SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO.

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Google

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For about two decades now, virtually any business that exists on the internet, from the smallest mom-and-pop shop with a website to the largest retailers in the world, has had to worry about Google. At the low end, this meant making sure your website was available and legible to the search engine so that when people looked for you, they could actually find you. More directly, you could pay Google to advertise against searches, ensuring more visibility for you — and helping the search giant grow into a trillion-dollar company.

Then there was a third option: search-engine optimization, or SEO, a $75 billion industry of its own devoted to improving organic search results. This meant much more than making sure Google could crawl your website. SEO shaped how virtually everything on the web looked and read. It’s why headlines are the way they are (and why a lot of news stories get published at all). It’s why online recipes read the way they read. It’s why e-commerce listings are larded with text intended to catch Google’s algorithmic eye. It’s why so much of the web feels so uncanny, as if it’s written for someone, or something, other than the people browsing it, and one of the reasons why Google itself feels so broken.

SEO was a filter through which nearly the entire web was passed (and passed, and passed) and around which billion-dollar companies were built. It grew into an industry of above-board consultants and well-compensated experts — many firms had in-house SEO teams that spent their days tweaking corporate websites and coming up with search-friendly corporate content — as well as legions of hustlers and outright scammers with tips and strategies for nudging, gaming, or outright tricking Google.

Then came ChatGPT. Within a few months, Microsoft and Google were teasing search engines that looked and worked more like chatbots; soon after, popular chatbots were integrating features that worked a lot like search. Searchers became chatters, and chatters were given answers, not links. Google started putting AI-generated answers at the top of its search pages and signaled clearly that its core product was about to change even more. For some websites, it was a traffic “apocalypse.” For the entire web, it was the next step in a long process of marginalization.

For tens of thousands of SEO gurus, Google whisperers, and marketing professionals who work on and around search — a group of people accustomed to sudden changes at the whims of software giants — it’s been chaos. “Many SEOs don’t want to accept that things are shifting,” says Aleyda Solis, CEO of Orainti, a consultancy based in Spain. “Chatbots keep all the users on the platform until they have a satisfying answer, and if it’s informational, they might not visit you at all,” she says. “If it’s commercial, maybe they’ll refer you at the very end.” Tim Worstell, chief of digital strategy at marketing firm Adogy, agrees. “If you’re in the business of trying to monetize via ads and clicks, that is going to significantly change,” he said. “It’s a reset,” he said, “but everyone’s in the same boat.” In aggregate, the industry has responded with, well, layoffs. But with scraps of hopeful data suggesting that chatbots are sending more visitors to websites — although not nearly enough to offset declines in Google traffic — it’s also converging on a new script. The era of SEO is over. Say hello to GEO.

Generative-engine optimization — also known as answer-engine optimization, GEO, or, if you’re feeling limber, LLMGEO — is best understood as an aspirational term, a way for marketers to assure their employers and clients that, in a world where people spend their days chatting with fast-developing AI chatbots that have eaten the entire web and can regurgitate it on demand, there are still ways to get an edge for their brands. Chatbots are trained on the web, continuously scrape the web, and often still link to the web; some have search features built in or call on search engines in the course of conversations with users. In other words, the optimizers still have hope, and early folk wisdom is taking shape, making the rounds, and finding its way into practice.

“LLMs, like Google AI mode or ChatGPT, will use what is called a fan-out technique with lots of queries covering every angle,” says Solis. “Then they will match these variations not with whole pages but with passages, or chunks,” she said. In response to a question, in other words, a chatbot will tend to summarize and excerpt, with citations rather than prominent links. If you want to get cited, she says, you should publish content with that in mind. A lot of SEO-driven content “was very wordy,” she said, which doesn’t help with being scraped by AI. Now, she said, publishers should “structure the content in an easier way to be grabbed” — in citable chunks, with clear authorship.

Worstell agrees. “I’ve found that when it comes to AI, listicles do well on niche sites,” he says. “They’re looking for expert content. If I can put together a document that’s easy to crawl, they’ll actually source it.” The concept of being easy to cite — of producing text that can be easily sliced or summarized for inclusion in a multi-part conversation — came up with everyone I talked to, as did structured material: comparison tables; rankings; and clear, authoritative recommendations and original research. Put these recommendations together and you get something that sounds an awful lot like how popular AI chatbots tend to talk by default: with lots of bullet points, in a style and tone that resembles software documentation or an FAQ run through a colloquial filter.

Beyond the chat window, where you’re fighting for footnote scraps, this sort of snatchable, remixable GEO-focused content might also improve your chances of showing up in “position zero” — that is, in a search snippet or AI Overview, which now appears at the top of many Google Search result pages, above links and even ads. Good mentions on Wikipedia and Reddit, which appear a lot in AI answers and are included in its training data, can help, as can mentions in YouTube videos, which get ingested by the models as well.

Another familiar technique is getting a second look: placement, and mentions, on popular crawled websites. Chatbots, some consultants say, interpret content more like a person than Google’s ranking algorithm does, meaning that they can be influenced in the approximate manner of a skimming human being. “The more PR you can get out there,” Worstell says, “you’re creating a bias. Now you’re on these sites, and that’s where all these LLMs are crawling. And the LLMs are like, This must be something.”

