GEO Was Invented On Sand Hill Street

I’ve been placing this one off.

Not as a result of the argument is arduous to make – it isn’t – however as a result of the conduct it’s about has been a fixture of the search engine optimization trade for so long as I’ve labored in it. The shiny new object arrives, the FOMO kicks in, the convention decks replace, and a complete skilled class reshuffles its vocabulary to match no matter acronym landed that quarter. I wrote just lately about how AI content scaling is just content spinning with better grammar – the instruments change, the qualitative wall doesn’t. The acronym cycle runs on the similar engine.

However this time, the shiny object didn’t emerge from practitioners observing a real shift and making an attempt to title it. It was manufactured upstream – by enterprise capital, amplified by engagement farming, and adopted by professionals whose main motivation isn’t “this is actual” however “I can’t afford to seem like I’m not maintaining.”

So right here we are.

The Funding Thesis

In Could 2025, Andreessen Horowitz revealed a weblog submit titled “How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Rules of Search.” It appeared of their enterprise publication, written by two a16z companions, Zach Cohen and Seema Amble. Public, on their web site, obtainable to anybody with a browser.

The submit declared that the “$80 billion+ search engine optimization market simply cracked” and that “a brand new paradigm is rising.” It name-dropped three GEO instruments – Profound, Goodie, and Daydream – as platforms enabling manufacturers to monitor how they seem in AI-generated responses. It described a future the place GEO corporations would “fine-tune their very own fashions” and “personal the loop” between perception and iteration. a16z promoted it throughout their social channels, together with a submit from the agency’s official account: “search engine optimization is slowly shedding its dominance. Welcome to GEO.”

Additionally: a16z is an investor in Profound.

The weblog submit creates demand for the class. The class creates demand for the instruments. The instruments are of their portfolio. A gross sales funnel with a byline.

Marc Andreessen’s “Software program is consuming the world” wasn’t simply an essay – it was a prospectus wearing editorial clothes. The GEO submit follows the similar logic: establish the wave, place your bets as the inevitable response, publish the narrative that makes each really feel like settled reality. Even sympathetic protection observed. The Alts.co write-up famous plainly that “a16z is drawing consideration to GEO as a result of it’s an opportunity to peddle/pump their very own investments.”

What Occurs When No one Checks The Supply

Ten months later, in March 2026, someone on X described the weblog submit as “a 34-page inside memo” that a16z had “quietly revealed” and which had acquired solely “200 views.” It cited a particular statistic: portfolio corporations rating No.1 on Google noticed “a 34% drop in natural visitors in 12 months.” I’m not inquisitive about the particular person. This submit is considered one of lots of following the similar sample, and the sample is what issues.

None of this is actual.

The weblog submit isn’t 34 pages. It isn’t inside. It wasn’t quietly revealed. The particular opening line and the 34% stat don’t seem in the precise piece. You may verify this your self proper now.

This isn’t a16z’s doing. An engagement farmer discovered an previous weblog submit and repackaged it with fictional scaffolding as a result of that format performs higher on social media. A “leaked inside memo” is sexier than a publication. “200 views” creates shortage. Invented statistics create authority.

And it labored. Individuals shared it, constructed threads round it, didn’t examine whether or not the memo existed. Why would they? The narrative was too good.

Two unbiased forces – a VC agency doing normal narrative-building, and an engagement farmer doing normal engagement farming – converge on the similar consequence. The VC seeds the class. The farmer, months later, independently amplifies a distorted model. Professionals soak up the distortion as a result of no person goes again to examine the main supply.

Not coordination. Convergence. And a class turns into “actual” with out anyone establishing that it is.

The Prepared Contributors

VCs and engagement farmers can’t take all the credit score. search engine optimization professionals are the most culpable hyperlink in the chain.

One widely-shared submit on X captures the mentality – and I’m citing the conduct, not the particular person, as a result of this place is in all places in the trade proper now. The argument: Shoppers don’t need to hear that GEO is “simply search engine optimization repackaged.” Neither does your government workforce. Inform them “it’s simply search engine optimization,” and also you’ll be “perceived as a legacy outdated thinker.” You would possibly even be “changed by a GEO company.” The conclusion: “whether or not you prefer it or not… it’s in your finest curiosity to get aboard the AI practice.”

The argument is not that GEO works. Not that it measures something significant. Not that it produces higher outcomes for shoppers. The argument is that in the event you don’t undertake the label, you’ll lose your job.

Ambulance chasing dressed as profession recommendation.

And right here’s what makes search engine optimization professionals extra culpable than the VCs or the engagement farmers: they don’t simply soak up the concern. They promote it. They repackage the anxiousness about their very own relevance and promote it downstream to shoppers and executives who are even much less geared up to consider the claims. The VC creates the narrative. The engagement farmer amplifies it. The search engine optimization skilled walks right into a shopper assembly and says, “You want a GEO technique, otherwise you’ll be invisible to AI,” understanding full effectively they will’t outline what which means in phrases the shopper may verify.

This is how search engine optimization professionals undermine their very own credibility. Not by being flawed about the technical shift, however by promoting certainty they don’t have a few class they didn’t hassle to verify, utilizing another person’s terminology to paper over their very own lack of knowledge.

No one held a gun to anybody’s head and stated, “Put GEO on your LinkedIn headline.” search engine optimization professionals are selecting to undertake terminology they haven’t evaluated, from sources they haven’t verified, for instruments they will’t validate; after which browsing that very same concern issue into shopper budgets. If the solely manner you’ll be able to promote your experience is by rebranding it each eighteen months, the downside isn’t the label. It’s the confidence.

