After watching too much youtube and reddit on GEO. I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI search is reshaping the way people discover brands. Not in a dramatic “SEO is dead” way but more like watching the rules quietly shift under everyone’s feet while most people pretend nothing is happening. I think the funny part is: SEO isn’t disappearing at all. It’s just being absorbed into something bigger. GEO, AISO, whatever people want to call it… it’s really just SEO plus a new set of expectations from machines that read the web differently than humans do.

One idea that keeps coming back is that AI is slowly taking over the first search, not the final one. People ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity for recommendations, and then if they trust the answer, they go Google the brand. Instead of “rank first for keywords,” the new competition seems to be “get into the answer that AI gives.” Whoever appears there wins the brand search later.

There’s a case that really stuck with me: Zugu, the iPad case company. They don’t try to be everything. They don’t push “cheap,” “lightweight,” or “fashionable.” Everywhere you look their website, YouTube reviews, Amazon, Reddit, they hammer two ideas:

• the magnetic stand is extremely stable
• the case is unbelievably durable

Because of that consistency, whenever someone asks AI: “Recommend a durable iPad case with a strong stand,” the model almost naturally answers: Zugu.

And the interesting part is that nothing about this is mystical. It’s just clarity. AI reads a thousand sources and forms a simple belief: “Zugu = durable and sturdy.” If a brand tries to claim ten things at once, AI shrugs and assigns them nothing. This is the part of GEO that feels more like psychology than SEO.

Another thing that stood out came from a backpack example. Imagine writing an article comparing travel backpacks. In the old SEO world, listing features and specs was enough. But now, something subtle matters more: a detail AI can’t invent. Something like: “I carried this backpack through Paris last week, and the side pocket fit my passport perfectly during airport security.” This kind of tiny, personal moment is exactly what AI picks up as “evidence of real experience.” The more the content feels like something only a human could write, the more likely AI is to trust it. Long, generic paragraphs don’t survive this filter.

There was also a moment in the Semrush demo that made me smile. They showed a “sentiment analysis” chart for AI search. Not only whether your brand shows up in answers—but whether the AI speaks about you positively, neutrally, or negatively. The idea that poor customer support could tank your AI visibility is… strangely poetic. It forces marketing, product, support, and brand reputation to collapse into one system. You can’t just fix SEO in isolation anymore.

And then there’s the technical side—less glamorous, but somehow even more important now. Short sentences help AI understand you faster. It prefers simple grammar over fancy phrasing. Lists and tables aren’t aesthetic choices; they’re extraction tools. AI basically skims the page the way a tired analyst might skim a spreadsheet. It doesn’t reward elegance. It rewards clarity and structure.

Behind the scenes, nothing works if search engines can’t crawl the site. A ridiculous number of sites accidentally block GPTBot or Bingbot in robots.txt and then wonder why their content never appears in AI answers. These are the small landmines SEO never warned us about, because back then the worst-case scenario wasn’t “a superintelligent system can’t see you.”

The more I read, the more GEO starts looking like three intertwined jobs: keeping normal SEO healthy enough for AI to find you, writing content in a way AI can digest instantly, and managing your brand reputation so AI actually wants to recommend you.

Traditional SEO is still the foundation. If you can’t rank on Google or Bing at all, none of the AI engines are going to magically rescue you—they’re still pulling from those indices behind the scenes. And yes, Bing matters more than anyone expected. Because ChatGPT’s browsing and Perplexity’s search often start from Bing’s index, ignoring Bing now is basically locking yourself out of a door you didn’t know existed.

Content for AI is a different game. Short sentences, clear headings, logical flow, a summary at the top, lists where they make sense, tables where comparisons matter. Not because humans need it, but because AI does. And then that extra layer—your voice, your firsthand moments, your data. The things that prove there’s a brain and history behind the writing. AI can generate filler, so it refuses to quote filler.

The final piece is brand voice, reputation, and consistency. AI doesn’t just look at your website; it looks everywhere people talk about you. Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, Quora discussions, listicles, niche forums. If the internet repeatedly associates your brand with the same traits, AI locks onto those traits. If it sees mixed signals, or worse, complaints, you get quietly filtered out.

It also means those “Top 10 tools…” articles everyone used to chase for backlinks suddenly matter again—but for a different reason. Even if there’s no link, AI still treats them as signals. Being included is like being awarded a small, permanent badge in the model’s memory.

When everything is condensed, GEO feels less like a new type of SEO and more like a new type of brand management—one where clarity, repetition, and human detail become the main currency. The target isn’t ranking #1 anymore. The target is being the brand AI thinks of first.

That’s probably the biggest mindset shift: we’re no longer competing for blue links—we’re competing for the recommendation slot inside an AI answer.

And in a strange way, that feels like a more honest version of the internet.