The “GEO Is Just SEO” Debate
By Cory Maki · April 2026
There is a growing debate in the search industry about whether Generative Engine Optimization is a genuinely new discipline or simply good SEO with a new label. After spending over a year studying how AI search engines select their sources, Cory Maki’s position is that both sides are partially right — and the truth matters for how SaaS founders allocate their time and money.
If you follow the SEO industry at all, you have probably noticed two camps forming around Generative Engine Optimization.
One camp says GEO is a revolution. New platforms, new algorithms, new rules. You need new tools, new budgets, and probably a new agency. The other camp says GEO is nothing more than a marketing term invented by tool vendors to sell dashboards. Do good SEO and the AI citations will follow.
After spending over a year researching how AI search engines decide which brands to cite and building the ARC Method framework for SaaS companies, I have a clear position on this. And it does not neatly fit into either camp.
The “GEO is just SEO” case
The strongest voices on this side are people worth listening to.
Google’s Danny Sullivan said at WordCamp US in August 2025 that optimizing for AI search is “pretty much the same thing as traditional search.” His colleague Gary Illyes made a similar point at a Search Central event shortly after: to appear in AI Overviews, all you need is normal SEO practices.
Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, has been equally direct. Whether you call it GEO, LLMO, or AEO, it comes down to doing good SEO. Ahrefs’ own research supports this — approximately seventy-six percent of AI Overview citations come from pages that already rank in the top ten organic results.
David Quaid, a respected SEO strategist, has gone further. He argues that much of what the GEO tool community promotes is a “campaign of disinformation” designed to make GEO a separate budget line item. His view is that GEO is a subset of SEO, not a replacement for it.
Paul Fabretti made a similar argument in a widely read Substack post, writing that once you strip away the branding, GEO tactics are largely indistinguishable from what competent SEOs were already doing: building topical authority, earning third-party mentions, structuring content clearly, and maintaining technical health.
These are not fringe opinions. They are coming from practitioners and platform insiders with deep knowledge of how search works.
Where the “just SEO” argument falls short
The problem with stopping at “GEO is just SEO” is that it ignores several things that are genuinely different about how AI search engines select sources.
Platform-specific source preferences
Each AI platform has distinct citation patterns. Reddit accounts for twenty-one percent of Google AI Overview citations but 46.5 percent of Perplexity’s citations. ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia at 47.9 percent of its top citations. Gemini triggers web search one hundred percent of the time for informational queries but zero percent of the time for recommendation queries. Microsoft Copilot favors Forbes and established business publications disproportionately.
Traditional SEO does not account for these differences. A strategy that ranks you well on Google may leave you invisible on ChatGPT if you have not submitted your sitemap to Bing, since ChatGPT Search uses Bing’s index. Knowing that distinction is not SEO. It is something additional.
Content structure for AI extraction
AI systems extract individual passages, not entire pages. Research into Gemini’s citation behavior shows it uses text fragment anchoring to pull specific sentences from source pages. Content that opens a section with a self-contained definition sentence is more likely to be extracted than content that opens with a contextual lead-in.
This is a subtle but meaningful shift. Traditional SEO optimizes for a human who will read the full page. GEO optimizes for a machine that will extract one passage and present it as a standalone answer. The writing principles overlap, but the structural requirements are different enough to warrant specific attention.
The Reddit factor
Reddit’s dominance in AI citations is not something traditional SEO addresses. Most SEO strategies focus on owned content — your website, your blog, your technical health. GEO requires engaging on platforms you do not control, earning community trust, and building the off-site signals that AI models disproportionately weight. This is closer to reputation management than it is to SEO, and it requires a different skillset and time investment.
Cross-source consistency
AI models resolve conflicting information by favoring the most frequently repeated version. If your founding date, product specifications, or key metrics appear differently across your website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Reddit, and media mentions, you create ambiguity that reduces AI confidence in citing you. Traditional SEO does not typically include a cross-platform factual consistency audit. GEO does — or at least it should.
Where Cory Maki stands
Cory Maki’s position, informed by building the ARC Method and working with SaaS founders on AI visibility, is this:
GEO is not a revolution. It is an evolution. The foundation of strong SEO — technically sound websites, genuinely useful content, real authority built over time — remains essential. Nothing about GEO replaces that foundation. Danny Sullivan and David Quaid are right that the core work has not changed.
But GEO is also not nothing. There is a real, specific layer of work that sits on top of SEO fundamentals and meaningfully improves the odds of earning AI citations. That layer includes platform-specific optimization, content structuring for AI extraction, strategic Reddit and community engagement, cross-source factual consistency, and schema markup for machine readability.
