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Today, the fight to get your brand mentioned in AI responses — a process called generative engine optimization (GEO) – should be one of the biggest priorities for marketing teams. Organizations must recognize the changing way potential customers search and the results they receive.
Too many companies hope that their SEO programs will also ensure they appear in AI-generated results. While good SEO helps inform GEO, it will not maximize your visibility in AI responses. Currently, a relative lack of competition is fueling a GEO gold rush, with proactive companies dominating responses and driving business growth.
There are many reasons for this urgency. The right GEO techniques can yield impressive results. Organizations also need to understand whether current techniques will maintain a sustainable advantage over time.
The evolution of SEO offers valuable lessons for GEO. Search marketers have seen this pattern before. Tactics that once produced good results eventually lost their effectiveness or resulted in sanctions. 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 many tools that optimize websites to help brands appear in AI-generated responses. At one end of the spectrum, the focus is on generating high-quality content that answers questions that brands think people use as AI prompts.
Common shortcuts include frequently asked questions, TL;DR bulleted summaries, question-based titles, and schema that helps crawlers understand the content on the page.
At the other end of the spectrum, some organizations are moving beyond what were, until recently, generally accepted boundaries and moving toward what is known as Black Hat GEO. These approaches deliberately aim to mislead LLMs.
The tactics include AI-generated spam content, fake reviews that boost EEAT signals, misleading claims in content, and serving different content every time an AI crawler visits a website.
Whatever approach your brand takes, the question is whether the benefits it brings are sustainable.
Lessons from the Beginnings 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 create the group’s website – one of the first of its kind – and the team was proud of it. However, in search engines of the time (think AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and Lycos), the band frequently appeared at or near the bottom of searches for its own name.
Heyman began implementing keyword stuffing to improve rankings. This approach made the band and its management much happier, but that was then. Thirty years later, the same tactic would no longer work because search engines now ignore or penalize techniques they consider manipulative.
Many SEO techniques that worked in the beginning no longer have any impact and may even result in penalties. Examples include hidden text, link manipulation schemes, low-quality spam articles, article spinning, etc.
Even BMW once clashed with Google. In 2006, Google completely removed BMW’s website from its results after providing Google’s crawler with a keyword-filled 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-ranking Google connections have had much less luck.
The prospect of GEO sanctions
We know that search engines have imposed penalties on organizations that attempt to achieve higher rankings using deceptive or unfair tactics. We also know they were ready to upset some of the world’s biggest brands. It seems inevitable that the companies behind today’s AI models will dramatically increase their responses to brands trying to get into GEO, just as search engines have done with SEO.
Just like search engines, AI models cannot and should not present brands that are misleading and cheating. Some of the current black hat techniques will likely lose their ability to influence the visibility of AI responses. At the very least, organizations that continue to use them face significant financial penalties. Taken together, these changes should significantly reduce the likelihood of malicious marks appearing in AI-generated responses.
Instead of wondering which approaches to avoid, brands should evaluate which GEO techniques can provide a lasting advantage rather than a short-term boost.
GEO: reputation risk or long-term brand booster?
History is a good teacher. Some tactics that search engines have penalized into oblivion will likely suffer similar consequences if used for GEO. Providing different content to AI crawlers (i.e. masking) does not provide any benefit to the AI models. Fake reviews are already under attack by the platforms that host them. As these reviews are detected and removed, LLMs will likely reduce the visibility of brands that continue to use these tactics.
As AI models evolve, they will become better at detecting and penalizing sites that fill pages with exaggerated claims. Black hat GEO only benefits 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 type of information AI providers want to include in their answers. This approach – let’s call it “white hat GEO” – should continue to produce strong results.
But what about the happy medium? Will FAQ sections remain a key part of web pages? I would say they will because they provide value and won’t incur penalties. Unlike black hat techniques, they benefit everyone. They help brands improve their visibility and make it easier for AI models to analyze information. Honestly, being a bit lazy, I love seeing a TL;DR at the top of a long article and a FAQ at the end. That’s how I roll.
Even if AI models become so good at extracting information that they no longer need these panels, they are unlikely to penalize them – provided the content remains high quality.
Choosing GEO tactics that last
Almost every brand 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 well, these efforts can increase visibility in the short term and produce positive results for years.
The way people obtain information is changing rapidly. If we don’t recognize this trend and prioritize GEO, we are not doing our job. Marketing is constantly evolving and it’s not easy to keep up, but now is not the time to stand aside. Your competitors are revving their GEO engines and working hard to steer you away from AI responses, which are already influencing vendor selection.
Make sure they choose you.
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