An analysis of the term Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and a critique of industry rebranding efforts following opinions shared by Andreessen Horowitz personnel.
Don’t let industry outsiders redefine what you do. Recently, two venture capitalists from the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz published an article suggesting we rebrand search engine optimization—or SEO—to "GEO," which stands for Generative Engine Optimization.
But who are these authors? They are finance and investment partners, not search or machine learning experts. In fact, their article comes with a heavy disclaimer telling readers not to rely on their opinions as business advice.
And where did this term "Generative Engine" even come from? It was traced back to a single Wikipedia article based on a lone, misattributed paper. That Wikipedia page has already been deleted because the term is not widely accepted in computer science.
SEO has always been about helping people find information, and we are already naturally adopting artificial intelligence. If we eventually decide to rename what we do—whether we call it AI visibility, AI optimization, or large language model visibility—it should be our choice, not a label handed down by outsiders.
The SEO industry predicted this AI-driven world a decade ago. We have been expecting this, we are ready for it, and we do not need to be told who we are.
If Marie Haynes, Barry Schwartz or Cindy Krum had written an article declaring SEO dead and proposing we rebrand our industry you’d seriously consider it. Wouldn’t you?
Zach Cohen:
2016: Finance Intern, Prolific Capital Markets
2017-2018: Spring Analyst, Ghitis Property Company
2017-2020: Founder & CEO, NextGen Bootcamp
2018-2020: Minority Owner & Head of Growth, Noble Desktop
2019: Venture Fellow, New Enterprise Associates
2020: Growth Equity Investor, Stripes (3 months)
2021-2022: Analyst, General Atlantic
2022-Present: Investment Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Seema Amble:
2007: Summer Analyst, Goldman Sachs
2009-2011: Analyst, Blackstone
2011-2012: Associate, Altamont Capital Partners
2012-2013: Investment Team, LeapFrog Investments
2013: Product Strategy, Intuit
2014: Product Intern, Amazon
2015: Venture Investing, Cowboy Ventures
2017-2019: Vice President, Goldman Sachs
2019-Present: Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
2022-Present: Term Member, Council on Foreign Relations
I don’t know either.
Looked them up just now. Two VC people with insignificant footprint or long-term interest in SEO, Machine Learning and AI who published one opinion blog post and probably forgot about it (and you).
Under the article, in fine print, quite literally, are the instructions to ignore it.
I quote:
So, no. Andreessen Horowitz hadn’t issued a royal decree to officially move our whole industry to geoscience category.
(Acronyms are not a16z’s core strength are they?)
So where did they get “GEO” from? My investigation showed that until its deletion, a single Wikipedia article, based on a single misattributed paper, provided all legitimacy to the term “Generative Engine”, which isn’t a widely accepted machine learning or computer science term.
Regular users just say things like “AI“, “search“, “look up“, “ChatGPT” and “Google“.
We can add more things SEO does, like CTR and EEAT.
I personally like:
I also don’t mind LLM visibility because it’s precise, but I do see its narrow scope.
Or if you, as an SEO, wish rename what you do to something else, why not pick your own name and do it by your own choice and not because an outsider to our industry instructs you to?
Ten years ago the SEO industry predicted the world Zach and Meena live in now, and described what is yet to come. We’re not taken by surprise, we’ve been expecting this, wondering what took so long.
Bring it on.
Dan Petrovic ·
Jun 09, 16:33
AI Marketing or AI Visibility Optimisation sounds logical to me. But we have also has to look at the market or our clients which terms are popular used by them. Find a unified terminology now and distribute it is very important now. Otherwise the field will be claimed by pr agencies and branding agencies and the SEO industry will see decreasing budgets.
Sign in with Google to comment.
I’m also in agreement w SEO + AI Visibility. Realistic framing for expectations.
A point one has to keep making w non-technical stakeholders is that ‘ranking’ (as if) in a stochastic environment means optimizing to be a probable content source used for training, for the most part. Google was a portal, more than ever it’s a proxy.
There’s no real stack ranking, though.