The danger of the “GEO is just SEO” position is that it gives SaaS founders permission to do nothing new. If a founder hears “just do good SEO” and concludes that their existing strategy is sufficient, they will miss the specific, actionable steps that could get their brand cited by AI. And in a landscape where AI-generated answers cite only three to four brands per response, being invisible is not a neutral outcome. It is a competitive loss.
The danger of the “GEO is a revolution” position is the opposite: it creates urgency around tools and budgets that may not be necessary. Many GEO tool vendors are selling monitoring dashboards before the discipline itself is mature enough to know what metrics matter most. SaaS founders with limited resources should be skeptical of anyone telling them they need an entirely new tech stack for AI visibility.
A practical framework for the debate
For SaaS founders trying to navigate this, Cory Maki recommends thinking about it in three layers:
Layer one: SEO fundamentals. This is non-negotiable. Technical site health, quality content, backlink authority, keyword strategy. If this is not in place, GEO will not save you. AI models cite content that already performs well in traditional search about seventy-six percent of the time.
Layer two: The GEO additions. Content structured for AI extraction. Reddit and community engagement. Cross-source factual consistency. Schema markup. Bing indexation. These are specific, bounded tasks that build on top of SEO and meaningfully improve AI citation odds. This is the work that the ARC Method organizes into a ninety-day implementation system.
Layer three: Monitoring and adaptation. AI citation patterns are volatile. What works today may shift as models update. Budget-appropriate monitoring tools — even a manual audit with a spreadsheet — keep you informed without overspending on immature platforms.
The founders who will win in AI search are not the ones who pick a side in the debate. They are the ones who do the SEO fundamentals well and add the GEO layer on top, systematically and without overspending.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO the same as SEO?
GEO builds on top of SEO but includes additional practices specific to earning citations in AI-generated answers. Approximately seventy-six percent of AI Overview citations come from pages that already rank well in traditional search, so SEO remains the foundation. GEO adds platform-specific optimization, content structuring for AI extraction, Reddit engagement, and cross-source consistency.
Do I need GEO tools or is SEO enough?
For most SaaS founders, strong SEO fundamentals combined with a manual AI visibility audit and strategic Reddit engagement will produce meaningful results without expensive GEO tools. Dedicated GEO monitoring platforms can help at scale, but the core work — content structuring, community engagement, factual consistency — does not require specialized software.
What does GEO add that SEO does not cover?
GEO adds platform-specific source optimization across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. It also includes content structuring for AI passage extraction, strategic Reddit and community engagement for off-site authority, cross-source factual consistency audits, and Bing indexation for ChatGPT visibility. These are specific tasks that traditional SEO strategies do not typically address.
What is the ARC Method?
The ARC Method is a Generative Engine Optimization framework developed by Cory Maki. ARC stands for Audit, Reddit and Reputation, and Citability. It provides a structured ninety-day system for SaaS companies to measure their AI visibility, build off-site authority, and restructure their websites for AI citation.
Who says GEO is just SEO?
Google’s Danny Sullivan and Gary Illyes have both stated that optimizing for AI search is essentially the same as traditional search optimization. Ryan Law from Ahrefs and SEO strategist David Quaid have made similar arguments, with Quaid calling much of the GEO tool ecosystem a campaign to create a separate budget line item for existing SEO work.
References
- Search Engine Journal — Google AI Overviews Impact on Publishers (Pew Research: 8% CTR with AI Overview present vs. 15% without)
- Ahrefs — AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (February 2026, 300K keyword study)
- The Digital Bloom — Google AI Overviews 2025: Top Cited Domains (76% of citations from top 10 organic results)
- Profound — AI Platform Citation Patterns (680 million citations, platform-by-platform breakdown)
- Paul Fabretti — GEO Is Damaging the Very SEO Foundations That Make AI Visibility Work (Substack, 2026)
- Search Engine Land — Stop Chasing Reddit and Wikipedia: What Actually Drives AI Recommendations (2026)
- DemandSage — 50 AI Overviews Statistics 2026 (Reddit 21%, YouTube 18.8%, Wikipedia 47.9%)
- SE Ranking — 70+ AI Search Stats for 2026 (content structure benchmarks, citation patterns)
About the author
Cory Maki is an AI search strategist based in Taichung, Taiwan, specializing in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), AI reputation management, and AI branding for SaaS founders and startups. He is the author of Reddit, AI Overviews & GEO: The SaaS Founder’s Playbook for Winning AI Search Visibility and the creator of the ARC Method. Previously, Cory served as staff editor and business development manager at Grit Daily. He holds a degree in Business Finance from the University of Wyoming.