"Good SEO is Good GEO." But Is That True?

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If you've been seeing the phrase "good GEO is good SEO" everywhere on LinkedIn lately, you're not imagining it. It's become the comfort take of the moment — and this week, it got a very official co-sign. Brendon Kraham, Google's VP of Search and Commerce, published a piece on Think with Google making exactly that argument. 

So here we are.

This episode is a rant. A structured, well-reasoned rant — but a rant. Because the "good GEO is good SEO" framing isn't just lazy. It's actively giving brands permission to stop learning at exactly the wrong moment.

In this episode:

• Why the "good GEO is good SEO" take is part true and mostly incomplete — and why that distinction actually matters for your brand
• The four ways GEO goes beyond SEO that no amount of foundational optimization covers: content extractability, entity authority, freshness for AI retrieval, and cross-platform presence
• Why entity SEO and entity authority are not the same thing — and conflating them will leave you invisible outside your own domain
• What Google's Think with Google article gets right, what it gets wrong, and why its advice is largely limited to Google Search specifically
• Why brands that use this take as permission to stop paying attention are the ones that will be invisible in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini while their competitors get cited
• The one question to ask yourself before you hit publish that tells you whether your content is actually extractable

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com. 

Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

Resources:

Google's Good SEO is Good GEO

Case Study: The Displacement of Legacy Authority

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome back to Found in AI. I am Cassie Clark, a fractional content strategist, an AI search optimization expert, and your host for all things AI Search Visibility, GEO AEO, and what it actually means to show up when your buyers are using AI to find answers. Today is a little different. I'm not bringing on a guest or sharing insights from someone else in the field today. I kind of need to step up on my soapbox and get something off my chest. So join me in a minute. Mostly because there's so much misinformation floating around. And it's almost downright mind-boggling at this point. But if I see one more LinkedIn post that says good GEO is just good STO, and then uses that as an excuse to tell everyone to stop learning, stop paying attention, stop worrying about what's changing, I'm going to throw my phone across the room. Listen, I am a tad frustrated, and I want to explain why because this take is not just lazy, like I hate calling it lazy, but it's a lazy take, but it's also actively doing damage to people who are trying to make smart decisions for their brands. Let's get into it. That is where the good GEO is good SEO crowd isn't wrong. The overlap is real. Content that's easy to read and easy to crawl helps with traditional search and with AI search. That part is true. But when people use that overlap to argue that you don't need to think differently about GEO, that's where I have a problem. Because that framing treats GEO like it's just SEO with a fresh coat of paint. And it's not. SEO is about getting indexed, GEO is about getting chosen. Those are not the same thing. A page can rank on the first page of Google and then can completely ignored by Chat GPT or these other AI engines. I have seen this happen over and over. I have even documented this in a case study, and that's titled The Displacement of Legacy Authority. You can read it below in the show notes or over on my website. But the displaced brand that's mentioned in this case study has a strong backlink profile. They have great keyword targeting, and they also have good clean technical SEO. But that brand loses visibility in AI-generated answers because indexing and citation are two different games with two different rule sets. Let me walk you through why SEO does not cover what GEO requires. First, we have entity authority. This is the one where I know someone is going to push back and say, but Cassie, Entity SEO is already a thing. Yes, it is. We still need Entity SEO. But entity SEO and entity authority are not the same thing, and conflating them is exactly the kind of shortcut that leads people to think that they're covered when they're not. Entity SEO, as most people practice it, is about building topical authority on your own website. Think topic clusters, internal linking, semantic relationships between your pages. You're essentially telling Google this site covers this subject thoroughly and consistently. That's useful. I'm not dismissing it. You still need to do that. But Entity Authority, the GEO version, is about whether your brand exists meaningfully across the entire internet. Not just on your own website, not just in your own content, but across absolutely everything. Does your brand get mentioned on third-party sites? Not linked to, just mentioned. Are people talking about you in Reddit threads without tagging your URL and other forms, not just Reddit, just all of them? Are you quoted in other people's newsletters? Are industry podcasts referencing your frameworks? Are influencers, whether they're part of an organized campaign or not, saying your name out loud to their audiences? That is what AI engines are picking up on. They are synthesizing the whole web, not crawling your internal link structure. And the signal they're looking for is this. If your brand only exists on your own website, no amount of internal linking fixes that. That is a GEO problem and it requires a