Every few weeks the question resurfaces in the marketing communities: is anyone actually doing generative engine optimization, has anyone really explored it, and bluntly, is it a legit strategy or hype. Fair questions. Here is an honest answer.
What the skeptics get right
A lot of what gets sold as GEO is recycled SEO with a new acronym. Structured data, clean headings, topical authority, earning mentions. None of that is new, and anyone promising a secret GEO trick is selling you something. The r/TechSEO discussion on GEO is full of practitioners making exactly this point, and they are not wrong.
What actually changed
The distribution changed. When a buyer asks ChatGPT “best tool for X” and gets three named vendors in a written answer with no list of links, the click you used to compete for never happens. Your Google ranking can hold while the traffic it produced quietly declines, because the query got answered before the click. That is not hype. That is a different funnel.
So the honest framing is this: GEO is not a new channel with new magic. It is a new scoreboard for mostly familiar work, plus a few genuinely new tactics, being quotable, being present on the sources models cite, and structuring claims a model can lift.
How to decide for your own brand
Do not settle it by argument. Settle it by measurement. Ask the engines your buyers’ actual questions and count: are you named, or are your competitors? If you are already the answer, GEO is a maintenance job. If competitors own the answer and you do not, that is quantified lost demand, and the case makes itself.
The point is that you can know, cheaply, before committing a budget. Run the free visibility check: send your domain and two or three competitors, and we will show you your current AI share of voice. Then decide.
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