GEO is a CMO Problem. Not an SEO Problem.

GEO is a strategic problem at the executive level more than an SEO problem at the operational level. I'm going to explain all of this below, so lock in 🔒

There’s a common misconception that GEO is a technical problem.

Just scroll through LinkedIn or X for 30 seconds and you’ll find the next viral GEO hack.

Like “create an AI info page” so LLMs can easily understand your brand!

Or maybe “create markdown versions of your content” to skyrocket AI visibility!

Or perhaps “get an automated Claude audit” that scans your robots.txt and automatically generates an LLMs.txt file for you!

Most widely promoted GEO tactics have marginal impact

Just search [GEO tactics for LLM visibility] and you’ll see the same tired ideas.

The recommendations below are not necessarily wrong, they are just overly basic table stakes.

Of course, marketers have misinterpreted this advice and taken these ideas to extremes.

Useless FAQ insertions

Google’s own documentation recommends implementing FAQs with schema.

But all the hype around FAQs for GEO has caused brands to make poor choices regarding the FAQ selection within their content.

Instead of answering questions that actually matter, they end up slapping useless questions at the bottom of the page because they think it “helps with GEO.”

Meanwhile it accomplishes nothing for the end user. Here is one such example:

Putting “key takeaways” at the top of every article

Another glorified tactic that is not inherently bad, but the upside is overhyped.

Short answer summaries can improve readability for humans, but there is no strong public evidence that a “key takeaways” block materially improves AI visibility on its own.

Over-formatting pages for “LLM readability”

This would be things like forcing every page into rigid Q&A patterns, stuffing bullet summaries between every section, and jamming HTML tables into sections where they don’t make sense.

Marketers assume LLMs need heavy formatting assistance in order to retrieve content, so they resort to copywriting tricks like “chunking” which can overcomplicate the editorial process.

Chasing Reddit for GEO

Marketers are obsessed with chasing Reddit for GEO, and it’s causing brands to spam Reddit.

This is bad for countless reasons already outlined by Eli Schwartz but it further supports the argument that GEO is not a technical problem.

Reddit represents the voice of real people, and that’s why moderators are vigilantly hunting down inauthentic activity from marketers like astroturfing or “SEO shaping” on threads where software evaluation is happening.

GEO is a brand positioning problem

GEO is a strategic problem at the executive level more than it is an SEO problem at the operational level.

The biggest GEO upside doesn’t come from technical optimization – but rather, the coordination of brand positioning, messaging, and reputation management across on-site and off-site channels.

Everyone assumes the SEO team should be 100% responsible for all aspects of GEO, meanwhile they only control a limited portion of how LLMs form their opinion of a brand.

Ross Hudgens made a recent post describing this very problem. If all of these sources don’t align to a consistent narrative, it’s going to be challenging for LLMs to arrive at a consensus regarding your brand.

GEO is a category alignment problem

Let’s examine [best AI SDR agents] where Coldreach has the #1 ranking position with an AI citation.

Despite high web ranking plus earning the URL citation, there is no recommendation for their brand regarding best AI SDR agents.

This tactic worked phenomenally well during the traditional SEO golden era when rankings and clicks were the goal.

AI being the great normalizer has reduced the effectiveness of this playbook dramatically.

Listicles won’t brute force your brand into AI recommendations

The main difference between SEO vs GEO is that you can’t bulldoze your way into brand recommendations for a topic your brand lacks recognition for.

We just saw that above with the best AI SDR agents example.

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Check out this AI Overview, where the URL citations are earned by Exabeam, SpyCloud and Pathlock.

None of these brands are recommended in the answer summary, yet they are all deploying listicles.

AI is the great neutralizer of this tactic, since it just scrapes and summarizes their listicles and recommends every other brand.

This is another reason why reporting on “citations” as a GEO success metric is a failure in isolation, given that there is no corresponding brand recommendation.