GEO solution. Then we have content extractability. AI engines don't make your pages, they pull from it. And there's a real difference between a page that's easy to pull from and one that isn't. Here's what I mean. When you write for SEO, the goal is to satisfy the query and keep the reader on the page. So you write maybe a long intro, you build context, you layer in your supporting points, you write like a human who wants another human to stay engaged. That is correct, that is good writing, we still need that. But AI engines are not reading your article the way a human does. They're scanning for something that they can lift cleanly, whether that's a definition, a step, a labeled framework, a direct answer. That way they can just drop it into a response without needing to interpret or reconstruct what you're trying to say. They want a flashcard, not an essay. So here's what that looks in practice. Say you and the competitor both write about the same topic. Your article is well written, well structured for SEO, it has good headings, solid keyword placement. Their article has all of that too, but they also open with a crisp two-sentence definition. They have a section called How It Works with four numbered steps. Each step is one sentence, it's clean, labeled, liftable. You rank, but they got cited. That's the scenario that I keep seeing. And it's not a ranking problem, it's just an extractability problem. No amount of link building or keyword optimization fixes that. Because the issue isn't how search engines see your page, it's whether AI engines can grab what they need when they retrieve it. The editorial thinking needs to shift. Before you publish, ask yourself, if an AI engine needed to pull one paragraph from this page to answer a question, which paragraph would it be? If you cannot answer that immediately, the content is not extractable enough yet. Work on fixing that. Then we have freshness signals for AI retrieval. In traditional SEO, freshness matters, but mainly for time-sensitive queries. But here's the thing: a page can rank for a keyword and sit at number one for years with minimal maintenance. You earn the ranking, the signal holds, traffic keeps coming, but that concept does not carry over to AI search. Here's why. AI engines aren't just deciding which page to rank once and leave there. They're pulling from content pulls at retrieval time, meaning every time someone asks a question, the model is selecting from what's available in that moment. A page that signals it's current has an advantage at the moment of selection, not just at the moment it was first indexed. That is a fundamentally different dynamic. So freshness in GEO isn't about publishing new content consistently. It's about the signaling to the model that what's already on your website is still accurate and hasn't been superseded. The as-of-date language, add that into your content. It's not just a timestamp for your human readers, it's a trust signal to the model. It basically says this information was verified recently, it reflects current reality, it is safe to retrieve. A page without that signal, even a great page is competing against pages that have it. And in a retrieval system, that matters a lot. The update cadence matters here too. You don't need to rewrite everything, but you do need to build a habit of revisiting your most important pages, refreshing the data, updating the language, and making it visible that the content is actively maintained. That is a GEO behavior. Classic SEO doesn't drive you there. Finally, we have cross-platform visibility. SEO tells you to build backlinks. You still need that for SEO. Please, please don't take any of this as oh we need to quit SEO. No, SEO is still important. But GEO tells you to build presence. They sound similar, they are not. A backlink from a high domain authority site helps your rankings. That's real, it still matters, it's still very important. But a backlink is just a technical signal. It tells a search engine that another site vouches for yours. What AI engines are looking for is something different. They're looking for consistent co-occurrence. Your brand name showing up next to the same topics repeatedly across surfaces that have nothing to do with each other. For example, a podcast appearance where you explain your framework, a Reddit or Quorethread where someone mentions your name and an answer they wrote without tagging your site, a newsletter that quotes you as an expert, and by the way, newsletters and emails are about to become super, super important. Maybe a guest post on an industry blog, an expert roundup where your take gets included. None of those are backlinks in the traditional sense. Some of them don't link to you at all, some of them do, but they all do the same thing. They train the model to associate a brand with a specific topic area. That association, built across unconnected platforms by different people in different contexts, is what entity authority actually looks like in practice. And it's not something that a backlink strategy pushes you to because backlink strategy is really about your website. This is more about your brand. The distribution strategy GEO requires isn't really a social media strategy, it's more of a present strategy. The goal isn't engagement or followers or reach in the traditional sense. The goal is consistent co-occurrence at scale, making sure that whatever AI engines are pulling, that information about your topic in your name keeps showing up in the mix. SEO doesn't get you there because it wasn't designed to. Now I want to be really clear about something before I get into why this take frustrates me so much. I'm on a semi-vacation this week. My husband and I have a couple