GEO is following the same path as early SEO

Today, the fight to get your brand mentioned in AI answers — a process called generative engine optimization (GEO) — should be one of the highest priorities for marketing teams. Organizations must recognize the shift in how potential customers search and the results they receive.

Too many companies hope their SEO programs will also ensure they appear in AI-generated results. Although good SEO helps inform GEO, it won’t maximize your visibility in AI answers. Right now, a relative lack of competition fuels a GEO gold rush, with proactive companies dominating answers and driving business growth.

There are plenty of reasons for that urgency. The right GEO techniques can deliver impressive results. Organizations also need to understand whether today’s techniques will maintain a sustainable advantage over time.

SEO’s evolution offers valuable lessons for GEO. Search marketers have seen this pattern before. Tactics that once delivered strong results eventually lost their effectiveness or attracted penalties. GEO may differ from SEO in many ways, but its long-term sustainability raises familiar questions.

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Examples of GEO shortcuts

There are lots of tools that optimize websites to help brands appear in AI-generated answers. At one end of the spectrum, the focus is on generating high-quality content that answers the questions brands believe people use as AI prompts. 

Common shortcuts include frequently asked questions, TL;DR bulleted summaries, question-based headlines, and schema that helps crawlers understand what’s on the page.

At the other end of the spectrum, some organizations push beyond what were, until recently, generally accepted boundaries into what’s referred to as black hat GEO. These approaches deliberately aim to mislead LLMs. 

Tactics include AI-generated spam content, fake reviews that boost E-E-A-T signals, misleading statements in content, and serving different content whenever an AI crawler visits a website.

Whatever approach your brand takes, the question is whether the benefits it delivers are sustainable.

Lessons from the early days of SEO

One of the first examples of SEO came from Bob Heyman, an executive at a digital agency called USWeb in the mid- to late 1990s. Heyman also worked as a music lawyer for several well-known rock bands, including Jefferson Starship. He helped build the band’s website — one of the first in that genre — and the team was proud of it. However, in the search engines of the day (think AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and Lycos), the band frequently appeared at or near the bottom of searches for its own name.

Heyman started implementing keyword stuffing to improve rankings. The approach made the band and its management much happier, but that was then. Thirty years later, the same tactic wouldn’t work because search engines now ignore or penalize techniques they consider manipulative.

Many SEO techniques that worked in the early days no longer have any impact and may even trigger penalties. Examples include hidden text, link-manipulation schemes, low-quality spam articles, article spinning, and more.

Even BMW once fell afoul of Google. In 2006, Google completely removed BMW’s website from its results after it served Google’s crawler a keyword-stuffed page that differed from what human visitors saw (you can still see the page on Matt Cutts’ blog). Although BMW fixed the problem and regained its rankings fairly quickly, other brands without access to high-level Google connections were far less fortunate.

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The prospect of GEO penalties

We know search engines imposed penalties on organizations that tried to rank higher through misleading or unfair tactics. We also know they were willing to upset some of the world’s biggest brands in the process. It seems inevitable that the companies behind today’s AI models will significantly increase their responses to brands that attempt black-hat GEO, much as search engines did with SEO.

Just like search engines, AI models cannot and should not feature brands that mislead and cheat. Some of today’s lingering black hat techniques will likely lose their ability to influence visibility in AI answers. At the very least, organizations that continue using them risk significant financial penalties. Taken together, these changes should greatly reduce the likelihood of rogue brands appearing in AI-generated answers.

Instead of asking which approaches to avoid, brands should assess which GEO techniques can deliver a sustainable advantage rather than a short-term boost.

GEO: A reputational risk or long-term brand booster?

History is a good teacher. Some tactics that search engines penalized into oblivion will likely face similar consequences if used for GEO. Serving different content to AI crawlers (i.e., cloaking) offers no benefit to AI models. Fake reviews are already under attack from the platforms that host them. As those reviews are detected and removed, LLMs will likely reduce visibility for brands that continue using those tactics.

As AI models evolve, they’ll become better at detecting and penalizing sites that stuff pages with exaggerated claims. Black hat GEO benefits only the brand using it and harms everyone else in the ecosystem, limiting its long-term viability.

Conversely, high-quality content that genuinely answers legitimate questions is exactly the kind of information AI vendors want to include in their answers. That approach — let’s call it “white-hat GEO” — should continue producing strong results.

But what about the middle ground? Will FAQ sections remain a key part of web pages? I’d argue they will because they provide value and won’t attract penalties. Unlike black hat techniques, they benefit everyone. They help brands improve visibility and make it easier for AI models to parse information. Frankly, being a little lazy, I love seeing a TL;DR at the top of a long article and FAQs at the end. That’s just how I roll.

Even if AI models become so good at extracting information that they no longer need those signposts, they’re unlikely to penalize them — provided the content remains high quality.

Choosing GEO tactics that last

Almost all brands should establish a sustainable approach to GEO. In addition to generating high-quality content that answers audience questions, brands should use reputable GEO techniques. Done properly, those efforts can boost visibility in the near term and deliver positive results for years.

The way people get information is changing rapidly. If we don’t recognize that trend and prioritize GEO, we’re not doing our jobs. Marketing changes constantly, and keeping up isn’t easy, but now isn’t the time to stand on the sidelines. Your competitors are revving their GEO engines and working hard to push you out of AI answers, which already influence supplier selection.

Make sure they choose you.