GEO is Snake Oil. Don’t Buy the Hype.

GEO agencies are charging premium prices to “optimize” your content for LLMs. There’s no science behind it. 

You may have heard this fear-inducing pitch: Optimize your content for LLMs, or get left behind. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the new SEO (search engine optimization), according to newfangled GEO marketing agencies, who say you’d better pony up for their services to ensure your brand appears in ChatGPT responses.

These agencies claim to optimize your content for AI search. They claim they can increase the frequency of AI mentions of your brand and propel you ahead of your competition. Sounds enticing, I know. But the GEO “research” these agencies cite is mostly guesswork that relies heavily on correlation, not causation. 

The reality is that there’s not nearly enough evidence yet to say “THIS is how we optimize for LLMs”:

• We do know that LLMs use ranked URLs, making SEO tactics as essential as ever. 
• What we don’t know is how AI chatbots judge the content they find and determine what to include or exclude in a generated response to a user. 

Even Sam Altman doesn’t know how to “optimize” content for LLMs

How do LLMs take all their training data and decide what answer to provide? That’s a question even AI bigwigs admit that they don’t fully understand. 

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said at an AI conference in 2024 that they “certainly have not solved interpretability” – in other words, they don’t know why it does what it does.  

Altman compared it to a “black box” of mysterious workings, similar to the human brain, which we don’t understand on a neuron-by-neuron level.  

If the head of the company behind ChatGPT can’t explain how AI chooses its answers, no marketing agency on the planet can claim to have cracked that code with any certainty.

What we do and don’t know about AI models

We know how Google search works because it has fixed rules and indexes. Search engines use ranking signals (links, recency, keyword match, depth of information, user behavior, etc.) to determine where a website shows up in search results. 

When we apply SEO practices, we’re making decisions based on how we know the algorithm operates.

LLMs like ChatGPT, by contrast, are probabilistic. They don’t follow set, transparent rules for answering a query the way search engines do. They generate answers by predicting the most likely next words based on patterns in the data they were trained on, plus whatever context you give them in the moment. 

You cannot rely on a specific prompt to always produce the same brand mention or citation, even if the underlying search index and URLs stay the same.

The research behind GEO is whisker-thin

Many GEO advocates cite a single research paper to bolster GEO claims – an academic paper authored by a group of Princeton PhD candidates in 2024. 

The paper outlined foundational GEO tactics. It suggested these approaches could boost visibility by as much as 40%:

• Structuring information so models can easily extract and cite it
• Emphasizing statistics and quotable statements that algorithms tend to favor 
• Formatting claims in ways that lend themselves to citation

Sound familiar? That’s because these are standard SEO tactics. These techniques have always been effective for optimizing content across search platforms, including Google. 

When agencies point to their own client work, they’re citing anecdotes, not scientific validation. A/B testing can provide insights, but it can’t demonstrate any real understanding of how LLMs decide what to mention. 

Many GEO success stories are actually SEO success stories. They’ve just rebranded them. And they’re charging you more. 

The AI measurement mirage

GEO software vendors will promise that their tracking tools give you precise visibility into how your brand shows up across AI platforms. If you appear in three responses out of 10, congratulations: you’ve earned a 30% visibility score.

The reality is that no tool today can comprehensively or perfectly measure brand mentions across LLMs — and any vendor claiming otherwise is overselling their capabilities.

That’s because LLMs don’t generate consistent outputs. Ask the same question twice, and you’ll often get two different answers.  

Many AI systems consider user context, such as conversation history, in their responses. There is currently no way to test how your version of Claude responds versus your Aunt Sharon’s – or your prospect’s.

The bottom line: AI visibility scores are a vanity metric at best. 

What we actually know: SEO still works

Here’s the part GEO vendors hope you’ll overlook: LLMs don’t magically conjure answers from the ether. 

They rely on a process called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG. When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, the agent pulls in a set of relevant URLs. Then it generates a response. 

If your content isn’t already ranking in traditional search results, the LLM is far less likely to see it. You can’t optimize for AI search if you’re not showing up in regular search first. 

How to rank in search engines AND show up in LLMs

The great news is that your content strategy doesn’t need fancy software or a big-ticket agency to succeed in the age of AI. Here’s what you can do to show up higher in search engine rankings, which, as we’ve explored, gives you a better chance of being mentioned by LLMs:

• Build domain authority through quality backlinks. This signals credibility to both search engines and the LLMs while demonstrating that other authoritative sources trust your content enough to reference it.
• Optimize technical SEO elements – XML sitemaps, schema markups, broken links, canonical tags, etc. – so search engines can crawl and index your site effectively.
• Create comprehensive content that answers questions better than your competitors. Search engine algorithms and LLM training data favor in-depth, well-structured information over surface-level, keyword-stuffed pages.

The bottom line: Stop obsessing over gaming systems you fundamentally can’t control, and focus on building content that genuinely serves your audience.

The bottom line: Save your budget

The irony of GEO is that it emerged alongside the AI content boom, and many GEO agencies are simultaneously pushing AI-generated content while promising to optimize it for AI search. But LLMs can’t pull from lived experience, independent research, or genuine subject-matter expertise. AI can’t create new ideas or perspectives.

The best way to stand apart from this trend is to create thought leadership content that establishes real authority in your industry, which requires human writers and strategists who can generate original ideas. 

People are tired of AI slop and content obviously structured for LLMs instead of human readers. One study showed that 82% of Americans can spot AI-generated content. 40% say they’d think less of a brand that uses AI for its content.

And just as importantly, you should work with partners who are transparent about their methods, honest about what can and can’t be measured, and grounded in proven strategies instead of hype.