One of search marketing’s SEO Rockstars recently shared his thoughts on SEO for generative AI, calling attention to facts about Google’s search results, explaining how the new AI search really works, and calling out fear-based marketing that overstates disruption in order to sell so-called “GEO” services.
Greg Boser is a search marketing pioneer with a deep level of experience that few in the industry can match or even begin to imagine.
Digital Marketers And The History Of SEO
His post was in response to a tweet by someone else that in his opinion overstated that SEO is losing dominance. Greg began his SEO rant by pointing out how some search marketer’s conception of SEO is outdated but they’re so new to SEO that they don’t realize it.
For example, the practice of buying links is one of the oldest tactics in SEO, so old that newcomers to SEO gave it a new name, PBN (private blog network), as if giving link buying a new name changes it somehow. And by the way, I’ve never seen a PBN that was private. The moment you put anything out on the web Google knows about it. If an automated spambot can find it in literally five minutes, Google probably already knows about it, too.
Greg wrote:
“If anyone out there wants to write their own “Everything you think you know is wrong. GEO is the way” article, just follow these simple steps:
1. Frame “SEO” as everything that was a thing between 2000 – 2006. Make sure to mention buying backlinks and stuffing keywords. And try and convince people the only KPI was rankings.”
Google’s Organic Links
The second part of his post calls attention to the fact that Google has not been a ten organic links search engine for a long time. Google providing answers isn’t new.
He posted:
“2. Frame the current state of things as if it all happened in the last 2 weeks. Do not under any circumstances mention any of the following things from the past 15 years:
2009 – Rich Snippets
2011 – Knowledge Graph (things not strings)
2013 – Hummingbird (Semantic understanding of conversational queries)
2014 – Featured Snippets – (direct answers at position “Zero”)
2015 – PPA Boxes (related questions anticipating follow-up questions)
2015 – RankBrain (machine learning to interpret ambiguous queries)
2019 – BERT (NLP to better understand context)
2021 – MUM (BERT on Steroids)
2023 – SGE (The birth of AIO)”
Overstate The Problem
The next part is a reaction to the naive marketing schtick that tries to stir up fear about AI search in order to present themselves as the answer.
He wrote:
“3. Overstate the complexity to create a sense of fear and anxiety and then close with “Your only hope is to hire a GEO expert”
Is AI Search Complex And Does It Change Everything?
I think it’s reasonable to say that AI Search is complex because Google’s AI Mode and to a lesser extent AI Overviews, is showing links to a wider range of search intents than regular searches used to show. Even Google’s Rich Snippets were aligned to the search intent of the original search query.
That’s no longer the case with AIO and AI Mode search results. That’s the whole point about Query Fan-out (read about a patent that describes what Query Fan-out might be), that the original query is broken out into follow-up questions.
Greg Boser has a point though in a follow-up post where he said that the query fan-out technique is pretty similar to People Also Ask (PAA), Google’s just sticking it into the AI Mode results.
He wrote in a follow-up post about Query fan-out:
“Yeah the query fan thing is the rage of the day. It’s like PAA is getting memory holed.”
AI Mode Is A Serious Threat To SEO?
I agree with Greg to a certain extent that AI Mode is not a threat to SEO. The same principles about promoting your site, technical SEO and so on still apply. The big difference is that AI Mode is not directly answering the query but providing answers to the entire information journey. You can dismiss it as just PAA above the fold but that’s still a big deal because it complicates what you’re going to try to rank for.
Michael Bonfils, another old timer SEO recently observed that AI search is eliminating the beginning and middle part of the sales funnel, observing about AI search:
“This is, you know, we have a funnel, we all know which is the awareness consideration phase and the whole center and then finally the purchase stage. The consideration stage is the critical side of our funnel. We’re not getting the data. How are we going to get the data?”
So yeah, AI Search is different than anything we’ve seen before but, as Greg points out, it’s still SEO and adapting to change is has always been a part of it.
Read Greg Boser’s post on X:
If anyone out there wants to write their own “Everything you think you know is wrong. GEO is the way” article, just follow these simple steps:
1. Frame “SEO” as everything that was a thing between 2000 – 2006. Make sure to mention buying backlinks and stuffing keywords. And try… https://t.co/Eqy0spIj8B
— Greg Boser (@GregBoser) May 29, 2025
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Thomas Christoph
