I’ve been placing this one off.
Not as a result of the argument is tough to make – it isn’t – however as a result of the habits it’s about has been a fixture of the search engine optimization business for so long as I’ve labored in it. The shiny new object arrives, the FOMO kicks in, the convention decks replace, and a complete skilled class reshuffles its vocabulary to match no matter acronym landed that quarter. I wrote just lately about how AI content material scaling is simply content material spinning with higher grammar – the instruments change, the qualitative wall doesn’t. The acronym cycle runs on the identical engine.
However this time, the shiny object didn’t emerge from practitioners observing a real shift and making an attempt to call it. It was manufactured upstream – by enterprise capital, amplified by engagement farming, and adopted by professionals whose major motivation isn’t “that is actual” however “I can’t afford to appear like I’m not maintaining.”
So right here we’re.
The Funding Thesis
In Might 2025, Andreessen Horowitz revealed a weblog put up titled “How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Guidelines of Search.” It appeared of their enterprise e-newsletter, written by two a16z companions, Zach Cohen and Seema Amble. Public, on their web site, accessible to anybody with a browser.
The put up declared that the “$80 billion+ search engine optimization market simply cracked” and that “a brand new paradigm is rising.” It name-dropped three GEO instruments – Profound, Goodie, and Daydream – as platforms enabling manufacturers to trace how they seem in AI-generated responses. It described a future the place GEO corporations would “fine-tune their very own fashions” and “personal the loop” between perception and iteration. a16z promoted it throughout their social channels, together with a put up from the agency’s official account: “search engine optimization is slowly shedding its dominance. Welcome to GEO.”
Additionally: a16z is an investor in Profound.
The weblog put up creates demand for the class. The class creates demand for the instruments. The instruments are of their portfolio. A gross sales funnel with a byline.
Marc Andreessen’s “Software program is consuming the world” wasn’t simply an essay – it was a prospectus wearing editorial clothes. The GEO put up follows the identical logic: determine the wave, place your bets because the inevitable response, publish the narrative that makes each really feel like settled fact. Even sympathetic protection seen. The Alts.co write-up famous plainly that “a16z is drawing consideration to GEO as a result of it’s an opportunity to hawk/pump their very own investments.”
What Occurs When No person Checks The Supply
Ten months later, in March 2026, somebody on X described the weblog put up as “a 34-page inside memo” that a16z had “quietly revealed” and which had acquired solely “200 views.” It cited a selected statistic: portfolio corporations rating No.1 on Google noticed “a 34% drop in natural site visitors in 12 months.” I’m not within the particular person. This put up is one in all tons of following the identical sample, and the sample is what issues.
None of that is actual.
The weblog put up isn’t 34 pages. It isn’t inside. It wasn’t quietly revealed. The precise opening line and the 34% stat don’t seem within the precise piece. You possibly can confirm this your self proper now.
This isn’t a16z’s doing. An engagement farmer discovered an outdated weblog put up and repackaged it with fictional scaffolding as a result of that format performs higher on social media. A “leaked inside memo” is sexier than a e-newsletter. “200 views” creates shortage. Invented statistics create authority.
And it labored. Individuals shared it, constructed threads round it, didn’t test whether or not the memo existed. Why would they? The narrative was too good.
Two impartial forces – a VC agency doing commonplace narrative-building, and an engagement farmer doing commonplace engagement farming – converge on the identical outcome. The VC seeds the class. The farmer, months later, independently amplifies a distorted model. Professionals take up the distortion as a result of no one goes again to test the first supply.
Not coordination. Convergence. And a class turns into “actual” with out anyone establishing that it’s.
The Keen Contributors
VCs and engagement farmers can’t take all of the credit score. search engine optimization professionals are probably the most culpable hyperlink within the chain.
One widely-shared put up on X captures the mentality – and I’m citing the habits, not the individual, as a result of this place is all over the place within the business proper now. The argument: Shoppers don’t need to hear that GEO is “simply search engine optimization repackaged.” Neither does your govt group. Inform them “it’s simply search engine optimization,” and also you’ll be “perceived as a legacy outdated thinker.” You may even be “changed by a GEO company.” The conclusion: “whether or not you prefer it or not… it’s in your greatest curiosity to get aboard the AI practice.”
The argument is just not that GEO works. Not that it measures something significant. Not that it produces higher outcomes for shoppers. The argument is that if you happen to don’t undertake the label, you’ll lose your job.
Ambulance chasing dressed as profession recommendation.
And right here’s what makes search engine optimization professionals extra culpable than the VCs or the engagement farmers: they don’t simply take up the worry. They promote it. They repackage the nervousness about their very own relevance and promote it downstream to shoppers and executives who’re even much less outfitted to judge the claims. The VC creates the narrative. The engagement farmer amplifies it. The search engine optimization skilled walks right into a consumer assembly and says, “You want a GEO technique, otherwise you’ll be invisible to AI,” realizing full effectively they’ll’t outline what meaning in phrases the consumer might confirm.
That is how search engine optimization professionals undermine their very own credibility. Not by being unsuitable concerning the technical shift, however by promoting certainty they don’t have a couple of class they didn’t trouble to confirm, utilizing another person’s terminology to paper over their very own lack of information.
No person held a gun to anybody’s head and stated, “Put GEO in your LinkedIn headline.” search engine optimization professionals are selecting to undertake terminology they haven’t evaluated, from sources they haven’t verified, for instruments they’ll’t validate; after which browsing that very same worry issue into consumer budgets. If the one manner you may promote your experience is by rebranding it each eighteen months, the issue isn’t the label. It’s the arrogance.
