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Despite the hype, publishers aren’t prioritizing GEO
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Referral traffic is drying up — but what’s more striking is how the industry is responding. Search engines, once reliable pipelines for traffic, now behave more like competitors than conduits stripping content for snippets that keep users firmly within their own platforms.
In theory that should make generative search optimization (GSO) a top priority for publishers. In practice, five publishers told Digiday they are holding back, skeptical of the hype and unconvinced that GEO offers a meaningful path forward for traffic referral and monetization.
GEO is pitched as the SEO (search engine optimization) of the AI era — a way to theoretically ensure content gets cited by large language models and answer engines. “This was all based on the assumption that somebody out there knows how to optimize for this,” said Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. “This whole conversation is not rooted in any fact. If there’s anyone who can prove to me that they can optimize the output of these rapidly developing tools, I would love to talk to them.”
He’s not alone in his criticism.
“I’m a little skeptical of anyone who is promising results at the moment,” said an SEO manager at a large news publisher, who agreed to speak anonymously. “The C-suite types are probably clamoring for any kind of data related to [generative] AI. But right now it’s just discovery. I can’t say how actionable any of this stuff is. We’re still so early in this product lifecycle that it’s tough for me to see the value in going into GEO whole hog,” they said.
As a head of SEO at a large lifestyle publisher put it: “We’re at a point where they [the SEO industry] haven’t even decided what to call it, let alone whether it’s a thing or [if] it’s real yet… It’s such a new industry that almost none of these people who are suggesting tactics have actually tested it thoroughly.”
Publishers are hesitant to throw resources at GEO. The reasons are familiar for anyone who’s dealt with a platform over the last decade or so: constant changes to AI models. No visibility into what gets surfaced — or why. No reliable data on traffic. No tools that offer real insight. And certainly no evidence that GEO drives meaningful reach.
Which is why most publishers are keeping GEO at arm’s length. The hype around GEO suggests urgency, but most media operators know better.
“Agentic search is emerging and growing at an exponential rate for some, but the traffic contribution [compared to] Google is still minuscule, from everything we’ve seen,” said an SEO manager at a travel publisher, who was not authorized to speak to Digiday on the record. “I’m also not convinced that we as an industry have identified what the KPIs from AI search are if it’s not the click.”
There’s also the fact that there’s still a lot of crossover between SEO and GEO. SEO best practices still matter, publishing execs said. Google has said the same. Its AI tools source information from sites that are deemed high-quality by traditional SEO frameworks like E-E-A-T, or “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.”
“Whatever is ranking in Google also ranks in these answer engines. So to a very large extent, it’s SEO being repackaged because nobody wants to hear that SEO is the solution since search traffic itself is on the decline,” said the lifestyle publisher’s head of SEO.
Michael King, founder and CEO of a content marketing and SEO agency iPullRank, agreed that traditional SEO rules still apply in the age of AI search — but they’re not enough. His agency is researching to help clients see results with AI tools, though he admitted nobody has much control over how or if they show up in these experiences.
Experimenting on an unproven system while the old one is still paying the bills isn’t skepticism — it’s survival.
One head of product at a news publisher said they are actively testing GEO tactics, because it would be foolish to ignore.
“When the internet as we know it is gone due to AI it may be all we have,” they said, under the condition of anonymity.
Eventually, this shift will come irrespective of publishers’ feelings. And when it does, they’ll have no choice but to reassess where GEO fits into the mix. In fact, some publishers are already doing just that.
Lily Ray, vp of SEO strategy and research at Amsive, a marketing agency, said SEO and GEO tactics are very similar. “Anybody that’s pretending to be an expert in [GEO], they’re lying,” she said.
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