Why don’t you need a magic geo-hack
By Enrique Dans | Published: 2025-10-29 18:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
You might remember this, if you’re old enough: In 2002, search engine optimization (SEO) went from a technical curiosity to a full-fledged industry. Suddenly, agencies, consultants and “black hat magicians” appeared overnight, offering tricks and hacks to get brands to the first page of search results.
Today, we stand at the dawn of the next wave – what some call generative engine optimization (GEO), response engine optimization (AEO), or simply artificial intelligence engine optimization (AIO). The logic is similar: make your brand visible… but the stakes are higher, the rules are murkier, and the risks are much more structural.
Imagine a world where users no longer click on search results, but instead ask an AI assistant in natural language: “What is the best CRM for a small startup?” The answer appears on your CRM instantly. No links, no pages, just a response. Brands that hope to matter should not only be ranked, but mentioned, cited, trusted and recommended before that user ever visits their site.
This transformation is real. Some articles say that GEO is “Get your brand noticed and accurately represented in AI-generated answers“, talk about how they are “rewriting the rules of online shopping”, or advise brands that “AEO is the future of search engine optimization (SEO)..”
But here lies the danger. If SEO’s past is any guide, we’re headed toward a new playground of snake oil and shortcuts. You will soon see the emergence of “GEO Specialists”, “AI Optimization Gurus” and “Non-Click Quantitative Marketing” workshops. Brands will chase algorithms that no one fully understands, pay for tools that promise to “put you inside the answer box,” and invest in technologies whose mechanics are opaque even to those selling them.
I should know. I’ve been posting daily for decades and haven’t licensed it under copyright, however Copyleft (Creative Commons Attribution), is open to anyone, including AI companies, to use, repurpose, or analyze. My reward? I stand broadly well in the age of the AI assistant because I keep my content open, clear, organized, and unobtrusive. I don’t rely on tricks. My brand (in this case my name) is simply known, cited and relied upon. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other chatbots knew me well when I first asked them who I was, or what my thoughts were, in 2022. That’s the real lesson.
The perfect storm is approaching
Here is the alignment of the forces: Â
- AI assistants and answer engines now mediate the discovery: Traditional search traffic is already declining
- Brands realize that a #1 rating isn’t enough: it has to be The answer. AEO guides emphasize “being the response.”Â
- Agencies and vendors are sensing new revenue streams: “AI Brand Visibility” measurement tools and dashboards tracking “Mentions in ChatGPT” promise access to this new ecosystem.
- Algorithmic opacity means how You mentioned things. Is your brand cited because you are the best or because you paid? The mechanics are hidden
- The consequences of getting it wrong are real: you can invest heavily, only to find that your brand is absent in AI answers while competitors dominate the mention space.
If history repeats itself, this could be an SEO 2.0 disaster: an industry of quick fixes, questionable tactics, and brands locked into dependence on channels they don’t control.
What brands He should Do instead
Here’s the counter-advice: simple, logical, and future-proof
- Create content that is open, structured, and authoritative.
Don’t lock your content behind barriers. Ensure it is accessible, clearly written and designed for easy machine reading (headings, bulleted lists, outline where appropriate). Brands optimized for AI answers are not hidden or confusing; They are empowering - Make sure your brand is citable, not just linkable.
SEO taught us backlinks. GEO/AEO teaches us signals – in articles, industry lists, datasets, and official partners, in places that are as open and accessible as possible. AI engines prefer earned media over brand-owned content. - Avoid “deceptive” agencies that chase black box signals.
If someone offers you a “geo shortcut” or “AI answer box hack,” ask them: What is the mechanism? What transparency do you offer? Models evolve. You’re betting on infrastructure you don’t have if you rely on opaque tactics - Combining the foundation of SEO with GEO awareness.
These are not separate marketing silos. Strong SEO is still important: fast site, good authority, clear content. But now you need to overlay the GEO mindset: how the AI will interpret, summarize, and cite your content before a user visits it. Think of it as ensuring your brand enters the conversation - Monitor and adapt, don’t improve once and forget.
Unlike traditional search results, AI answers are evolving. Updating models, shifting data sources, and adopting RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) helpers. Brands should treat vision as an ongoing feedback loop, not a one-time project.
Cautionary tale
Remember when brands bought bulk link packages in 2010, thinking it would guarantee a #1 Google ranking? Many saw a bump, and then a collapse, when the algorithm changed. GEO can repeat this cycle: A brand invests in “AI vision tools,” sees short-term gains, then is penalized or overwhelmed as the models adjust.
But the biggest risk is dependence. If your brand presence becomes entirely mediated by an ecosystem you don’t control – for example, a chatbot that puts you in the answer box – you lose control of your narrative. It becomes a commodity subject to the platform’s rules
Human scale advantage
Here’s the good news: You don’t need a “magic geo-hack.” You just need authenticity, clarity and openness. My own case (and many similar cases) proves this. I published every day, was publicly licensed, and structured clearly—not for the sake of the algorithm, but for the sake of readers and machines alike.
Brands that follow the same logic will create meaningful content, make it accessible, and make it citable. Not only will they avoid the GEO trap; They will also thrive in the age of artificial intelligence. Because as models evolve, and as assistants engage with your content, the brands they cite first will be the ones built on trust, not gimmicks.
GEO, AEO, and AIO are the next frontier, but they don’t require abbreviations. It requires doing the basics better. Avoid the hype, the witches, and the quick fix salesmen. Do what’s proven: publish well, open your content, and let the engines (and your audience) do the rest.
Because the worst thing you can improve is the algorithm. The best thing you can improve is To be known.
The early deadline for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 PM PT. Apply today.
(Tags for translation)AI
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
