The race is on to crack visibility in AI search, but many brands are mistaking a new interface for an entirely new discipline.
Consumers are increasingly turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) for buying advice, with the World Economic Forum reporting that 23% of people aged 18-39 have used an AI agent when shopping in the past twelve months.
Brands are scrambling to understand how they can appear more prominently in this changing consumer journey. New disciplines, including Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), have emerged, promising to help brands secure their place in AI-generated responses.
In a desire to gain commercial advantage, brands have rushed to these techniques. But despite some of the promises made by newly anointed GEO gurus, the reality is much less revolutionary than many would have you believe.
The fundamentals still do most of the work
The prevailing narrative is that AI has already fundamentally re-written the rules of search. But most evidence points in the opposite direction.
Currently, the signals that appear to influence visibility in LLMs are the same that have underpinned SEO success for years. Technical performance, content quality and brand recognition all remain central to how brands are discovered online.
These traditional optimisation techniques still do most of the heavy lifting, because AI models evaluate the same credentials that search engines do. Strong copy remains one of the clearest differentiators, especially with AI-generated content becoming more common. AI still favours results with third-party mentions, established credibility, and demonstrated expertise in a particular subject area.
SEO has always been a discipline where multiple factors work together, and rarely can an individual change be isolated as the reason for success.
The same principle applies to GEO. Visibility in AI search is unlikely to come from one single tactic. Instead, it will be the result of strong fundamentals combined with thoughtful experimentation.
This means brands that have spent years building authority through helpful content and strong websites are already in a strong position to appear in LLMs, versus those attempting to engineer visibility through AI-specific tactics alone.
The consumer interface may have changed, but the web foundations remain largely the same.
Not every GEO tactic deserves the hype
While traditional methods of optimisation do most of the heavy lifting, this doesn’t mean GEO should be ignored altogether. There are several emerging tactics that appear to increase the chances of being cited in an LLM including adapting content and site structures to make them easier for AI systems to interpret and surface.
Schema mark-up, which sits in the website backend and provides additional context for search crawlers, is becoming increasingly valuable as it seems to help AI systems understand information more clearly. FAQ schema and other structured formats can segment information into digestible sections that are easier for AI tools to reference and reuse.
Third party references are also becoming increasingly important. AI systems frequently synthesise information from multiple sources, meaning mentions in news coverage, industry rankings and expert round-ups strengthen a brand’s presence in generated responses. Discussions on Reddit, forums and even YouTube comment sections are also appearing regularly in AI-generated answers, creating new opportunities for brands to build visibility beyond their own websites.
At the same time, some of the industry’s newest GEO tactics are likely being oversold.
Site crawlers like robots.txt are starting to be presented as essential for visibility. The issue is that there is a lack of evidence that major LLM providers consistently honour these instructions. Many marketers are implementing them on the assumption that they influence AI behaviour, but it’s still a guessing game at this point.
Claims of guaranteed GEO success should be treated with caution. Right now, AI search is the Wild West. There are promising signals and some emerging best practices, but very few certainties.
GEO should complement SEO, not replace it
It is clear search will become more AI-driven. Zero-click searches are already reducing the number of visits many websites receive, particularly from informational queries. It’s not difficult to imagine a future where users complete much more of their journey within AI interfaces and search results pages themselves. The temptation for brands to shift budgets away from traditional SEO towards newer AI-focused services is obvious. But brands should not treat GEO as a replacement for established search strategies yet. Although there are promising techniques emerging, the fundamentals of SEO are still as important as they’ve ever been.
And even if a fully AI-powered search future arrives, the core principles of discoverability are unlikely to change. Brands still need authority, trust, useful content and a strong reputation. The popular acronyms might change, but the foundations of good search practice will remain the same.
