Listen: Another failed attempt to kill SEO

Don’t let industry outsiders redefine what you do. Recently, two venture capitalists from the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz published an article suggesting we rebrand search engine optimization—or SEO—to "GEO," which stands for Generative Engine Optimization.

But who are these authors? They are finance and investment partners, not search or machine learning experts. In fact, their article comes with a heavy disclaimer telling readers not to rely on their opinions as business advice.

And where did this term "Generative Engine" even come from? It was traced back to a single Wikipedia article based on a lone, misattributed paper. That Wikipedia page has already been deleted because the term is not widely accepted in computer science.

SEO has always been about helping people find information, and we are already naturally adopting artificial intelligence. If we eventually decide to rename what we do—whether we call it AI visibility, AI optimization, or large language model visibility—it should be our choice, not a label handed down by outsiders.

The SEO industry predicted this AI-driven world a decade ago. We have been expecting this, we are ready for it, and we do not need to be told who we are.