For the past two decades, SEO has promised small business owners a way to level the digital playing field. If you just followed the right advice—insert the right keywords, post the right content, hire the right agency—you’d find your place in Google’s spotlight. But let’s be honest: it’s been a rigged game from the beginning. SEO didn’t reward the best businesses, just the ones with the most time or money to chase an ever-moving target. And now, just when small businesses have started to understand the game, here comes a new acronym with even bigger promises and even hazier payoffs: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization.
GEO is being billed as the future of search in the age of AI. Instead of trying to rank in Google’s ten blue links, the pitch goes, you’ll optimize your content to show up in answers generated by tools like ChatGPT, Google’s SGE, or Bing AI. In this vision of the future, people don’t click links anymore—they ask a question and get a complete, AI-generated answer. Your job, then, is to somehow get your content included in that answer.
If that sounds familiar, it should. This is SEO all over again, just dressed up in the language of artificial intelligence. It’s a new opportunity for agencies to sell expensive services, bundled with confusing dashboards and analytics that measure things you can’t actually take to the bank. The difference? With GEO, the system is even more of a black box. You might be included in an AI-generated answer—but you won’t know when, how, or whether that mention will drive traffic or conversions. It’s like trying to win a race when you can’t see the track, don’t know where the finish line is, and might not even be told if you placed.
A 2024 research paper from UBC and Cohere outlines the mechanics of GEO. The paper describes a framework for evaluating whether content appears in generative answers, and suggests ways to rewrite or reframe that content to increase its chances of being quoted by AI. It’s intellectually interesting, and potentially meaningful for researchers or media companies. But for most small businesses? Chasing GEO-style optimization is a distraction right now. It’s a high-effort, low-certainty game that consumes valuable time and marketing energy for what is, at best, a theoretical benefit.
To put it plainly: GEO is not ready for prime time. The systems we’d be optimizing for—large language models like GPT-4 or Google’s Gemini—are opaque, inconsistent, and rapidly changing. There’s no reliable feedback loop, no clear set of best practices, and no proven ROI. What we have instead is a new kind of promise: spend now, maybe benefit later. It’s SEO déjà vu, only this time, the clicks may not even exist.
Worse still, recent research from UC Berkeley highlights a deeper flaw in the very premise of GEO. A study asked how AI models choose what evidence to believe when given conflicting sources of information. The answer? These models don’t act like humans. They don’t favor the most trustworthy or well-reasoned sources. They favor content that looks superficially relevant—content that repeats the question, uses similar words, and appears directly on-topic. In other words, AI models are easily fooled by formatting and keyword mimicry. Credibility, citations, and clear reasoning matter far less than we’d like to believe.
So what does this mean for your business? It means that even if you play the GEO game well, you’re not necessarily being rewarded for quality or authority. You’re being rewarded for sounding like something the AI is looking for. It’s a system optimized for surface-level signals, not substance.
And that, in my view, is the real danger. SEO trained an entire generation of business owners to chase rankings instead of relationships. GEO threatens to take that detachment even further, turning your marketing into a desperate attempt to get noticed by a machine that doesn’t care about your expertise, your reputation, or your impact. It cares only that your content looks like the right answer.
If you want to stay visible in the AI-powered internet, there’s a better path. Focus on clarity. Write directly and honestly for your audience. Create content that reflects your unique voice and the real problems you solve. Build an email list. Publish in spaces you control. Develop a reputation that makes people seek you out—because if AI eventually does start attributing and rewarding high-quality content, you’ll already be positioned as a trusted source.
You don’t need to be the first business to optimize for AI’s attention. You need to be the business that’s still standing—and still trusted—when the hype settles and the next shiny object comes along.
Because the real risk of GEO isn’t just wasting money. It’s that in chasing visibility inside someone else’s machine, you forget what made your business valuable in the first place. And that’s a trade not worth making.