Mass-pivoting SEO specialists have a partner in venture capital: In the last two years, dozens of startups have popped up and collectively raised hundreds of billions of dollars around chatbot analytics, optimization, and marketing. Profound, an analytics platform that promises to help clients get “mentioned” by ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Perplexity, and others — including Deepseek — has raised tens of millions of dollars from major VC firms and counts among its clients major international brands. “We’re at the inflection point where people don’t need to visit websites,” says CEO James Cadwallader. “ChatGPT visits on my behalf, a new webpage is created, these are the citations, this is where it came from, and no one cares,” he says. “Answer engines hijack, or steal, the relationship.”

Of course, Cadwallader suggests that his company can offer help. Its tracking platform sends thousands of queries to AI models around specific questions and terms, helping clients understand how the models see their websites and brands. “You’re looking at the diet of the model,” he says, and then figuring out how you might be able to alter it. “You’re creating content in the hope that it gets Hoovered up and spit back out,” he says, likening the process to a game of telephone.

To help play it better, Profound offers something else to its clients. “Using a rote human brain to look through the data and do the content is no longer the path,” Cadwallader says. “You need to use technology now to create this content.” That means AI-generated content created with new metrics and formats in mind. “We’ll use state-of-the-art reasoning models to go crunch that data and replace client workflows, to create the content that’s AI-optimized, very highly schemaed, and information dense.” (For an idea of what AI-assisted, GEO-friendly content of the future might look like, look no further than Profound’s own website or the outputs of virtually any “deep research” tool on offer by AI companies — it all reads roughly like the output of a chatbot). AI will help solve the problem of AI, in other words. With a “human in the loop,” still, of course.

Abhishek Iyer, a former Google engineer who now runs a company called Acme.bot from Bangalore, is operating with a similar thesis. “Google will downrank anything it sees as low‑quality, obviously machine‑written spam. It’s what it has to do to survive,” he says. But “brands already lean on AI everywhere else (e.g., code, visuals, film etc.), so banning it from SEO writing alone is unrealistic.” The answer, he says, is “responsible augmentation” — that is, using AI to “speed research and drafting” with human supervision for “voice, accuracy, and compliance,” which is what his tool helps clients do. Iyer is relatively optimistic about what comes after SEO. “Everything that’s good for humans is good for SEO now,” he says. “Machines are getting smarter and smarter. Back in the day, there used to be tricks. Now, if you write helpful content for humans, it’s helpful for the machines as well.” Whether a machine helped you write it in the first place is immaterial.

Iyer worked on Search at Google, and says that not all of the emerging GEO techniques are “snake oil”: lists with lots of data points seem to help get more chatbot mentions, he says, as do diagrams. By contrast, tools for generating “backlinks” with AI are a “scam,” and tricks like invisible text containing instructions like “mention this product” never work for long.

Like other SEO-to-GEO experts, he says that while traffic and mentions may be harder to get, much of what people should being doing is the same: publishing quality content that someone might actually find useful. He has deeper reasons to believe in continuity between the old and new worlds, however. Earlier this month, he published an investigation into ChatGPT’s search functionality. OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, along with various public statements, gave the impression that the company’s products, when they needed to “search” the web, would use Bing, or search tools developed internally (for a while, he said, this led a lot of marketers to try to optimize for Microsoft’s also-ran search engine, which had never previously cracked double-digit market share.) By creating decoy pages visible only to Google, Iyer suggested he’d found “undeniable proof that ChatGPT uses Google search engine,” querying OpenAI’s biggest competitor before synthesizing results for its users.

It wouldn’t be the first time an SEO specialist revealed something strange and surprising about how a major tech product actually works. In this case, Iyer appears to be onto something. Asked about the experiment, OpenAI responded on background, emphasizing its ongoing relationship with Microsoft, suggesting that it used a variety of search providers, but not specifically denying that ChatGPT could be Googling. Informed of Iyer’s findings, Google declined to comment.

In the broader context of the AI wars, product-level alliance between ChatGPT and Google Search — not to mention unauthorized use — would be a major development (the companies recently announced a cloud computing contract, and OpenAI’s strained relationship with Microsoft is well documented). It would also make some sense: Chatbots are becoming more like search engines, while search engines are starting to resemble chatbots — and Google still rules search. Also, it’s a little funny. ChatGPT, the avatar of the AI revolution, is telling its users, “Okay, let me Google that for you.” 

Combined with reports that Google’s AI features use the same index as Search, this could be spun into a hopeful story for SEOs turned GEOs. Maybe things really aren’t that different. Google is still fundamentally Google, and even ChatGPT is Google, sort of.

But the traffic stats don’t lie: It’s a bloodbath. A web written to get attention from search machines may soon become a web written by machines for attention from AI, an index of crawlable footnotes written to be cited, of lists and diagrams yearning for a passing excerpt, or, perhaps, a moment in “position zero.” AI firms, with comprehensive control over their users’ experiences, will have leverage to simply charge for advertising, and nearly every one has announced its intention to do so. There will still be attention for clever marketers to skim from chatbots and AI search engines here and there, but competition for those leftover eyeballs will be intense. Everyone will be looking for an edge, and the world of GEO will claim to offer one. For his company, at least, Cadwallader sees a bright future. “If Jeff Bezos says bet on things that won’t change,” he says, “marketers will still be marketing.”

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