The folks most able to evaluating whether or not GEO is an actual self-discipline are the similar folks adopting it quickest. Each hour they spend chasing the vocabulary is an hour not spent constructing the understanding that will make them unimaginable to exchange. I’ve written about how AI is hollowing out the junior pipeline: the apprenticeship layer the place practitioners really be taught judgment. The acronym treadmill accelerates that. It replaces depth with breadth, understanding with terminology, {and professional} improvement with skilled efficiency.

What’s Truly Beneath

Strip away the a16z framing, the fabricated memos, and the skilled anxiousness, and ask the boring query: what would you really do in another way in the event you took GEO significantly?

I’ve argued before that grounding is just retrieval: When an AI system cites a supply, it’s operating a search process, not exercising editorial judgment. Indexing, vector search, relevance scoring. The identical rules we’ve been working with for 20 years, with a generative interface on prime. GEO isn’t a second self-discipline standing alongside search engine optimization. It’s previous retrieval visibility in a trench coat pretending to be two disciplines. And your information interpretation expertise – perched comfortably atop Mount Dunning-Kruger – don’t trump the clear, demonstrable logic of how a retrieval engine works. Should you can’t clarify why a consequence appeared, you haven’t any enterprise promoting a service that claims to optimize for it.

The a16z submit itself confirms this, maybe by accident. The recommendation it provides manufacturers pursuing GEO is a best hits of search engine optimization finest practices: structured content material, authoritative backlinks (rebranded as “earned media”), schema markup, topical authority. It even recommends “brief, dense, citation-worthy paragraphs” and “particular claims with verifiable numbers” – which is, and I can’t stress this sufficient, simply competent writing.

David McSweeney has been doing search engine optimization since before a few of these GEO startups’ founders graduated. He’s spent years writing about the similar ways now being repackaged underneath the GEO label (content material freshness, digital PR, group participation, hyperlink constructing) and has the publication dates to prove it. His abstract of the GEO pitch: make the most of the reality that companies don’t perceive AI techniques rely on conventional search, and extract more cash from them.

He referred to as it the grift. I believe that’s beneficiant. A grift implies particular person con artists. This is structural: a class manufactured at the prime, distorted in the center, and adopted at the backside. Not as a result of it describes something new, however as a result of the skilled price of ignoring it feels increased than the skilled price of pretending it’s actual.

You’re Not In The Driver’s Seat

Your job as a reliable skilled is to perceive what these abbreviations really imply, the place they arrive from, and what – if something – they modify about your work.

Should you can clarify to your shoppers and your management what AI techniques really do, how they retrieve information, what’s genuinely measurable, and what isn’t – you’ll by no means be in a reactive place. You’ll by no means be the particular person scrambling to add “GEO” to a slide deck as a result of somebody on X advised you it was the future.

If as an alternative you let your self be dragged round by no matter narrative enterprise capitalists want you to imagine this quarter, you’ll at all times be reacting. One weblog submit away from a method pivot. Shopping for instruments offered by individuals who profit from your insecurity. That’s a selection. Not a destiny.

The underlying mechanics of how content material will get found – search engine crawler, LLM grounding system, RAG pipeline – haven’t undergone a paradigm shift. The interface has shifted. Customers get solutions synthesized from sources moderately than a listing of hyperlinks.

However “the interface modified” doesn’t promote software program. “All the pieces you already know is out of date and also you want our dashboard” does.

Comply with The Cash

a16z advantages as a result of the GEO narrative creates demand for his or her portfolio corporations. The software startups profit as a result of the narrative creates their market. The engagement farmers profit as a result of fabricated memos drive impressions. The businesses that rebrand as “GEO specialists” profit as a result of they will cost extra for the similar companies with a shinier label.

Who doesn’t profit? The practitioners doing stable, foundational work. These folks don’t want a brand new acronym. They want the trade to cease mistaking advertising and marketing for methodology.

And the shoppers. The shoppers are the place the concern chain terminates, and the invoices start. A brand new line merchandise for work that ought to have been occurring already underneath the search engine optimization retainer, or that may’t be reliably measured in the first place. The VC manufactures the class. The search engine optimization skilled absorbs it and marks it up. The shopper pays for it. A recreation of phone the place the invoice lands on the final particular person in the room who doesn’t communicate the language.

I’ve written individually about the measurement downside with these instruments – the non-determinism, the hole between parametric and retrieved information, the dashboards constructed on methodological sand. The instruments a16z promotes in that weblog submit have the similar structural limitations. The dashboards look great. The numbers move. Whether or not the numbers imply something is a query no person promoting the dashboard has an incentive to reply.

In the meantime, the precise disaster will get no airtime. Natural search visitors throughout main U.S. publishers dropped 42% after AI Overviews expanded. Rankings didn’t change. Visitors did. That’s the actual downside. Not which three-letter acronym to put on your slide deck, however the undeniable fact that the economic model underpinning content production on the open internet is breaking. GEO doesn’t deal with that. It doesn’t even faux to. It simply provides everybody one thing to be busy with while the floor drops out.

The cycle time is getting shorter. We went from “AEO” to “GEO” in about eighteen months. Give it one other 12 months, and there’ll be one other acronym, one other VC weblog submit, one other fabricated memo, and one other spherical of execs making an attempt to resolve whether or not the newest three letters are value placing on their LinkedIn headline.

Or you could possibly simply do good work and perceive what you’re doing effectively sufficient to clarify it with out borrowed terminology. However I suppose that doesn’t have the similar ring to it on a pitch deck.

Extra Assets:

This submit was initially revealed on The Inference.

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