There’s an AI SEO Trend Trying to Rob You Blind
Written by: Josh Powers, July 15th, 2025
They want you to clutch your pearls so they can clutch your wallets. And maybe give a little tip-tap on your sack as they exit your pocket.
Who’s trying to grab a little squeeze? Anyone touting these new terms I’m about to mention, and claiming they’re the oasis in the desert.
New terms have emerged amongst the uncertainty, and like the gold rush, nearly everyone making profit right now are selling shovels.
GEO = Generative Engine Optimization
AEO = Answer Engine Optimization
AIO = Artificial Intelligence Optimization (usually gets conflated with Google’s AI Overviews)
I’ve been in the digital marketing sphere since 2010. SEO’s been the top dog in marketing, the bread and butter of agencies, and the driving force for sales and visibility for tons of brands.
My point is: SEO as a whole hasn’t been disrupted at all, even though traffic has. You’ve had people saying the famous phrase “SEO is dead” for the longest time. They’re hollering it from the rooftops while cranking one out right now, and nobody brought their jizz umbrellas.
So what the fuck does this all mean? Let me start by saying SEO is the Garden of Eden and all these other terms are spawns of Adam’s nutsack.
These terms are just SEO in slutty heels with a boob job. Agencies and gurus are cashing in on the fear and uncertainty.
These terms are trying to encapsulate an idea: that they’re on the yellow brick road, and the wilderness creeping in on either side is dangerous.
But we’re all traipsing around the dark forest wondering what the fuck we’re doing. There are people trying to figure it out. They share data, insights, and their efforts–wasted or not–on the how’s and why’s behind how you can show up in AI results.
First, let’s understand how an LLM pulls up information when someone asks it a question.
Disclosure: I’m not an AI engineer, I don’t pretend to be, and I’ve pulled information from people far smarter than I.
Let’s Call it What it Is: Large Language Models (LLMs)
LLMs are AI programs that recognize and generate text, and that doesn’t encompass all of AI. It’s when you feed a ton of data to a program, and design it to generate results that can be read and understood.
We’ve popularized the buzzword that is “AI” as a catch-all to mean a lot of shit. LLMs are next-word prediction models that someone injected steroids into and made fucking jacked beyond all belief. Now, they rank word importance, and just predict what we’re going to say, what we’re expecting to hear, you get the gist.
There’s no black magic fuckery happening, even though it seems like LLMs are firing fairy dust fireworks and answering all your questions.
We obviously know that LLMs get a ton of shit wrong, but it can get some basic stuff right. The reason Answer Engine Optimization became a thing is because people really do look at ChatGPT and similar LLMs as a way to get answers, not click through to websites that tell them that information.
So you’re not going to get traffic the way you used to, and that makes your clicks and impressions separate worse than my cousin’s eyes after he got hit with that aluminum baseball bat. So on the back of that panic, people are profiting.
An AI Craze vs. Answers You Crave
I fuckin’ nailed that rhyme.
Everyone claims to have the answer right now. The truth is, nobody does. The deeper, scarier truth, is that even engineers don’t know how AI produces the results that it does.
For clarification, artificial intelligence engineers know how it works in a sense that’s greater than you or I understand, but they don’t know how an AI learns things it was never taught.
If that’s the case, how can marketers say “I have the answer” when the people who built this shitstorm in the first place can’t tell you?
They can’t. I can’t. Even though the human brain is a pattern recognition engine, which has made us decently good at spotting AI-produced visual and text-based content, the game is changing fast.
People make decisions based on emotion, and AI has most people scared for the future. We all want to be early adapters, because those are the people who are usually at the top of the pyramid later on, so it’s being used against you.
Even the CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, admits that “When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choice it does…” That’s an excuse-me-what-the-fuck kind of moment.
But it’s honest, so I applaud it. The problem with that isn’t with Anthropic, because that’s transparency I’m still shocked about–the problem is that it makes it difficult for anyone claiming to have answers for AI search results fucking bonkers.
They do have information to share, but it’s literally the same shit that already helps you rank on Google.
To quote Lily Ray, “Yep, a lot of these GEO folks are really just discovering SEO for the first time.”
There’s been a mountain of “best practices” and other bullshit flooding the internet and burying all the reliable sources. In reality, GEO, AIO, and AEO are just rebrandings of SEO piggybacking on a truckload of confusion shrouding this new world of LLMs.
What’s the Answer to the AI Craze for Business Owners?
The wheel hasn’t been reinvented. It’s just got a new skin on it. LLMs have disrupted search to some extent, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Don’t buy into these new acronyms, because AI/LLMs are trained on available information and search data as it is.
My prediction is that we’re never going to have fully satisfactory answers as to how LLMs produce results. We may get closer, but you’ve gotta understand that:
LLMs are changing all the time
The digital marketing world usually needs weeks, sometimes a couple of months, to figure things out after a planned Google core update
We can’t react fast enough to properly say “This works” for LLM search, because it’s gonna be obsolete before you know it
There’s no magic bullet that’s going to answer your problems. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been doing differently here at Clarify:
Focus less on TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) content (it’s still important, but “answers” aren’t getting clicks the way they used to)
Inject voice as hard as possible into writing, like you’ve identified in this post
Don’t be cut and dry, but be explosive, emotion-driven, and write/record content that’s very, very human and authentic
Don’t let fear seize the day: measure what works
Also, don’t measure everything, because attribution is a nightmare right now for a lot of reasons, and sometimes you have to rely on good old human psychology in marketing
Obsessively testing everything we can to try and make sense of what is and isn’t showing up in LLM search
So what are your next steps in the diarrhea sandstorm we’re all choking in right now?
Bank on authentic connections. If you’re a local service business, which are most of the businesses Clarify helps, rest assured that people aren’t getting proper “near me” results from LLMs at this time.
Local SEO is still largely safe, so even if you see traffic take a nosedive, you may actually see revenue go up. You’re the signal; the internet’s drowning in noise right now.
Hard-focus on what’s valuable to your customers. Be authentic, ask what they enjoy about your service, and as we’ve seen before, other people will love that same thing. That’s the basis of your marketing.
Don’t let sheisty motherfuckers rip you off with GEO, AEO, and AIO panic.