Why "Good SEO is Good GEO" is a Dangerous Myth: The Reality of Optimization in the AI Era

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, recently declared that "Good SEO is good GEO." It is a comforting sentiment, meant to reassure marketers that their decades of accumulated knowledge are still perfectly applicable in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

While there is a kernel of truth to this in a utopian sense, we fundamentally disagree.

Equating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is not just inaccurate — it is delusional and potentially harmful to your brand’s visibility. Below, we explore why "working" SEO often actively works against GEO, and how much overlap between SEO and GEO truly exists.

The "Working" SEO Trap: Optimization Over Substance

To understand the conflict, we must look at how traditional search engines select winners. For years, Google’s algorithms have prioritized optimized content over potentially good content.

If your content is the most insightful in the industry but lacks specific optimization, you may not appear even on the second page. Conversely, mediocre content often ranks #1 because it plays the game better.

The Game of (Thrones) Traditional SEO

In the current landscape, "Good SEO" often means manipulating the system rather than serving the user. This involves:

• Aggressive Keyword Insertion: Forcing specific phrases into places they don't naturally fit.
  You’ve seen this. A sentence reads, "If you are looking for ‘best plumber New York cheap price’, we are here." It sounds like a broken robot, but Google’s crawler loves the exact match, so it ranks.
• Purchased Backlinks: artificially inflating authority.
  A massive SaaS company pays a broker to get a link on a random "Mom & Pop Gardening" blog. The link to their project management software is hidden in a paragraph about tomatoes. It makes zero semantic sense, but the "link juice" passes, and their domain authority grows.
• Chaotic Internal Linking: Using exact-match anchor text regardless of context.
  You link the word "apple" (referring to the fruit in a diet article) to a category page for Apple Smartphones. You do this unintentionally because your new plugin does this automatically, trying to pass as much power to the tech page as possible. It confuses the user, but it works for the crawler.
• Weaponized "Negative" SEO: The system is so reliant on signals that it can be used as a weapon.
  Imagine you write a great article that hits #1. A competitor with a bigger budget doesn't just try to outrank you; they pay for thousands of "toxic" backlinks (like from gambling or adult sites) to point at your article. Google sees the spam, assumes you are cheating, and penalizes you. You disappear from the results without doing anything wrong.

In the game of traditional SEO, algorithms are rigid filters. This lack of advanced semantic understanding made it easy for bigger market players to win simply by having the budget to hire a marketing team, purchase extensions, buy backlinks, and mathematically force their way to the top of the SERP.

How GEO Breaks the Corrupted Cycle of Content

Luckily, Generative Engine Optimization is not like that. It operates on a completely different framework. AI models do not count backlinks or keyword density; they analyze semantic logic and trust.

The tactics that still define the working SEO often act as poison for AI models.

The Hallucination Problem

Let's revisit the "Apple" example.

• In SEO: Linking "apple" (fruit) to "Apple" (iPhone) is a clever equity-passing trick.
• In GEO: This is a semantic contradiction. When an AI analyzes your site structure to formulate an answer, it sees a link connecting a biological fruit to a consumer electronic. The AI gets confused. To avoid "hallucinating" (providing false info), it simply chooses not to cite you.

Ideal vs. Reality

The good news is that "good SEO" still means purely organic backlinks, perfectly semantic anchor text, and natural language.

The bad news is that this ideal world doesn't exist. If you play by "ideal" rules, you lose to competitors using "working" rules (aggressive optimization).

This is where the phrase "Good SEO is Good GEO" falls apart.

AI is sophisticated. It analyzes content for novelty and logic rather than the depth of technical optimization. It breaks the cycle where the biggest budget wins, leveling the playing field for those with genuine expertise.

Information Gain: Why Skyscrapers Fall in GEO

What has been the golden rule of SEO for the last decade? "Create better content." In practice, however, this usually meant the "Skyscraper Technique": take the top 3 ranking articles, rewrite them, combine their points, and publish a "new" article.

• Result: A unique string of words that offers zero new value.
• SEO Outcome: You rank because the content is more "comprehensive" than the three articles it is based on.

