GEO, AEO, AIO, Whatever You Want to Call It: SEO Is Dead
Profound’s CEO, James Cadwallader recently told New York Magazine that we’ve reached an inflection point; one where humans no longer need to visit websites. AI, he says, will visit on your behalf, rewrite the page, cite it, and move on. “Answer engines hijack, or steal, the relationship.”
But who exactly is being hijacked?
It’s a strange argument, especially coming from someone whose own analysts have flagged the opposite trend: AI-generated content that gets deindexed by Google and ignored by answer engines.
Why? One theory: he’s trying to close the loop.
Profound is building its reputation tracking how AI systems surface and cite content. Now it wants to create that content too. The dream, it seems, is an end-to-end system: insights in, content out, no humans required. It's a classic founder fantasy: total automation, machine-to-machine communication, a world where nothing gets published until it’s been pre-chewed by a model.
Cadwallader is advocating for a world where AI slop talks to AI slop, at the very moment his company is rolling out a generative AI product that creates content based on the GEO insights surfaced by Profound a.k.a a product designed to generate that slop at scale.
But that vision misunderstands something fundamental. The end consumer still exists. And no one wants to find out that what they’re reading, or buying, or trusting, was spun up by the same system that ranked it. The internet wasn’t built for recursive hallucination. It will be interesting to see how the tussle between human and machine written content plays out in the post-SEO world.
In the same article, columnist John Herrman wrote that “for tens of thousands of SEO gurus, Google whisperers, and marketing professionals who work on and around search — a group of people accustomed to sudden changes at the whims of software giants — it’s been chaos.”
Herrman went on to quote Aleyda Solis, CEO of Orainti about the extent of denial about the future of SEO: “Many SEOs don’t want to accept that things are shifting.”
However, certain SEO influencers are starting to begrudgingly acknowledge the shift. Lily Ray, one of the most visible experts in the field, has been analyzing domains heavily cited by ChatGPT in the travel vertical (via Profound data) and comparing them to their visibility in Google. The trend? Many of these sites have little to no organic search presence.
Traditional SEO tactics no longer correlate with visibility in LLMs, answer engines, or AI products. What shows up in ChatGPT isn’t necessarily SEO optimized content. It’s answerable content. And those are different things.
So, yes, we agree with Cadwallader on one point: we are at an inflection point. We may not agree about who creates the content (despite the dollar signs in the Profound CEO’s eyes). Moving forward, the goal is to understand how content is optimized for and, increasingly, that means optimizing for how AI understands and retrieves information.
In that sense, SEO is dead. Or at least, it’s been eclipsed.
Unfortunately for SEO specialists, the importance of link ranking in Google is in permanent decline. As to what comes next… that’s AIO. That’s GEO. That’s AEO. Call it what you want. But the days of chasing blue links are over.