Instead, the AI overview recommends the brands that actually deserve to be there, such as Teramind, Proofpoint, DTEX, etc.

Most brands have no idea how they’re actually represented across LLMs

Despite an unavoidable element of randomness in AI answers, companies should reverse engineer how LLMs are piecing together information about their brand.

Starting with bottom of funnel prompts like:

What’s the best [category] solution for an enterprise B2B company in the [industry] with [features] – then evaluate the answers and sources systematically.

New research from Kevin Indig found that web search position has the biggest impact on LLM citation rate.

This is further validation that GEO is fundamentally connected to traditional SEO because LLMs rely on web search (grounding) to generate answer summaries, especially bottom of funnel queries pertaining to product evaluation.

The key takeaway is that if your pages are not ranking highly in traditional SEO, 3rd parties and external websites may control the narrative about your brand.

Most high volume, high competition categories are dominated by 3rd parties

It’s useful to understand which product categories are dominated by 3rd parties versus 1st party so that you can prioritize marketing efforts accordingly.

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In this example, the brand recommendation rate is around 90% meanwhile the citation rate is around 15%.

This suggests the brand is well covered across 3rd party pages where LLMs are extracting relevant information.

If we examine the SERP, it’s evident that 3rd party sources are driving the overwhelming majority of citations.

Citations are coming from affiliates like Business.com, CurrentWare, PC Mag, Gartner and other grounding sources.

The key takeaway is that if your brand wants to compete in high volume categories you may be forced to play the affiliate game.

What all of this means for marketers

Technical website hygiene still matters. If you have a vibe coded, JavaScript heavy website with poor internal linking and flat architecture you’re unlikely to perform well in GEO.

Things like XML sitemaps, page indexing, site taxonomy and internal linking structure are still crucial for RAG and training data ingestion.

However, these are the fundamental pillars of SEO that only create the foundation for GEO to be built upon, rather than accelerating GEO itself.

GEO is a brand positioning and category alignment exercise more than a technical SEO audit.

Questions marketers should be asking about GEO:

• Are LLMs actually recommending our brand, or only citing our pages?

• When our brand appears in AI answers, what category is it bucketed into? And is that the category we want to own?

• Do LLMs associate our brand with the right buyer, use case, and problem set? Or are they grouping us with legacy competitors?

• Are third party sites, review platforms, Reddit threads, and analyst pages shaping more of our AI visibility than our own content?

• Is there a consistent positioning narrative across our homepage, product pages, comparative content, review websites and 3rd party affiliates?

• Are we trying to force visibility with listicles and formatting tricks instead of earning recommendation status through market and category alignment?

• Do we know which prompts matter most at the bottom of the funnel, and have we tested how our brand appears for those prompts?

• Within our flagship category, are AI answers being shaped mostly by first party sites or by affiliates and review platforms?

• If third parties dominate the category, do we have a plan to earn stronger coverage there?

• What is the role of YouTube in our niche? How often does YouTube influence LLM answers and are we represented there?

• Are we publishing content that actually helps buyers understand our positioning and differentiators?

• Or are we just adding FAQ blocks and “key takeaways” because it looks like productive GEO work?

• What outdated, inaccurate, or weak brand associations keep resurfacing in AI answers? Which team owns fixing those associations once we find them?

Stop chasing GEO hacks

The core GEO problem to solve is whether LLMs believe your brand belongs in the answer or not.

LLMs need to arrive at a consensus about your brand which is shaped by reputation, category alignment, and repeated confirmation across the web.

Technical SEO provides the base layer foundation, but it does not help LLMs form a conclusion about your brand’s positioning in the market.

The bigger opportunity is to align messaging across every surface that influences how LLMs interpret your brand and why it deserves to be recommended.

That means GEO is not a siloed optimization problem, but rather an ecosystem visibility problem.

It’s time to stop chasing GEO hacks, because AI is neutralizing ineffective and outdated techniques once and for all.