The Thesaurus Trap

In the AI era, the definition of "unique" has shifted dramatically. Rewriting existing ideas using different words is what we call the Thesaurus Trap.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on the entire internet. If your article merely repeats what is already in their training data (even if rewritten), the AI has no reason to cite you. It already "knows" that information.

GEO requires Information Gain. To be cited by AI, you must provide something semantically unique — data, opinions, or angles that none of your competitors are writing about. AI is smart enough to detect a rewrite and decline it. It seeks the source of the new idea, not the aggregator.

However, a shifting definition of what is truly 'unique' is just the first crack in the foundation. The argument that "Good SEO is Good GEO" truly unravels when we move from content strategies to the technical execution.

Tactical Divergence: Where GEO is Not SEO

To prove that GEO and SEO are different disciplines, let’s look at the tactics they use. The structural requirements for a Large Language Model (LLM) often directly contradict the best practices for a search crawler.

Consider the rigid constraints of metadata. For years, SEO specialists have been trained to treat meta descriptions like haikus, strictly keeping titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 160 to prevent truncation in Google’s search snippets. The goal was visual cleanliness and Click-Through Rate (CTR). 

Generative Engines, however, don't just scan the visual snippet; they read the underlying code. In the world of GEO, those short, punchy descriptions often fail to give the AI enough context to determine if your content is the authoritative answer. 

To win in GEO, you need descriptive, context-heavy metadata that explains the substance of the page — a practice that traditional SEO would flag as "too long."

The same divergence applies to headings. The "best" SEO practice dictates that you insert high-volume keywords into your H2s and H3s based on data from tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. 

But GEO requires you to ignore the search volume and focus on the conversation. Real people ask AI complex, nuanced questions. Your headings should mirror these natural language queries to bridge the gap between user intent and AI comprehension, even if traditional keyword tools show those phrases have "zero search volume."

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. To fully illustrate why "working" SEO and "working" GEO are fundamentally different disciplines, we’ve broken down the key technical practices side-by-side below.

How Much Overlap Between SEO and GEO: Side-by-Side Comparison

To learn more about SEO vs. GEO, follow this link: The Ultimate Guide to Search vs. Generative Engine Optimization.

Is SEO Deprecated? The Hybrid Future

Does this mean SEO is dead? Not at all.

We are entering a hybrid era. Your customers function non-linearly. They may start a search in ChatGPT to get a summary, and then go to Google to verify a specific product or price.

The New Reality: "Good SEO is not Good GEO" and will never be. SEO and GEO will coexist, but they serve different masters.

While some specialists predict SEO will become a legacy practice, we believe both remain vital. However, if you want to future-proof your business, you must shift your primary focus to GEO.

Winning on Google while remaining invisible on ChatGPT is a hollow victory. But why is this loss of visibility so important, even if we accept that AI answers often yield zero traffic to your site? You can explore the hidden value behind this phenomenon here: The End of the "Messy Middle".

Final Words: "Good SEO is not Good GEO"

It is time to stop pretending that optimizing for a 20-year-old crawler is the same as optimizing for a modern neural network. The mantra "Good SEO is Good GEO" is not just a simplification — it is a fallacy.

Think of the fundamental difference in the objective:

• SEO is a popularity contest. It is about convincing a robot that your page is important because others are pointing at it. It relies on external signals and rigid formatting.
• GEO is a credibility test. It is about convincing a synthetic intelligence that your content is the answer. It relies on semantic trust, logical structure, and pure information gain.

Trying to play both games manually — satisfying the rigid technical rules of the past while meeting the high-context demands of the future — is an overwhelming challenge that breaks traditional marketing teams.

To succeed, you need to automate the heavy lifting of these complex workflows. This is where Genixly comes in.

Genixly is the AI-native control plane for ecommerce. It allows you to automate not just your GEO strategies, but your entire workflow, ensuring you stay visible in both the ten blue links and the generative answers of the future.

Start automating your visibility with Genixly today

FAQ: The Real Gap Between SEO and GEO