The folks most able to evaluating whether or not GEO is an actual self-discipline are the identical folks adopting it quickest. Each hour they spend chasing the vocabulary is an hour not spent constructing the understanding that may make them unimaginable to exchange. I’ve written about how AI is hollowing out the junior pipeline: the apprenticeship layer the place practitioners really be taught judgment. The acronym treadmill accelerates that. It replaces depth with breadth, understanding with terminology, {and professional} improvement with skilled efficiency.
What’s Really Beneath
Strip away the a16z framing, the fabricated memos, and the skilled nervousness, and ask the boring query: what would you really do in a different way if you happen to took GEO critically?
I’ve argued earlier than that grounding is simply retrieval: When an AI system cites a supply, it’s operating a search job, not exercising editorial judgment. Indexing, vector search, relevance scoring. The identical rules we’ve been working with for 20 years, with a generative interface on prime. GEO isn’t a second self-discipline standing alongside search engine optimization. It’s outdated retrieval visibility in a trench coat pretending to be two disciplines. And your information interpretation expertise – perched comfortably atop Mount Dunning-Kruger – don’t trump the clear, demonstrable logic of how a retrieval engine works. For those who can’t clarify why a outcome appeared, you haven’t any enterprise promoting a service that claims to optimize for it.
The a16z put up itself confirms this, maybe by chance. The recommendation it offers manufacturers pursuing GEO is a biggest hits of search engine optimization greatest practices: structured content material, authoritative backlinks (rebranded as “earned media”), schema markup, topical authority. It even recommends “quick, dense, citation-worthy paragraphs” and “particular claims with verifiable numbers” – which is, and I can’t stress this sufficient, simply competent writing.
David McSweeney has been doing search engine optimization since earlier than a few of these GEO startups’ founders graduated. He’s spent years writing about the identical techniques now being repackaged underneath the GEO label (content material freshness, digital PR, neighborhood participation, hyperlink constructing) and has the publication dates to show it. His abstract of the GEO pitch: benefit from the truth that companies don’t perceive AI methods depend on conventional search, and extract extra money from them.
He known as it the grift. I believe that’s beneficiant. A grift implies particular person con artists. That is structural: a class manufactured on the prime, distorted within the center, and adopted on the backside. Not as a result of it describes something new, however as a result of the skilled value of ignoring it feels increased than the skilled value of pretending it’s actual.
You’re Not In The Driver’s Seat
Your job as a reliable skilled is to grasp what these abbreviations really imply, the place they arrive from, and what – if something – they alter about your work.
For those who can clarify to your shoppers and your management what AI methods really do, how they retrieve info, what’s genuinely measurable, and what isn’t – you’ll by no means be in a reactive place. You’ll by no means be the individual scrambling so as to add “GEO” to a slide deck as a result of somebody on X instructed you it was the longer term.
If as a substitute you let your self be dragged round by no matter narrative enterprise capitalists want you to imagine this quarter, you’ll at all times be reacting. One weblog put up away from a method pivot. Shopping for instruments bought by individuals who profit out of your insecurity. That’s a selection. Not a destiny.
The underlying mechanics of how content material will get found – search engine crawler, LLM grounding system, RAG pipeline – haven’t undergone a paradigm shift. The interface has shifted. Customers get solutions synthesized from sources reasonably than an inventory of hyperlinks.
However “the interface modified” doesn’t promote software program. “Every part you recognize is out of date and also you want our dashboard” does.
Observe The Cash
a16z advantages as a result of the GEO narrative creates demand for his or her portfolio corporations. The device startups profit as a result of the narrative creates their market. The engagement farmers profit as a result of fabricated memos drive impressions. The businesses that rebrand as “GEO specialists” profit as a result of they’ll cost extra for a similar companies with a shinier label.
Who doesn’t profit? The practitioners doing stable, foundational work. These folks don’t want a brand new acronym. They want the business to cease mistaking advertising for methodology.
And the shoppers. The shoppers are the place the worry chain terminates, and the invoices start. A brand new line merchandise for work that ought to have been taking place already underneath the search engine optimization retainer, or that may’t be reliably measured within the first place. The VC manufactures the class. The search engine optimization skilled absorbs it and marks it up. The consumer pays for it. A sport of phone the place the invoice lands on the final individual within the room who doesn’t communicate the language.
I’ve written individually concerning the measurement drawback with these instruments – the non-determinism, the hole between parametric and retrieved information, the dashboards constructed on methodological sand. The instruments a16z promotes in that weblog put up have the identical structural limitations. The dashboards look nice. The numbers transfer. Whether or not the numbers imply something is a query no one promoting the dashboard has an incentive to reply.
In the meantime, the precise disaster will get no airtime. Natural search site visitors throughout main U.S. publishers dropped 42% after AI Overviews expanded. Rankings didn’t change. Site visitors did. That’s the true drawback. Not which three-letter acronym to place in your slide deck, however the truth that the financial mannequin underpinning content material manufacturing on the open internet is breaking. GEO doesn’t handle that. It doesn’t even faux to. It simply offers everybody one thing to be busy with whereas the ground drops out.
The cycle time is getting shorter. We went from “AEO” to “GEO” in about eighteen months. Give it one other 12 months, and there’ll be one other acronym, one other VC weblog put up, one other fabricated memo, and one other spherical of execs making an attempt to determine whether or not the newest three letters are price placing on their LinkedIn headline.
Or you may simply do good work and perceive what you’re doing effectively sufficient to clarify it with out borrowed terminology. However I suppose that doesn’t have the identical ring to it on a pitch deck.
Extra Sources:
This put up was initially revealed on The Inference.
Featured Picture: Summit Artwork Creations/Shutterstock
