GEO’s Reputation Problem: Why It Matters

There’s a persistent myth floating around that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a purely technical challenge.

Take a quick scroll through LinkedIn or X, and you’ll be bombarded with the latest viral GEO “hack.” You’ve seen them: “Create an AI info page” so large language models (LLMs) can instantly understand your brand. Or “Convert your content to markdown” for a visibility boost. Maybe even “Run an automated Claude audit” to generate an llms.txt file from your robots.txt.

The problem is that most of these tactics deliver limited impact because they miss the fundamental truth about how LLMs decide which brands to recommend. GEO performance is shaped less by technical tweaks and more by how consistently your brand is positioned, categorized, and validated across the entire web.

The Most Promoted GEO Tactics Have a Marginal Impact

If GEO is driven by positioning and consensus, it’s no surprise that many widely shared tactics fall short. Search for “GEO tactics for LLM visibility” and you’ll find the same tired ideas on repeat. These recommendations aren’t wrong, but they’re mostly table stakes. The real issue is that many brands have misinterpreted this advice and taken it to extremes.

Useless FAQ insertions. Google’s own documentation suggests using FAQ schema, but the hype around FAQs for GEO has led brands to make poor choices. Instead of answering questions that matter to users, they slap irrelevant questions at the bottom of a page, convinced it “helps with GEO.” Meanwhile, it accomplishes nothing for the end user.

Putting ‘key takeaways’ at the top of every article. This tactic isn’t inherently bad, but its upside is wildly overhyped. Short summaries can improve readability for humans, but there’s no strong public evidence that a “key takeaways” block materially improves AI visibility on its own.

Over-formatting pages for LLM readability. This means forcing every page into rigid Q&A patterns, stuffing bullet points into every section, and jamming HTML tables where they don’t belong. Some assume LLMs need heavy formatting assistance to retrieve content, so they resort to copywriting tricks like “chunking,” which overcomplicates the editorial process.

Chasing Reddit for GEO. Brands are obsessed with Reddit, and it’s causing them to spam the platform. This is bad for countless reasons, as Eli Schwartz has outlined, but it further proves that GEO isn’t a technical problem. Reddit represents the voice of real people, which is why moderators are vigilantly hunting down inauthentic activity like astroturfing or “SEO shaping” on threads about software evaluation.

GEO Is a Brand Positioning Problem

GEO is a strategic issue at the executive level, not an SEO issue at the operational level. The biggest GEO upside doesn’t come from technical optimization, but from the coordination of brand positioning, messaging, and reputation management across on-site and off-site channels.

Everyone assumes the SEO team should be 100% responsible for GEO, yet they control only a limited portion of how LLMs form their opinions of a brand. The SEO team handles on-site content, blogs, and comparison guides. The brand team and product marketing own homepage messaging, product pages, and pricing. The PR team manages external validation, press, and news. Partnerships cover affiliates, analysts, and resellers. Customer marketing handles Reddit, social media, and review sites.

As Ross Hudgens recently noted, if none of these sources aligns with a consistent narrative, it becomes challenging for LLMs to reach a consensus about your brand.

GEO Is a Category Alignment Problem

Consider the search for [best AI SDR agents]. Coldreach has the No. 1 ranking position with an AI citation. Despite a high web ranking and earning the URL citation, there’s no recommendation for their brand regarding the best AI SDR agents.

This tactic worked phenomenally well during the traditional SEO golden era when rankings and clicks were the goal. But AI, being the great normalizer, has dramatically reduced the effectiveness of this playbook.

Listicles Won’t Brute Force Your Brand Into AI Recommendations

The main difference between SEO and GEO is that you can’t bulldoze your way into brand recommendations for a topic your brand lacks recognition for. We saw that above with the AI SDR agents example. Another example is [best insider threat management], where URL citations are earned by Exabeam, SpyCloud, and Pathlock. None of these brands is recommended in the answer summary, yet they are all deploying listicles.

AI is the great neutralizer of this tactic. It simply scrapes and summarizes their listicles, then recommends every other brand. This is why reporting on “citations” as a GEO success metric is a failure in isolation, given that there’s no corresponding brand recommendation. Instead, the AI Overview recommends the brands that actually deserve to be there, such as Teramind, Proofpoint, and DTEX.

Most Brands Have No Idea How They’re Actually Represented Across LLMs

Despite the unavoidable element of randomness in AI answers, you should reverse-engineer how LLMs piece together information about your brand. Start with bottom-of-funnel prompts like: “What’s the best [category] solution for an enterprise B2B company in the [industry] with [features]?” Then evaluate the answers and sources systematically.

New research by Kevin Indig found that web search position has the greatest impact on LLM citation rates. This is further validation that GEO is fundamentally connected to traditional SEO, as LLMs rely on web search (grounding) to generate answer summaries, especially for bottom-of-funnel product evaluation queries. The key takeaway is that if your pages aren’t ranking highly in traditional SEO, third parties and external websites may control the narrative about your brand.

Most High-Volume, High-Competition Categories Are Dominated by Third Parties

It’s useful to understand which product categories are dominated by third parties versus first-party so you can prioritize marketing efforts accordingly. In the example of [best employee monitoring software], the brand recommendation rate is around 90%, while the citation rate is around 15%. This suggests the brand is well covered across third-party pages where LLMs are extracting relevant information.

Examining the SERP, it’s clear that third-party sources account for the overwhelming majority of citations. Citations come from affiliates such as Business.com, CurrentWare, PC Mag, Gartner, and other reputable sources. The key takeaway: if your brand wants to compete in high-volume categories, you may be forced to play the affiliate game.

What This Means for Your GEO Strategy

Technical website hygiene still matters. If you have a vibe-coded, JavaScript-heavy website with poor internal linking and flat architecture, you’re unlikely to perform well in GEO. Things like XML sitemaps, page indexing, site taxonomy, and internal linking structure are still crucial for retrieval-augmented generation and training data ingestion. However, these are the fundamental pillars of SEO that only create the foundation for GEO to be built upon, rather than accelerating GEO itself.

GEO is a brand positioning and category alignment exercise, not a technical SEO audit.

Questions you should be asking about GEO:

• Are LLMs actually recommending our brand, or only citing our pages?

Stop Chasing GEO Hacks

The core GEO problem is whether LLMs believe your brand belongs in the answer. LLMs need to reach consensus on your brand, shaped by reputation, category alignment, and repeated confirmation across the web. Technical SEO provides the foundation, but it doesn’t help LLMs reach a conclusion about your brand’s market positioning.

The bigger opportunity is to align messaging across every surface that influences how LLMs interpret your brand and why it deserves to be recommended. That means GEO isn’t a siloed optimization problem, but rather an ecosystem visibility problem. It’s time to stop chasing GEO hacks, because AI is neutralizing ineffective and outdated techniques once and for all.