There is a particular smell to a gold rush, and I have smelled it twice now. The first time was around 2011, when "social media expert" became a job title that people put on business cards without irony, and every agency in a fifty-mile radius suddenly had a Social Media Practice, staffed by people who had, three weeks earlier, been doing something else. The second time is right now, and the word on the business cards is GEO.
Generative Engine Optimization. Or AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, if you prefer the other acronym, and there are now enough competing acronyms that the acronyms themselves are a tell. This month alone I watched agencies announce "AI search certifications," launch "AEO frameworks," and publish frameworks-about-the-frameworks, all of it delivered in the confident, declarative tone of people who have cracked a code. They have not cracked a code. There is no code yet. That is the entire problem, and nobody selling GEO wants to say it out loud, so I will: nobody has real data, and every GEO strategy currently on the market is guesswork wearing the costume of expertise.
What We Actually Know
Let me be precise about the state of knowledge, because precision is the first casualty of a gold rush. Here is what we genuinely know about how large language models decide what to cite when they answer a question: almost nothing, and what little we think we know changes every time a model gets retrained, which is constantly.
We do not have a Search Console for ChatGPT. We do not have rank tracking for Perplexity that means anything stable, because the same query asked twice can return different sources, different phrasings, different everything, depending on factors we cannot see and the model cannot explain. We do not have a documented ranking system, because there isn't one in the sense that SEO people mean the term. There is a training corpus, a retrieval layer that changes, a system prompt we never see, and a sampling temperature that introduces literal randomness into the output. You cannot optimize for randomness. You can only pretend to, and charge for the pretending.
Contrast this with early SEO, which people forget was actually knowable. Google published guidelines. You could run experiments and see stable, repeatable results. You could watch a page move from position eight to position three and reason about why. The feedback loop was slow but real. GEO has no feedback loop yet. It has anecdotes, and anecdotes at scale are not data, they are folklore.
The Premature Optimization Trap
There is a phrase from software engineering that every GEO consultant should have tattooed somewhere visible: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Donald Knuth wrote it. He meant that optimizing a system before you understand where its actual bottlenecks are is worse than useless, because you spend real effort making the wrong things faster while introducing complexity that makes the real problems harder to find later.
That is exactly what the GEO industry is selling. Optimization for a system whose behavior is not yet understood, whose mechanics change monthly, and whose actual traffic contribution to most businesses is, at the moment, somewhere between negligible and unmeasurable. You are being sold a tuning kit for an engine that has not finished being built, by mechanics who have never seen the engine, based on the sound it makes from outside the garage.
And here is the part that should make you angry if you are paying for this: the specific tactics being sold as GEO are, almost without exception, things you should already be doing for regular SEO and for the plain benefit of human readers. Write clearly. Structure your content so a machine can parse it. Answer the actual question early. Build genuine authority and get cited by real sources. Have a clean technical foundation. That is the whole GEO playbook, and it is just the SEO playbook, and it is just the good-writing playbook, relabeled and repriced with an AI premium on top.
Who Gets Rich in a Gold Rush
The people who got rich in the actual gold rush were not, by and large, the miners. They were the ones selling shovels, and picks, and tents, and overpriced eggs to hungry men who had convinced themselves the next pan of gravel would change their lives. The GEO economy is the shovel business. The certifications are shovels. The frameworks are shovels. The conference talks and the audit templates and the twelve-week engagements are all, every one of them, shovels sold to people panning a river that may or may not contain gold, in quantities nobody has measured, using techniques nobody has validated.
I am not saying AI search does not matter. It matters, and it is going to matter more, and there will eventually be a real discipline of understanding how to be present and credible inside these systems. I am saying that discipline does not exist yet, and the honest position for anyone with twenty years in this field is to say so, and to watch carefully, and to run small cheap experiments, and to refuse to sell certainty that cannot exist.
What to Actually Do
Do the boring, durable things. Write content so good and so clear that a machine summarizing it has no choice but to represent you accurately, because there is nothing else to say. Earn real citations from real sources, because retrieval layers lean on authority signals that look a lot like the ones we already understand. Keep your technical house clean. Build the assets you own, the email list and the brand and the direct relationships, because those pay off regardless of which engine wins.
And when someone offers to sell you a GEO strategy with a confident number attached to it, a percentage, a guaranteed lift, a certification, ask them one question: where is your data? Not your case study, not your framework, your data. The stable, repeatable, controlled data that shows this tactic caused that outcome. They do not have it. Nobody does. That is not a gap in their offering. That is the whole truth of this moment, and the people worth listening to are the ones willing to admit it.
GEO is not a strategy yet. It is a research problem wearing a sales suit. Optimize for the humans, watch the machines, and keep your hand on your wallet.