Is GEO Marketing Just Another SEO Trend?
No. Trends like keyword stuffing or guest post spam faded because they were tricks aimed at gaming a ranking algorithm. GEO exists because a real and growing share of searches now happen inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, or in Google's own AI Overviews, instead of on a traditional results page. That shift in where people ask questions is not going away, even as the specific tactics for responding to it keep changing.
Why this feels like past SEO fads
The skepticism is fair. Marketing produces a new acronym almost every year, and terms like GEO, AEO, and LLMO can feel like the same advice relabeled to sound new. A lot of what gets sold under those labels really is just SEO with a fresh coat of paint.
What is actually different this time
- Hundreds of millions of people now use ChatGPT and similar tools weekly for the kind of research questions that used to start with a Google search
- Google put AI Overviews in front of a large share of its own results, a change to its own product, not a marketer's trick
- This is a shift in how people behave, not a search algorithm update that can quietly reverse next quarter
What genuinely might be a fad within GEO
Some specific tactics, like text stuffed with awkward phrasing aimed purely at an AI model, will fade the same way keyword stuffing did. The durable part underneath is being an accurate, well organized, genuinely useful source, which was always the point of good SEO too.
The practical takeaway
Treat the underlying shift in buyer behavior as real and lasting. Treat any specific GEO tactic as temporary, and expect the details to change again in a year. A simple filter: judge any GEO advice by whether it would also make a human reader trust you more.
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