Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has become the industry’s latest buzzword, and it’s easy to see why. As more people turn to ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs to research and make decisions, showing up in those answers feels like the next frontier. But according to the panelists on our recent webinar, Narrative Wins: Building Visibility, Trust, and Influence in the Age of AI, treating GEO as a fresh start separate from SEO is one of the costliest mistakes a brand can make right now.
GEO doesn’t replace SEO. It builds on it.
John Greving, SEO Director at Go Fish Digital, put it directly: if you’re doing SEO well, your GEO should already be on the right track. The brands struggling most with GEO tend to be the ones who never built a strong SEO foundation in the first place, and are now trying to skip straight to the new thing. “I think that’s a mistake,” Greving said. “Most companies would probably do better to lock down the SEO side of things and learn from that in terms of what might be working well.”
Don’t abandon what you’ve already built.
Hannah Peacock (Workato) raised a related point: many teams are treating GEO as permission to walk away from years of SEO work. Her team takes the opposite approach, looking at what’s already ranking, what’s already resonating, and building defensibility into that existing content rather than starting over.
“There’s so much foundational work that’s already been done,” Peacock said. “Abandoning that to start a GEO strategy from scratch is tempting, but it’s a mistake.”
Greving agreed, calling it reinventing the wheel, and an expensive one at that. It echoes a problem SEO teams have dealt with for years: content that quietly goes stale because no one goes back to check it. The instinct to start fresh with GEO risks repeating that same cycle, just with a new label.
The takeaway
GEO isn’t a shortcut around SEO, it’s the next layer on top of it. Brands that treat it as a wholesale replacement are more likely to end up with disconnected, redundant content and no real way to measure whether it’s working. The brands that win will be the ones who audit what they’ve already built, reinforce what’s working, and let GEO extend that foundation rather than abandon it.
Want to hear the full conversation? Watch the replay of Narrative Wins: Building Visibility, Trust, and Influence in the Age of AI.