golf trips planned, and I'm really committed to being present for that. So I've been at my desk just long enough this week to get podcast episodes out and wrap up a couple client drafts, and then I have logged off, like trying to trying to not be on the internet this week. So when Steve Toth flagged a new article on LinkedIn yesterday, so Monday, I did not see it because again, I was on a golf course yesterday, but I read it this morning and I had a choice: either let it go and enjoy the vacation and just come back to it next week. But because I've already been thinking about this and I've been sitting on this for a couple days, I could not let it go. The article is from ThinkWithGoogle, business.google.com. This is Google's own official digital marketing publication. It's written by Brendan Cram. Cram? I'm probably saying his name wrong, but we'll go with it. He's the VP of Surge in Commerce at Google. The headline, I'm not making this up, is good SEO is good geo. Now I want to be fair here because I think that Brendan is a smart person and Google has real skin in this game. And some of what's in that article is actually solid advice. Like focus on your unique perspective. Create content that only your brand can speak to. Don't chase inauthentic mentions. Those, you know, the strategies that are spammy. Don't do that. Build a great web experience. All of that is true, all of that is good. Those are things that we should still be doing. But the framing is doing real damage. Because when Google's VP of Search publishes an article that essentially tells CMOs, don't worry about all the new names. Good GEO is just good SEO. What happens? The people in search marketing who are already skeptical of GEO as a discipline read it and they feel validated. You are likely gonna see a hundred hot takes on LinkedIn this week saying, see, Google says this. I'm glad I went on vacation. But the people who haven't done the deeper research read it and then they decide they don't need to. The brands that are disappearing from AI generated answers keep disappearing because nobody told them that Google's AI overviews and ChatGPT and Perplexity and Copilot, or whichever one you're using that is not Google associated, are not the same system with the same signals. Google is understandably talking about Google. That article is about Google search. And with Google search, the advice is reasonable. Their generative AI features are built on top of their existing ranking system. So your SEO foundation for Google does carry over. That part is true. But we need to think about AI visibility strategies as a whole engine thing, not just Google's. When I say whole engine, I'm talking about Chat GPT, Perplexity, talking about Copilot, talking about Yahoo Scout, all of the all of the engines that users are using. Because they're using Chat GPT to research vendors, they're using perplexity to compare solutions, they're using copilot to get recommendations. Those systems do not share Google's index. They do not wait signals the same way. Those things matter differently across engines. And keep doing your SEO while helpful and we should does not address any of them. When a piece like this gets shared uncritically, it gives people permission to stop paying attention. And I do understand the appeal of that. I really do. Learning a new discipline is challenging. Challenging is a very good word. It's uncomfortable and it requires admitting something that you've spent years getting good at is no longer the complete picture. But the brands that use this article as a reason to stop learning are the ones I'm going to be auditing in six months because they're going to be wondering why they're invisible in every AI engine that isn't Google. And as of now, Google is not the clear winner. You do not need to abandon your SEO strategy. Please do not do that. It still matters. You still need your SEO specialist. What you need to do is layer on top of it. You need to understand that GEO is additive. It builds on your SEO foundation and then goes further. We're talking entity building, content extractability, freshness for retrieval, cross-platform distribution. These are things that traditional SEO just doesn't cover because it didn't have to. These are things you have to deliberately learn and deliberately execute and really just experiment with. The FSA framework, freshness structure authority, it exists because I needed a way to explain the GEO layer to people who already understood SEO. They're not replacements for each other, they're more like compliments. But you have to understand what's different about each one before you can use them together. Okay, I needed to say that and I feel better about it. But if you've been hearing this take and using it as a reason to not dig into GEO more deeply, or you're seeing this take and you're a little bit like, maybe I really don't need to listen to that, like maybe I don't need to study this out, I'm gonna ask you to nicely reconsider your stance. Not because learning new things is fun, though honestly I'm a nerd and it kind of is, but because the brands that get clear on the difference now between SEO and GEO, those differences, they're the ones that are going to have a much easier time in the next year or two. So before I step off my soapbox, I'm just gonna leave a final thing. It's time to learn the difference. Okay, I'm done. I'm Cassie Clark. If you want to understand where your brand actually stands in AI Search engines right now, an AI Search Visibility Audit is a good place to start. You can find out more in the show notes or at CassieClarkmarketing.com. I'll see you on Thursday for a rundown of what's happened in AI Search this week. Until then, stay visible.