GEO, AEO, and "AI SEO" have become some of the most hyped terms in the industry — but how much of it is genuinely new, and how much is repackaged advice with a shinier label? Here's what the conversation actually covered.
GEO, AEO and "AI SEO"
The conversation started with a fundamental question: are these new disciplines, or just old ones with new names? The honest answer is that Generative Engine Optimization, Answer Engine Optimization, and most of what gets sold as "AI SEO" are largely rebrands of classic SEO — not genuinely separate fields.
The reason is structural. Large language models and AI search products still lean on traditional search indexes like Google for crawling, ranking, and sourcing. ChatGPT's browsing, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — all of them pull from indexed, rankable web content. That means anything that damages your organic SEO will typically hurt your AI visibility at the same time. There's no shortcut that bypasses the foundation.
💡 The bottom line: If your traditional SEO is weak, no amount of "GEO optimization" will save your AI citations. The index is still the infrastructure.
Disinformation and AI SEO Tools
A significant part of the conversation focused on the vendor landscape — specifically, the disinformation campaigns aimed at CMOs and executives. The pattern is consistent: a tool promises AI search dominance, the pitch centers on dashboards tracking AI mentions and brand visibility scores, and the actual deliverable is scaled AI content production.
The deeper problem is that many of these tools actively push "fan-out" content tactics — producing dozens of thin pages targeting long-tail queries — which directly contradicts the Helpful Content Update era advice. Google has spent years signaling that it wants sites to consolidate, improve quality, and reduce thin, low-value pages. Recommending the opposite to unsuspecting clients is not a grey area.
⚠️ Watch out for: Any vendor whose "AI SEO strategy" primarily means publishing more AI-generated pages at scale. That's the strategy Google has been penalising since 2023.
Authority, Topical Focus and Backlinks
The group spent time on the fundamentals that still determine outcomes: authority and topical relevance. Google continues to behave in a very domain-centric way, often over-rewarding large publishers with broad authority at the expense of more specialized sites that might actually have deeper expertise on a given topic.
That said, the slow shift toward more granular topical and subtopic-level authority is real. Being genuinely strong in a narrow lane — rather than broadly mediocre across a wide one — is increasingly the better bet. High-quality backlinks combined with a tight topical focus remain critical for both classic rankings and AI citations. LLMs tend to cite sources that are both authoritative and specifically relevant to the query, not just generically popular.
AI Overviews, Traffic and Behavior
If you want to identify the real "AI SEO" battleground, it's Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode — not standalone chatbots. Usage from AI Overviews dwarfs what's coming from ChatGPT or Perplexity for most sites, and that gap isn't closing any time soon.
On traffic patterns: AI-driven referrals are plateauing for many sites, and engagement from those sessions is converging with traditional organic — meaning the argument that AI traffic is lower quality is becoming less clear-cut. That has real implications for how you measure attribution, the PR value of AI citations, and whether dedicating significant resources to GEO-focused campaigns actually moves the needle versus investing in the fundamentals that drive both channels.
Video, YouTube and UGC
One of the more practically useful threads in the conversation was the rise of video and user-generated style content in AI results. YouTube listicle-style videos are increasingly being surfaced in AI Overviews for "best" and comparison queries — the type of informational, high-intent searches where brands most want to appear.
This isn't a coincidence. Google owns YouTube, and the trust signals for video content — watch time, engagement, channel authority — translate into a different kind of credibility than a blog post. The recommendation from the group: treat YouTube optimization, creator collaborations, and embedded video as core parts of your SEO and AI search playbook, not side channels or "nice to haves." Brands that are still treating video as optional are leaving meaningful visibility on the table.
💡 Practical implication: If you're not appearing in AI Overviews for your key "best X" or comparison queries, check whether YouTube videos are dominating those slots. That tells you exactly where to invest next.
Strategy Going into 2026
To close, the group outlined what a realistic AI-era SEO strategy looks like — especially for small and mid-sized sites that can't outspend large publishers on sheer content volume.
The focus comes down to a few clear principles: stay in your topical lane and build genuine depth rather than surface-level breadth; invest in strong backlinks and digital PR because authority signals still determine who gets cited; and break down the silos between SEO, content, PR, social, and video so that brand and authority signals line up consistently across both traditional search and AI experiences.
The sites that will perform well heading into 2026 are not the ones that published the most AI content. They're the ones that are recognizable, trusted, and genuinely useful within a specific domain — and who made sure that all their channels are working together to reinforce that reputation.