Stop Paying for AI Search Optimization (It Doesn't Exist)
If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve likely seen the pitch.
It usually comes from an agency or a "growth hacker" promising to get your brand into the coveted AI Snapshot (the answer box at the top of Google). They call it GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
It sounds technical. It sounds urgent. And it sounds like a secret backdoor to traffic.
But if you listen to the people actually building Google Search, they will tell you it’s mostly nonsense.
I recently analyzed the latest "Search Off the Record" tapes featuring Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison. When asked about these new acronyms, he didn’t validate them. He laughed at them.
"My favorite thing is that we should be calling it LMNOPEO... I think the good news is there's not a lot you actually really need to be worrying about." — Danny Sullivan
That isn’t just a throwaway joke. It is a direct signal from the team building the product: The "secret sauce" everyone is trying to sell you doesn't exist.
The "Cheat Code" is Dead
The industry is trying to convince you that AI requires a complex new technical language. They want you to believe that if you just structure your data this way or use these keywords, the AI will pick you.
But Sullivan was clear: Google’s AI models are trained to approximate human preference. The best way to "trick" the AI into ranking you is to simply write content that a human being actually wants to read.
Agencies love selling complexity because complexity looks like value. But if the goal of the AI is to mimic human satisfaction, then "optimizing for the robot" is actually a penalty, not a feature.
This makes the math simple: If you are paying an agency $5,000 a month to reverse-engineer the robot, you are lighting money on fire.
Commodity Trap
However, Sullivan did issue one warning that every founder needs to hear. It wasn't about how to write; it was about what to write.
He flagged "commodity content"—basic facts, simple definitions, and consensus information—as the danger zone.
Think of queries like "What time is the Super Bowl?" or "What is a fractional CMO?"
In the past, you could write a 500-word blog post on that topic and capture traffic. Today, LLMs are incredibly good at summarizing those facts. If your content library is built on "commodity info," the AI will simply read your site, summarize it, and serve the answer to the user without ever sending them to your URL.
The Only Defense is Humanity
So, if we can’t "optimize" for the AI, what do we do?
We stop trying to feed the bot and start trying to impress the human.
In 2026, your content strategy shouldn't be about keywords. It should be about "Un-Googleable" insight. You need to produce content that an LLM cannot easily generate from a data feed:
Unique Data: Proprietary research or case studies only you have.
Strong Opinion: A point of view that goes against the consensus (AI is trained on consensus; it hates outliers).
Human Experience: Stories, "I" statements, and messy realities that a robot can't hallucinate.
My Advice
Stop looking for the "GEO" hack. It doesn't exist.
Instead, audit your content for commodity risk. Look at your top 10 blog posts. If an AI can summarize them in three sentences, you are in the danger zone.
The only defense against the algorithm is to be so distinctly human that the machine has no choice but to cite you.
