If Marie Haynes, Barry Schwartz or Cindy Krum had written an article declaring SEO dead and proposing we rebrand our industry you’d seriously consider it. Wouldn’t you?
What about Zach Cohen and Seema Amble?
Who?
Zach Cohen:
2016: Finance Intern, Prolific Capital Markets
2017-2018: Spring Analyst, Ghitis Property Company
2017-2020: Founder & CEO, NextGen Bootcamp
2018-2020: Minority Owner & Head of Growth, Noble Desktop
2019: Venture Fellow, New Enterprise Associates
2020: Growth Equity Investor, Stripes (3 months)
2021-2022: Analyst, General Atlantic
2022-Present: Investment Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Seema Amble:
2007: Summer Analyst, Goldman Sachs
2009-2011: Analyst, Blackstone
2011-2012: Associate, Altamont Capital Partners
2012-2013: Investment Team, LeapFrog Investments
2013: Product Strategy, Intuit
2014: Product Intern, Amazon
2015: Venture Investing, Cowboy Ventures
2017-2019: Vice President, Goldman Sachs
2019-Present: Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
2022-Present: Term Member, Council on Foreign Relations
I don’t know either.
Looked them up just now. Two VC people with insignificant footprint or long-term interest in SEO, Machine Learning and AI who published one opinion blog post and probably forgot about it (and you).
Under the article, in fine print, quite literally, are the instructions to ignore it.
I quote:
- “The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. “
- “This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.”
- “Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. “
So, no. Andreessen Horowitz hadn’t issued a royal decree to officially move our whole industry to geoscience category.
(Acronyms are not a16z’s core strength are they?)
So where did they get “GEO” from? My investigation showed that until its deletion, a single Wikipedia article, based on a single misattributed paper, provided all legitimacy to the term “Generative Engine”, which isn’t a widely accepted machine learning or computer science term.
Do we need new acronyms and names?
- SEO – We optimise for information retrieval and help our clients get better visibility.
- AI is something we natively adopt and optimise for as our second nature.
- Search Engine – It’s where people look up stuff, Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Naver.
- Now starting to integrate AI components to be more useful to users.
- AI Assistants (formerly chatbots) – ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini
- AI Agents – assistance with ability to act on our behalf.
- Now using search engines to give better answers to users.
Regular users just say things like “AI“, “search“, “look up“, “ChatGPT” and “Google“.
We can add more things SEO does, like CTR and EEAT.
I personally like:
- AI Marketing
- AI Visibility
- AI Optimisation (but not abbreviated to AIO).
I also don’t mind LLM visibility because it’s precise, but I do see its narrow scope.
Or if you, as an SEO, wish rename what you do to something else, why not pick your own name and do it by your own choice and not because an outsider to our industry instructs you to?
We saw this coming.
Ten years ago the SEO industry predicted the world Zach and Meena live in now, and described what is yet to come. We’re not taken by surprise, we’ve been expecting this, wondering what took so long.
Bring it on.
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