GEO isn’t a fad, but most GEO tactics won’t survive | MarTech

Marketing – especially martech – often behaves like the fashion industry. Every year, sometimes every season, a design from an important fashion label emerges that fast-fashion brands rush to copy. It doesn’t take long before everyone is wearing the same look, which is often the first sign that it’s time to move on.

Marketing is no different. The industry regularly chases the latest trend, only to abandon it once the novelty fades. Generative engine optimization (GEO), also called response engine optimization (AEO), has become the latest must-have for marketers.

At first glance, the logic is compelling. With more and more people using AI tools to research products and services, why wouldn’t brands want to be the first recommendation brought up by ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity or Gemini? These four models dominate the current landscape. It feels like a no-brainer.

But not so fast. There are good reasons to doubt whether the current GEO gold rush will deliver the promised returns. To understand why, it’s worth examining both the arguments for and against GEO becoming a forgotten marketing tactic within the next five years.

The case against GEO

There are compelling arguments that GEO could go the way of the Pet Rock. Yes, in 1975 many people paid good money for rocks marketed as pets.

The first reason to question GEO is that marketers may be shooting themselves in the foot. Increasingly, web content now opens with a TL;DR, followed by a summary, key points, an FAQ, and very little content. This suggests that some GEO experts are over-engineering their content, degrading the human experience, while putting less effort into actual quality.

Just as marketers in the early days of SEO mindlessly filled pages full of keywords, it’s easy to imagine that today’s more clumsy optimization tactics will look just as out of place in a few years. In the pursuit of authentic, high-quality content, Google and others have penalized text that was too optimized for SEO. The same could easily happen with current GEO content.

One of the reasons search engines push back on over-optimization is that the resulting content is boring and undifferentiated. Marketers chased the same keywords with pages that added nothing new to the internet. It is a reasonable assumption that much GEO content is now produced by specialist GEO agencies with a superficial understanding of the topics they claim to cover.

Much of that content could also be generated by AI, further contributing to parity and potentially poisoning training data for future models. When AI systems are trained on material that mimics previous generations, model degeneration becomes a real risk. If large language models want to improve, they really need new input, not reheated output from older systems.

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The risks of AI-generated content are already visible. Tests show that human-generated content designed to surface in AI chatbot responses can outperform AI-generated material by up to an order of magnitude.

Over-optimization also brings with it the possibility that future models will actively avoid its use. Highly optimized content tends to be repetitive and may not register as high quality. This kind of over-engineering could ultimately hurt the optimization of AI systems and human readers.

Many GEO results already resemble a natural language interface layered on top of traditional search results, rather than the original AI-generated output. When an AI tool says it’s “searching the web,” that’s often exactly what it does. In that context, success may still depend more on SEO fundamentals than GEO tactics.

Ultimately, there is no guarantee that the AI ​​model landscape will remain the same in five years. Users may rely on custom models, or future systems may even more aggressively search the Internet before responding. Whichever direction things go, it is unlikely that the ecosystem will resemble the current environment.

The case against GEO is simple. Even if GEO still matters five years from now, many of today’s tactics may not work—or even prove counterproductive—in the relatively near future.

Why GEO is not a fad

I will begin to defend GEO by accepting the arguments against it. It is unlikely that most GEO efforts undertaken today will have little or no positive impact five years from now. Still, as with SEO, there will almost certainly remain an ongoing need for optimization – despite attempts by model owners to prevent people from over-optimizing in an attempt to game the system.

Simply put, search engines or generative AI models will not eliminate the need for any form of optimization.

That leaves marketers with two choices. You can sit on the sidelines and ignore GEO, freeing up resources for other areas of marketing. That approach is not irrational.

Or you can follow current GEO best practices while still designing content for a human audience. Over-optimization is unlikely to deliver long-term value, but sensible optimization likely will.

The history of black-hat SEO provides a stark warning. Techniques from the early 2000s – such as hiding white text on a white background or serving different pages to search engines than to users – failed spectacularly. The lesson is simple. Trying too hard rarely pays off.

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Building a sensible GEO strategy

As with black-hat SEO, the risks of overdoing GEO are real. The most successful organizations will adopt a balanced GEO strategy that takes into account both human readers and AI models.

Add a FAQ and format the page so that it can be easily scanned by people. Include key takeaways. Add a TL;DR at the top if – and only if – it improves the experience for all readers.

Most importantly, the body copy should be new, interesting and really useful. Google can already serve millions of pages asking, “How do I do generative AI optimization?” Another only makes sense if it offers something meaningfully different.

Despite the challenges, investing in GEO still makes sense today. You’re allowed to make mistakes. The rules will probably change. But if done carefully, the potential benefits outweigh the risks. Sitting on the sidelines is probably not the better option.

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