Today, the fight to get your brand mentioned in AI responses – a process called generative engine optimization (GEO) – should be a top priority for marketing teams. Organizations need to recognize the change in how potential customers search and the results they receive.
Too many companies hope that their SEO programs will also ensure that they appear in AI-generated results. While good SEO helps inform GEO, it won’t maximize your visibility in AI responses. Right now, a relative lack of competition fuels 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 deliver impressive results. Organizations also need to understand whether today’s techniques will maintain a sustainable advantage over time.
The evolution of SEO offers valuable lessons for GEO. Search marketers have seen this model before. Tactics that once yielded positive 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. On the one hand, the focus is on generating high-quality content that answers questions that brands believe people will use as AI suggestions.
Common shortcuts include FAQs, TL;DR bulleted summaries, question-based titles, and an outline that helps crawlers understand what’s on the page.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, some organizations push beyond what were until recently the generally accepted boundaries in what is called Black Hat GEO. These approaches deliberately aim to mislead LLMs.
Tactics include AI-generated spam content, fake reviews that boost EEAT signals, misleading content statements, and serving different content every time an AI crawler visits a website.
Whatever approach your brand takes, the question is whether the benefits it offers are sustainable.
Lessons from the early days of SEO
One of the earliest 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 attorney for several well-known rock bands, including Jefferson Starship. He helped build the band’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 often appeared at or near the bottom of searches for their name.
Heyman began implementing keyword stuffing to improve rankings. This approach made the band and its management much happier, but that was the time. 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 beginning no longer have any impact and can even result in penalties. Examples include hidden text, link manipulation schemes, low-quality spam articles, article rotation, and more.
BMW also once clashed with Google. In 2006, Google completely removed BMW’s website from its results after it provided 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). While BMW resolved the issue and regained its ranking fairly quickly, other brands without access to top-tier Google connections have been much less fortunate.
The prospect of GEO sanctions
We know that search engines have imposed penalties on organizations that have attempted to rank higher through misleading or unfair tactics. We also know that in doing so they were willing to disrupt some of the biggest brands in the world. It seems inevitable that the companies behind today’s AI models will significantly increase their responses to brands attempting black-hat GEO, just as search engines have done with SEO.
Just like search engines, AI models cannot and should not feature brands that mislead and cheat. Some of today’s persistent black hat techniques will likely lose their ability to influence visibility into AI responses. At a minimum, organizations that continue to use them risk significant financial penalties. Taken together, these changes should significantly reduce the likelihood of rogue brands appearing in AI-generated responses.
Instead of wondering which approaches to avoid, brands should evaluate which GEO techniques can offer a sustainable advantage rather than a short-term boost.
GEO: a reputational risk or long-term brand strengthening?
History is a good teacher. Some tactics that search engines have penalized into oblivion will likely face similar consequences if used for GEO. Providing different content to AI crawlers (e.g. cloaking) offers no benefit to AI models. Fake reviews are already under attack from the platforms that host them. As such reviews are detected and removed, LLMs will likely reduce visibility for brands that continue to use such tactics.
As AI models evolve, they will become better at spotting and penalizing sites that fill pages with exaggerated claims. Black Hat GEO only benefits the brand that uses it and harms everyone else in the ecosystem, limiting its long-term sustainability.
In contrast, high-quality content that actually answers legitimate questions is exactly the kind of information AI vendors want to include in their answers. This approach – let’s call it “white-hat GEO” – should continue to produce excellent results.
But what about the middle ground? Will FAQ sections remain a key part of web pages? I would argue that they will do so because they provide value and will not attract fines. Unlike black hat techniques, they benefit everyone. They help brands improve visibility and make it easier for AI models to analyze information. Frankly, being a bit lazy, I like to see a TL;DR at the beginning of a long article and the FAQ at the end. That’s just how I roll.
Even if AI models became so good at extracting information that they no longer needed those signals, they would hardly penalize them, as long as the content remained high quality.
Choose 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 reliable GEO techniques. If done correctly, these efforts can increase visibility in the short term and provide positive results for years.
The way people get information is changing rapidly. If we don’t recognize this trend and prioritize GEO, we won’t do our job. Marketing is constantly changing and keeping up isn’t easy, but now is not the time to stay on the sidelines. Your competitors are firing up their GEO engines and working hard to exclude you from AI responses, which already influence supplier selection.
Make sure they choose you.
