@tjrobertson52

When people hear that I do SEO, they often ask, what about GEO? Do you also do GEO? Or people will come to me and they'll say, I already have someone to do my SEO.

I'm looking for someone to do GEO or AI optimization. And I always say, sure, I do what you're referring to as GEO, but I just call it SEO. And my guess is within a year, we'll all just be calling it SEO.

But that's not because nothing has changed. You'll hear a lot of SEO saying that the strategies for ranking in AI search are exactly the same as the strategies for ranking in traditional search, that by doing traditional SEO, you're doing everything necessary for GEO. These are people who are not keeping up with SEO.

So I'm gonna explain exactly how it's changed. But first, why don't I like the term GEO? The term GEO implies that traditional SEO is still a thing, and now there's this new thing you also need to do called GEO.

However, from my perspective, the way that we search for and find information is changing, and SEO just needs to change along with it. Right now, we're in this awkward transition phase where when you do a search online, you'll get some mixture of an AI response and traditional search results. My prediction is that by the end of 2026, it's just gonna be AI search.

And by that, I don't mean that Google won't be showing you links to websites. I think sometimes links to websites are still useful, but they won't be showing you the raw search results from a traditional search engine. I think the entire response will be generated by AI.

And maybe my timeline's off, maybe it's one or two years away, but we know this is coming. Google's already made it very clear. And so if we're moving into a world where all search is AI search, then that's what SEO is.

SEO is all the things you do to get recomm

it very clear. And so if we're moving into a world where all search is AI search, then that's what SEO is. SEO is all the things you do to get recommended in AI search.

We don't need a separate term for that. If you're doing SEO and you aren't focused on AI search, I would say you aren't doing SEO, at least not for much longer. You're doing traditional SEO or legacy SEO.

It's similar, sure, but it would be like someone in 2020 using SEO tactics from 2005 and calling it SEO. Okay, but what do you mean, TJ? How is it different?

I have a lot of videos going through the differences in details, but I'll give you the gist. In traditional SEO, a user is interacting directly with the search engine. They're typing in a query, and an algorithm is returning about 10 results.

The user is then going to click on one or two of those websites before they get the information they need to make a decision. Typically, they're only going to look at the top three results. It was a big decision.

They might do a few follow up searches, but typically it's just the one. In AI search, whether it's ChatGPT or Google's AI mode, a human never interacts directly with the search engine. Instead, it's the AI interacting with the search engine.

The human enters a query or a prompt or an entire conversation. Then the AI does its best to break down the intent of that human, then does a search in a traditional search engine. But instead of searching for one broad competitive term, it's often searching for three to 12 very specific, less competitive terms.

And instead of looking at one or two websites in the top three results, it'll often look at hundreds of websites in the top 20 results of each of those searches. For that reason, ranking in AI search is actually really easy. As long as you have an ounce

websites in the top 20 results of each of those searches. For that reason, ranking in AI search is actually really easy. As long as you have an ounce of authority and you have content that's somewhat relevant for one of those dozen searches, you can easily be one of the hundreds of pages that surfaced.

But ranking's not what matters in AI search. It's getting recommended. Of the hundreds of pages that the AI reviews, it's only going to site a few of them.

It's gonna try to determine which of these pages are most trustworthy and relevant to the user's query. And it's gonna retrieve not the entire page, but just one passage from that page and pull it back into the context window of the conversation. And ultimately, the only thing that matters is that your brand is recommended as a solution in that passage.

That's what SEO is now, or at least what it will be very soon. If you aren't doing that, you aren't doing SEO, at least not for much longer.