Building the Plane in the Air: My Thoughts on the SEO-to-GEO Transition

It’s a wild time to be on the internet right now, and at the top of the list are marketers responsible for surfacing their brand/content in front of people on the internet.

For 20 years, there were rules. Sure, the rules changed slightly every few years, but even though SEO was a “black box,” there were generally accepted rules for how to rank in Google and reach customers.

Last year when AI Overviews launched in Google and started to eat away at clicks, people thought that was a paradigm shift. Everyone started complaining about it cannibalizing their clicks, and optimizing for how to show up. But we had no idea.

As LLMs have started to take a larger share of search volume this year, a whole new category of marketing is surfacing. And while marketers could historically rationalize kicking the can down the road (would Google actually ever cannibalize its own ad business? How fast could ChatGPT actually eat Google’s lunch?), the launch of Google’s AI Mode has sent everyone in a tizzy. We are here, the time is now, and your CXO wants answers. What’s the plan?

In some ways, it's incredibly exciting. Imagine being a search marketer in 2000. You got to figure out the rules, and those who did so first made a lot of money and got very famous. Fortunes were made, incumbents were toppled. We are maybe in the 2nd inning of LLMs as a search tool - so the time is now, and you can bet your bottom dollar that with this paradigm shift, the same opportunity for fame, fortune and incumbent toppling are all on the table.

As someone who runs a product that:

1. Is used by 100+ brands to improve search rankings, and
2. Is increasingly being asked how we impact LLM appearance, and
3. Is navigating the balance of leaning into the new world, vs optimizing for what still makes up the overwhelming majority of search queries and traffic…

I’m in the same boat as search marketers trying to navigate this transition. You can’t go all in on the new thing, because trad Google still makes up the majority of searches. You can’t ignore the new world, it's coming.

As 1 part marker in time, and 1 part cathartic exercise, I wanted to verbalize how I am thinking about this, as we all triangulate this brave new world.

1. There seems to be consensus, as of May 29, 2025, that brand mentions are the new backlinks. Not that backlinks don’t matter, but brand mentions seem to be the new hotness. Everyone from Rand Fishkin to ahrefs seem to agree on this point.
2. There seems to be consensus that what was formerly thought of as OFF PAGE SEO is going to be more important than on page. Again (ahrefs study), but it just feels like technical/on page SEO is much less important that what other people are saying about you. LLMs use content and context, not the speed of your website or other page source tags.
3. We need to be wary of people talking up their own book. A lot of people are saying PR will be more important than ever. It may be. But half the people saying this are execs at major PR firms (e.g. the quote from Edelman exec in this semafor piece). Think about who your info is coming from. Best to follow people who don't have a dog in the fight. This goes for me too (Running a business that drives hundreds of brand mentions for brands each month…I do have a dog in this fight).
4. The days of optimizing for one single algorithm are likely over. It feels unlikely that any one LLM will have the same dominance Google had the past 20 years. Too many people are using tools that switch off between models, and even in a world where ChatGPT gains a lot of market share, it seems unlikely it takes 90% of searches. While it's likely that each of the models use some of the same reasoning, the days of just checking your Google search console and having one search engine to worry about are soon a thing of the past.
5. It’s just going to take a lot of humility, and a lot of reading. I think back to 2012 when I lived for Moz’s Whiteboard Friday sessions and Danny Sullivan’s latest SearchEngineLand posts. We need to all go back to this time and accept that it’s no longer the time to game the system… It's time to go to school. 
6. In my opinion, it's time to go 30% GEO, 70% SEO, and be open to adjusting that quarterly. I think about this as I think about our own marketing. Our product essentially works for both SEO and GEO, but what should our marketing copy talk about? I’m looking for things that meet in the middle of that venn diagram (mentions, links, etc.). There is no perfect balance, but 100% either way is probably wrong. (we may look back at this on 18 months and say “100% LLM was definitely the right way.”)
7. On a long enough time frame, you can't go wrong focusing too much on LLMs.

I think about the businesses that absolutely dominated in SEO by recognizing what worked, creating a good strategy, then executing the hell out of it with patience.

Zillow - recognized that winning the massive housing market would take a mix of a) a really extensive listing page for every house, b) a really fast loading website, and c) a killer content strategy. Cue their extensive listing pages, hiring of a chief economist, and essentially becoming the real estate column across hundreds of news outlets for backlinks.

NerdWallet - recognized that winning for the most lucrative (and competitive) terms on the internet would take becoming a household name people could trust, Invested long in content with the hire of Maggie Leung, and essentially became the personal finance column for thousands of news outlets.

The same can be said for TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and other behemoths that thrived on SEO from 2005 to 2015.

Fame and fortunes were made in SEO, and they will be made in the era of LLM. There is no right way to do this, but putting your head in the sand and riding out the SEO era in bliss is likely the wrong way. 

It’s time to study, create a game plan, and execute like hell. 

Noah Greenberg is the CEO of Stacker, the first content distribution platform built for earned reach. He’s led the company in redefining how brands and publishers collaborate, with over 4,000 news outlets using Stacker to enhance coverage. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Noah previously helped scale Graphiq, later acquired by Amazon.

Featured Image Credit: Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva