV 3: Machine-friendly content with people in mind I’ve honestly been meaning to write an article on the Dead Internet theory — and I will! — but the next point kind of resonates with this sentiment. Aren’t we just going to run into an internet of GenAI soulless content? It is discoverable, findable, crushable by every crawler — yet it is humanly empty, if you will. Dead Internet One point that really resonated with me was that AI can be — and should be — used as a drafting assistant. Gary Kane is an omnichannel sales leader at JoyJolt. I loved his saying on AI in content creation actually: he uses ChatGPT as a starting point for formal emails so he doesn’t 'stress for 7 minutes' drafting from scratch, instead quickly generating a version he can edit in 2 minutes. I feel like this approach is a helpful kick-starter for writers, especially SEO- and other content managers. Gary Kane Melissa Rosen, the content marketing manager at Motion, shares this view of AI in her professional work. To Melissa, AI is a drafting companion and a smart editing assistant rather than a full scale tool for autonomous content writing. She uses Claude and Athena for drafting and SEO research but still handpicks keywords, rewrites drafts and layers in audience nuance from her own conversations. Melissa Rosen From my own experience, one thing AI lacks is distinctly human and recognizably personal language. I mean — you could probably train it, like I trained a Space in Perplexity (yes, I’m a fan of this tool, so what?), but it won’t write or sound like you for 100%. The SMB brand strategist Stacy Eleczko shared that she keeps AI and its miraculous analytic skills for research and revision rather than pure writing. Stacy explains that AI cannot read emotional nuance or invent a differentiated positioning. While it can structure, restructure and say the same thing in so many different ways, AI just is not… human. In fact, she doubles down on using real customer language and actual questions in content so her client brands show up and feel relevant in both traditional SEO and LLM search. Stacy Eleczko POV 4: Off-site brand knowledge matters in GEO In her webinar ‘The AI Search Action Checklist’, Aleyda Solis from AirOps states that in AI search, authority signals are 'shifting from backlinks to mentions, citations and entity-based trust’. Sounds familiar yet? While LLMs consider a brand credible if it shows up across directories, listings and socials, traditional search algorithms lean on backlinks as a proxy for authority. In other words, where SEO treated links as votes, GEO treats mentions as evidence that a brand is real, trusted and relevant across the wider web. I saw this logic play out in Tiffany Da Silva’s work. Tiffany is a digital marketing and AI marketing consultant and her work still centers on link development for Google, but her AI search audits explicitly look at how often brands are cited across the sources that target LLMs pull from. Likewise, Destiny Flaherty builds this into her Princess Polly roadmap, treating digital PR and brand mentions as a primary lever for AI visibility and using ProFound to quantify how often the brand appears across high‑intent prompts compared to competitors. (Oh, I guess I am doing quite a favor to the tools I’m mentioning in this piece.) Tiffany Da Silva POV 5: Measuring the immeasurable It was Tiffany actually, who articulated my own concern so well. Again, going back to these GEO and AI-visibility solutions popping up (and grabbing millions at pitches!), what do they measure? Or else — how? The feeling from popular AI solutions is ‘black box’. Tiffany shared her frustration here: while she uses Aleyda Solis’s Orianti to track AI visibility and compares that data with Google Analytics 4 explorer views to isolate AI traffic and conversions, she says it is still a provisional setup and a standardized GEO measurement framework is ‘1-2 years away’. I was lucky to have talked to Russel Benoit, senior partnerships manager at AVTECH, who gave an insight as a professional from outside SEO. He treats ChatGPT as a meaningful traffic source and goes out to manually test queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to track where and how one of AVTECH’s products shows up. But there is no specific AI-related KPI in the company’s roadmap yet — he goes even further, saying he and his team have ‘no visibility into AI search performance across engines’ yet. Russel Benoit, You might think it comes down to the size of the company. Well, here’s a similar insight from Claudia Vanselow from Henkel. Claudia is the senior global e-commerce manager, and she shared that her team has ‘no direct AI traffic measurement capabilities’. This