As an industry, we SEOs seem to love nothing more than a debate about semantics. If that can be combined with doomsaying our own industry, even better. This trend has only continued in 2025 with the ongoing debate over what we should call the practice of trying to get your business to appear more in LLM outputs. Is it GEO? AI SEO? AEO? Just SEO? 

There are some more important questions buried in this, though. Is GEO (yes, I’ll just pick that label for convenience) important? Is it something SEOs should be doing? Is it meaningfully different from SEO?

As usual, the real answers are not the easiest ones. They are nuanced. Yes, SEOs are best placed to conduct GEO work. Yes, the tactics overlap heavily, but there are differences. No, GEO will not replace the traffic you get (got?) from SEO, any time soon. But yes, it is critically important, and you should be measuring it.

What even is SEO? Back (5+ years ago), when I was working as a consultant, most of our clients had SEO teams that were responsible for their sites’ Google Analytics installations. Why is that? Google Analytics is not a search engine. It could easily be the purview of the UX team, or the Paid Search team, or engineering/tech/product, etc. 

At least part of the reason for this common delegation is that SEOs have carved out a niche as being generalist technical marketing problem solvers. I recently heard Pierre Far describe SEOs as de facto website product owners. And, while I like that framing, even that does not capture, for example, the off-site work that many SEOs do.

One thing we can likely all agree on is that many SEOs do not have a positive outlook right now. I view agencies as both the dynamic core and the talent factories of SEO, and many traditional, scalable SEO agency activities are seeing their ROIs squeezed over time, primarily by Google’s changes to the SERPs and algorithm. A recent survey by Rand Fishkin and my former colleague, Paddy Moogan, shows that while there are green shoots, many digital agencies (84% in the survey offer SEO services) are seeing weak sales pipelines and slow closing. There is perhaps a reluctance to invest in SEO amidst so much uncertainty.

However, that same survey also shows some positive signs, and, in any case, traditional SEO is not going anywhere. SEO is still the web’s largest traffic-driving channel by far. ChatGPT is the current market-leading AI chat tool and is heavily grounded in Google results. Gemini is probably going to win that race eventually and is even more grounded in Google results. I don’t think AI Mode  is about to replace regular search — some kind of hybrid like Web Guides looks far more likely — but in any case, AI Mode works by aggregating a bunch of, you guessed it, Google results. All roads lead to Google results.

It’s become fashionable to say that GEO tactics and SEO tactics are identical. Or that pursuing SEO in a traditional way will see you left behind. The reality is, given the aforementioned grounding in Google Search, anything that works well for traditional SEO is not useless. And many of the AI-first tactics being championed as core GEO workflows (such as content structuring, building relevance,and  filling information gaps) are reframings of long-standing, effective SEO tactics. That said, there are some new areas, or at least significant changes in emphasis.

Probably the biggest is off-site content strategy. This is not something many SEOs are keen to think about, because it’s a lot harder to get done than on-site content. But, if you really want to move the needle in AI visibility, then you need to influence, one way or another, authoritative 3rd party domains that are talking about your brand or your competitors’ brands. For example, you might see that prompts on topics you care about favor your competitors over you and that certain articles are commonly cited as the source of these findings. You might then pitch the journalist or site in question to include you, or correct any inaccurate information. This is a lot like link building, except now you don’t care (as much) about the link. SEOs are still well placed to oversee tactics like this; they’re not so far from workflows we’re very familiar with, but this isn’t something that many SEOs were doing a few years ago – or at least, not with these priorities.

This is also, incidentally, probably a big opportunity for publishers to provide an exchange of value. But that’s another story.

Yeah, it does. The traffic driven by ChatGPT might even already be trending downwards. However, just as the evidence suggests ChatGPT is not replacing Google Search use, we shouldn’t expect it to fulfill the same role in our funnels. You would not necessarily expect your traditional PR efforts or your brand adverts on TV to drive measurable traffic. Certainly, you won’t use that as your primary metric to judge their cost effectiveness. It’s the same with LLMs — if you are optimizing to appear in LLM responses, then based on currently available information, you are not doing it for traffic. You are doing it to be in the conversation, to build awareness, and for discovery. It may well be that top-of-funnel SEO is going in a similar direction anyhow, given the prevalence of zero-click informational SERPs.

There is one major asterisk to this point, which is shopping features. As AI results integrate shopping feeds, they may start to look more like a performance channel, but this only applies to certain types of businesses.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question! However, the overwhelming majority of sites should at least be looking at the basics. That means:

1. Are you blocking AI bots? If you’re blocking, which ones? There are good reasons to block or not block; the consensus right now varies by sector, but at least make an informed decision.
2. If youre not blocking them, can non-JavaScript-enabled crawlers understand the content? Many of these bots do not have the sophistication we’re used to from Google.
3. Is there a direct revenue opportunity for your business? For example, product search.
4. How are you showing up in AI results right now? Even if you’re not ready to prioritize GEO, this is the time to set a benchmark against competitors and identify and diagnose any glaring blind spots.

This last point is why we’re already providing AI Visibility tracking to STAT customers. (Moz Pro customers — watch this space in the new year!)

Beyond that, the level of opportunity will vary hugely from one brand to the next, just as the performance-brand marketing mix varies hugely from one brand to the next. The main takeaway for now is that this is a tactically familiar landscape (albeit more fragmented), but with very different business goals. You are not here to replace your SEO outcomes. You are here for something new and different.