Why the SEO vs GEO debate is missing the point

Every few years, marketing picks a new fight with itself.

Right now it's SEO vs GEO. And honestly? The takes are exhausting.

You've got three camps. The head-in-the-sand crowd pretending nothing changed. The "SEO is dead, all hail GEO" crowd acting like they just discovered fire. And a smaller, quieter group that recognizes both things can be true at once: things shifted, the old playbook isn't enough on its own, and adapting is literally part of the job description.

That third group is right. Everyone else is arguing about what to call the weather while it's raining on them.

The "vs" framing is the whole problem

The moment you put "vs" between SEO and GEO, you've already lost the plot. It implies one wins and the other loses. That's not what's happening here.

What's happening is expansion. Search didn't get replaced. It got bigger. People still Google things. They also ask ChatGPT. They check Perplexity. They scroll Reddit. They watch a YouTube breakdown and then ask Claude to summarize the tradeoffs for them. The way people research got wider, messier, and harder to track. The entry points multiplied.

Gartner predicted traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026 because of AI chatbots. Whether that exact number lands is anyone's guess, but the direction is obvious. Buyers don't live in one search bar anymore.

That's not a reason to abandon SEO. It's a reason to stop pretending SEO is the only game in town.

The GEO hype machine has a credibility problem

Here's where the GEO evangelists lose me.

Half the "GEO best practices" floating around LinkedIn are just SEO best practices with a fresh coat of paint. Write clear, structured content. Build topical authority. Earn citations from credible sources. Use schema markup. None of this is new. Slapping a GEO label on it doesn't make it new.

The other half is advice that sounds smart but falls apart if you poke it. "Optimize your content for LLM ingestion." OK, how exactly? By writing content that's well-structured and authoritative? That's... SEO. You just described SEO.

Benjamin Houy shut down his GEO platform Lorelight. Not because nobody wanted it — he had paying customers. He shut it down because he decided the whole product category wasn't necessary. The things that make you show up in AI answers are the same things that made you show up in search results: a real brand, real content, real backlinks, real expertise. There's no secret GEO sauce that unlocks a different reality.

Renaming the department and pretending you invented the future doesn't change what actually works.

But ignoring AI search is just as dumb

The "nothing changed" crowd is wrong too. Stuff changed. A lot of stuff.

When a buyer asks ChatGPT "what's the best AI sales tool for mid-market SaaS companies" and your brand doesn't show up in the answer, that's not a problem you fix by publishing another keyword-targeted blog post. When an AI Overview absorbs your content and gives the user what they need without a click, your Google Analytics traffic graph stops telling you the full story.

I talk to marketers every week who are still running the 2019 playbook. Keyword research, publish, build backlinks, repeat. It's not that the playbook is wrong. It's that it's incomplete now, and the gap is widening.

What actually works (the boring answer nobody wants to hear)

The real answer isn't "more AI." It isn't "ignore AI." And it sure as hell isn't slapping a GEO label on your existing SEO work and calling it innovation.

It's a mix of manual work, critical thinking, and AI technology. That's it. Less exciting than a LinkedIn manifesto, more useful than one too.

You still need humans doing the looking

Someone has to actually sit down and analyze SERPs. Review AI Overviews. Check how your brand shows up — or doesn't — when people ask LLMs about your category. Go read the Reddit threads. Scroll the YouTube comments. Look at what third-party review sites are saying. Not because it's glamorous, but because there's no substitute for actually paying attention.

What ChatGPT says about your product matters now. So does what Perplexity cites. So does what appears in an AI Overview when someone searches your category. If nobody on your team is regularly checking these things, you're flying blind and calling it strategy.

You still need humans deciding what matters

Not every mention is meaningful. Not every citation moves the needle.

Somebody has to separate signal from noise. Somebody has to figure out what actually influences how a buyer thinks about you versus what's just another vanity metric wearing a trench coat. "We got mentioned in a ChatGPT response" sounds great in a Slack channel. Did it drive a demo? Did it change perception? Did it move pipeline? Usually, nobody knows. That's the problem.

The judgment call about what deserves real investment requires people who understand the business, not just the dashboard.

AI has a role — just not the one you think

AI is excellent at processing scale. Use it to cluster topics. Find content gaps. Summarize patterns across hundreds of reviews and forum threads. Check brand consistency across touchpoints. Speed up QA. Crunch query and citation data that would take a human team weeks.

What AI can't do: decide what any of that means for your business, your buyers, your competitive position. That's still a human job. Probably always will be.

We wrote about this tension in our piece on why AEO was overhyped in 2025. The companies that won weren't the ones who went hardest on AI optimization. They were the ones who built something worth citing in the first place.

The framework, if you want one

Here's what I'd bring to a strategy meeting if someone made me put this into a slide deck:

Strong SEO fundamentals. Technical health, quality content, topical authority, backlinks. This hasn't stopped mattering. It won't.

Broader visibility tracking. Rankings, yes, but also AI citations, community mentions, review sentiment, answer engine presence. Track where your brand shows up across the full buyer research journey. Not just page one of Google.

Human-led interpretation. People making judgment calls about what deserves investment versus what's noise. You can't automate taste. You can't automate knowing your market.

AI-assisted execution. Use AI to move faster on things humans already decided matter. Content production, data analysis, pattern recognition at scale. AI as accelerant, not autopilot.

Four pieces. None of them need a new acronym.

Call it whatever you want

Call it SEO. Call it GEO. Call it AEO. Call it whatever helps you win an argument on LinkedIn or get your conference talk accepted.

The end goal hasn't changed: earn visibility, build trust, drive action.

The surfaces where you need to do that got wider. The tools got better. The competition got more complicated. None of that warrants a religious war between three-letter acronyms.

It just requires doing the work. Paying attention to where buyers actually spend their time. Building a brand worth recommending — whether the one doing the recommending is a person or a language model. And being honest with yourself about what AI can and can't do for your marketing.

That's the whole thing. No manifesto needed.

Salespeak helps B2B companies turn AI visibility into pipeline. We built the first LLM optimizer that works at the edge, so your brand shows up where buyers are actually researching. See how it works →