highlights that even large FMCGs, despite their tech-savviness and reliance on truly powerful data systems, are — at the moment — stuck with third-party benchmarks rather than an owned GEO dashboard. Claudia Vanselow POV 6: How do you unite SEO and GEO to win in both? Among popular articles and research on SEO vs. GEO, one of my favorite finds is LLM Pulse’s ‘GEO is the new SEO: a practical playbook for 2025’. The playbook explains that the emphasis now is on making content and websites easier for LLMs to sprawl, parse and quote. The workflow it suggests is to treat your existing SEO engine as the base, then systematically make those same pages 'answer‑ready' for generative engines. You can work on the availability of your pages by unblocking AI bots. You can re-purpose your existing content and restructure pages and blogs into more ordered pieces with explicit FAQ sections and listicles. Another approach is building presence wherever AI models 'source truth' (high‑signal forums and authoritative media — think G2 for SaaS reviews) and then treating GEO as a measurable discipline rather than a guessing game. In practice, this turns SEO and GEO into one pipeline: SEO makes you discoverable on the open web, and GEO instrumentation tells you whether that same content is actually showing up on AI answers. Key question: How does GEO vs. SEO translate into business operations? Well, the answer is two-fold. I spoke with a DTC leader who runs an 8-figure ecommerce portfolio. Justin Perez from 2.7 August Apparel described this translation into operations as a non-stop balancing act. On the one hand, there is performance marketing, which delivers immediate ROI. On the other hand, organic and AI‑driven discoverability needs patient ongoing investment. In his words, ‘SEO is treated as a core acquisition channel, not a side initiative, with his team tracking organic and assisted revenue, non‑branded vs. branded keyword growth, ranking movement for high‑intent queries, CTR and impressions in Search Console, indexation health and technical performance metrics. And the emerging GEO layer doesn’t replace this foundation. Instead, it adds a new leadership challenge: how much time and budget to shift from chasing the next conversion spike to structuring data, content and brand authority so the company actually shows up in AI‑generated answers? Justin Perez People I have talked to (some are not mentioned here) all seem to point to the same uncomfortable truth for businesses. GEO is not a shiny add‑on, it is the new visibility layer sitting on top of SEO, and it is already moving real money. McKinsey’s 2025 'New front door to the internet' report warns that brands may lose up to 50% of their traditional search traffic as more decisions happen inside AI answers rather than on websites (look at Shopping with ChatGPT with in-chat checkouts). Interestingly, studies and agency data show that this AI‑driven traffic, while smaller, converts far better. Growth Marshal’s 2026 article shares an intriguing statistic: AI search traffic is 4.4 times more valuable than organic. Put bluntly: GEO is where a growing slice of high‑intent demand is being captured and routed. Businesses that are invisible at that layer will simply never be considered on spot at a given interaction with AI. Dropping SEO entirely is not what I am building for here. For an SMB, the call is to evolve into dual-discovery marketing where one pipeline feeds both Google and AI engines. In practice, it is all the ‘human’ stuff my interviewees talked about: human opinionated content, aggressive editing of GenAI drafts and authentic off-site reviews and mentions — along with rebuilding and restructuring your best content into AI-ready information. It also means dedicating a little time every month from chasing one more blog keyword to doing what Katie, Tiffany, Destiny, and others already do: run a simple AI visibility audit, reinforce your presence on the sources LLMs trust and treat GEO metrics (like AI-referred leads) as early‑stage KPIs, even if they are messy. In that sense, the 'new reality of GEO/SEO' translates into business as a shift from fighting for one more blue link click to competing for the brief moment when an AI system decides whose name to put into the answer — and smart SMBs are quietly redesigning their operations, content, and measurement so their brand is the one that gets spoken out loud.

This story contains AI-generated text. The author has used AI either for research, to generate outlines, or write the text itself. 

The is an opinion piece based on the author’s POV and does not necessarily reflect the views of HackerNoon.

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