GEO is just strategy led by FOMO

Can somebody Google: “Emperor’s clothes shops near me”? Because he’s running about in a flimsy, see-through, GEO nightdress – and it’s cold out there.

I get it. If you’re brand-side, suddenly senior people are drumming their fingers and asking questions like: “Why is our competitor getting all the mentions when I ask ChatGPT? I thought we were ranked ahead of them in search.” And if you’re agency-side, you don’t want to say: “Take a breath, I don’t think you need to change anything, really.” 

Not when some clients have already started editing their LinkedIn to say they are now Head of GEO. Not when some clients are nudging and winking and saying that the SEO line on their budget is easy to change to something like, *ahem*, GEO.

And the pivot looks seductively simple: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. They’ve got an extra-big search bar – but it still looks like a search bar.

So, why wouldn’t we apply the same interrogation techniques that we refined with Google’s algorithm, over 20 years ago, to crack this new code? Why wouldn’t we just reverse-engineer the way these LLMs assemble their answers, and solve the mystery?

Better yet, we’ll vibe code our own agency GEO tools to deliver the brand insights. Now, agencies that previously never touched SEO tools – like Ahrefs and Semrush – are suggesting they’ve created a proprietary analytics tool for the AI Chatbot-o-sphere.

Guess what? Someone needs to get the emperor a big coat.

Because, despite some surface-level appearances, LLMs aren’t like Google. You can’t really optimise for AI answers. We know, from the data-scientists who helped build these machines, that they are not merely indexing and ranking the internet and its content. They are RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) models, and as the name suggests, they use a series of highly-complex mathematical steps to produce an answer

Playing the game

When you typed a keyword into Google, you were playing a game with known rules. Google matched your words to pages. You could measure your position. You could then – in theory, and in time – move it.

AI systems don't work like that.

When someone asks ChatGPT a question, the system doesn't search for pages. It converts the question into mathematics, then looks for content that's mathematically and semantically close to that question. It then slices relevant chunks out of articles it finds, re-ranks those chunks through a secondary process, and hands the top results to the language model to synthesise into an answer.

Every platform, whether it's Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT, does this differently. So, effectively you don't know how they're slicing your content, meaning you don't know at which stage yours gets dropped. And crucially, you can't measure any of it. There's no equivalent to a rank tracker. Your content could be ignored at step one or step four, and you'd never know.

With SEO, you could see the leaderboard and work out how to climb it. With AI, there is no leaderboard. There's a black box that produces a different answer every time you ask it the same question. In fact, a different answer even if you ask the same question a hundred times.

Stacking the odds

That’s exactly what some recent research by Sparktoro’s Rand Fishkin revealed – that there is a less than 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI, if asked one hundred times, will give you the same list of brands in any two responses.

So, what do we tell our clients, and our clients’ bosses? We say: don’t dig a moat in quicksand, and don’t make FOMO your strategy. Stay human. The AI models are using all their mathematics to be like us. So don’t try to solve for the AIs. Solve for humans.

Write like a human, and encourage other humans to publish and tell those human stories. Good PR.

Share those stories far and wide – multi-channel, and in mainstream and niche publications. Because people and AIs all find increased validation when your brand is found, with some consistency, far and wide. 

Make sure that your expertise and authority come across – not just your data. Sounds like good ol’ Google E-E-A-T principles, right? And good PR.

SEO is still very valid. The vast majority of search is still Google search.

Tracking your brand’s visibility across models, and across channels, is a good measure to steer effort and investment.

But above all: stay human.

Written by

Colin Cather, Director & co-owner at Bottle Digital PR