GEO Was Invented On Sand Hill Road

I’ve been placing this one off.

Not as a result of the argument is difficult to make – it isn’t – however as a result of the habits it’s about has been a fixture of the website positioning trade for so long as I’ve labored in it. The shiny new object arrives, the FOMO kicks in, the convention decks replace, and a whole skilled class reshuffles its vocabulary to match no matter acronym landed that quarter. I wrote lately about how AI content scaling is just content spinning with better 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 attempting to call it. It was manufactured upstream – by enterprise capital, amplified by engagement farming, and adopted by professionals whose main motivation isn’t “that is actual” however “I can’t afford to appear to be I’m not maintaining.”

So right here we’re.

The Funding Thesis

In Might 2025, Andreessen Horowitz printed a weblog publish titled “How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Rules of Search.” It appeared of their enterprise e-newsletter, written by two a16z companions, Zach Cohen and Seema Amble. Public, on their web site, obtainable to anybody with a browser.

The publish declared that the “$80 billion+ website positioning 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 publish from the agency’s official account: “website positioning is slowly shedding its dominance. Welcome to GEO.”

Additionally: a16z is an investor in Profound.

The weblog publish 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 publish 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 one Checks The Supply

Ten months later, in March 2026, someone on X described the weblog publish as “a 34-page inner memo” that a16z had “quietly printed” 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 visitors in 12 months.” I’m not within the particular person. This publish is certainly one of a whole lot following the identical sample, and the sample is what issues.

None of that is actual.

The weblog publish isn’t 34 pages. It isn’t inner. It wasn’t quietly printed. The particular opening line and the 34% stat don’t seem within the precise piece. You may confirm this your self proper now.

This isn’t a16z’s doing. An engagement farmer discovered an previous weblog publish and repackaged it with fictional scaffolding as a result of that format performs higher on social media. A “leaked inner 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 examine whether or not the memo existed. Why would they? The narrative was too good.

Two unbiased forces – a VC agency doing commonplace narrative-building, and an engagement farmer doing commonplace engagement farming – converge on the identical consequence. The VC seeds the class. The farmer, months later, independently amplifies a distorted model. Professionals take up the distortion as a result of no person goes again to examine the first supply.

Not coordination. Convergence. And a class turns into “actual” with out anyone establishing that it’s.

The Prepared Contributors

VCs and engagement farmers can’t take all of the credit score. website positioning professionals are probably the most culpable hyperlink within the chain.

One widely-shared publish on X captures the mentality – and I’m citing the habits, not the particular person, as a result of this place is in all places within the trade proper now. The argument: Shoppers don’t wish to hear that GEO is “simply website positioning repackaged.” Neither does your govt group. Inform them “it’s simply website positioning,” 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 finest curiosity to get aboard the AI prepare.”

The argument just isn’t that GEO works. Not that it measures something significant. Not that it produces higher outcomes for shoppers. The argument is that when you don’t undertake the label, you’ll lose your job.

Ambulance chasing dressed as profession recommendation.

And right here’s what makes website positioning professionals extra culpable than the VCs or the engagement farmers: they don’t simply take up the concern. 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 geared up to judge the claims. The VC creates the narrative. The engagement farmer amplifies it. The website positioning skilled walks right into a consumer assembly and says, “You want a GEO technique, otherwise you’ll be invisible to AI,” figuring out full nicely they’ll’t outline what which means in phrases the consumer may confirm.

That is how website positioning professionals undermine their very own credibility. Not by being fallacious concerning the technical shift, however by promoting certainty they don’t have a few class they didn’t trouble to confirm, utilizing another person’s terminology to paper over their very own lack of information.

No one held a gun to anybody’s head and stated, “Put GEO in your LinkedIn headline.” website positioning 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 concern issue into consumer budgets. If the one manner you possibly can promote your experience is by rebranding it each eighteen months, the issue isn’t the label. It’s the boldness.

The individuals most able to evaluating whether or not GEO is an actual self-discipline are the identical individuals adopting it quickest. Each hour they spend chasing the vocabulary is an hour not spent constructing the understanding that may make them inconceivable to exchange. I’ve written about how AI is hollowing out the junior pipeline: the apprenticeship layer the place practitioners truly study 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 truly do otherwise when you took GEO critically?

I’ve argued earlier than that grounding is just retrieval: When an AI system cites a supply, it’s working a search process, not exercising editorial judgment. Indexing, vector search, relevance scoring. The identical ideas we’ve been working with for twenty years, with a generative interface on prime. GEO isn’t a second self-discipline standing alongside website positioning. It’s previous 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. When you can’t clarify why a consequence appeared, you don’t have any enterprise promoting a service that claims to optimize for it.

The a16z publish itself confirms this, maybe unintentionally. The recommendation it offers manufacturers pursuing GEO is a best hits of website positioning finest 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 not stress this sufficient, simply competent writing.

David McSweeney has been doing website positioning since earlier than a few of these GEO startups’ founders graduated. He’s spent years writing about the identical ways now being repackaged below the GEO label (content material freshness, digital PR, neighborhood participation, hyperlink constructing) and has the publication dates to prove it. His abstract of the GEO pitch: make the most of the truth that companies don’t perceive AI programs depend on conventional search, and extract extra money from them.

He known as it the grift. I feel 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 truly imply, the place they arrive from, and what – if something – they modify about your work.

When you can clarify to your shoppers and your management what AI programs truly do, how they retrieve data, 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 particular person scrambling so as to add “GEO” to a slide deck as a result of somebody on X informed you it was the longer term.

If as an alternative you let your self be dragged round by no matter narrative enterprise capitalists want you to consider this quarter, you’ll all the time be reacting. One weblog publish away from a technique pivot. Shopping for instruments offered 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 moderately than a listing of hyperlinks.

However “the interface modified” doesn’t promote software program. “All the pieces you already know is out of date and also you want our dashboard” does.

Comply with The Cash

a16z advantages as a result of the GEO narrative creates demand for his or her portfolio corporations. The software startups profit as a result of the narrative creates their market. The engagement farmers profit as a result of fabricated memos drive impressions. The companies 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 strong, foundational work. These individuals don’t want a brand new acronym. They want the trade to cease mistaking advertising and marketing for methodology.

And the shoppers. The shoppers are the place the concern chain terminates, and the invoices start. A brand new line merchandise for work that ought to have been occurring already below the website positioning retainer, or that may’t be reliably measured within the first place. The VC manufactures the class. The website positioning skilled absorbs it and marks it up. The consumer pays for it. A recreation of phone the place the invoice lands on the final particular person 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 publish have the identical structural limitations. The dashboards look great. The numbers move. Whether or not the numbers imply something is a query no person promoting the dashboard has an incentive to reply.

In the meantime, the precise disaster will get no airtime. Natural search visitors throughout main U.S. publishers dropped 42% after AI Overviews expanded. Rankings didn’t change. Site visitors did. That’s the actual drawback. Not which three-letter acronym to place in your slide deck, however the truth that the economic model underpinning content production on the open internet is breaking. GEO doesn’t handle that. It doesn’t even fake to. It simply offers everybody one thing to be busy with while the floor drops out.

The cycle time is getting shorter. We went from “AEO” to “GEO” in about eighteen months. Give it one other yr, and there’ll be one other acronym, one other VC weblog publish, one other fabricated memo, and one other spherical of execs attempting to resolve whether or not the most recent three letters are value placing on their LinkedIn headline.

Or you might simply do good work and perceive what you’re doing nicely 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 publish was initially printed on The Inference.

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