If you've spent the last year calling out GEO as marketing

bollocks, then stuck it in your headline anyway, what the fuck

are you doing?

This is SEO. Fucking what? I'm Nikki and I've been in SEO for

over 30 years before it was even called SEO. I help people

like you make money from your website by getting found on

search. And today I'm talking about something that's really,

really pissed me off.

SEOs, good SEOs, people I like and respect,

adding GEO and aeo to their LinkedIn headlines

because they're tired of losing pictures to other people. I get

it, I really do, but it's making everything

worse. So here's what happened. I had

a conversation with a potential client recently. They'd found me on

ChatGPT, which, by the way, awesome, and they

wanted to know what I'd done to get there. So I told them SEO.

And they said, well, yeah, but what did you do specifically

to be in AI search? And I said, SEO.

And they said, yeah, but you must have done something differently,

right? And I said, I literally did the same

SEO I do for all my clients. And to cut a

long story short, they went with someone else, someone on LinkedIn

who offered AEO and GEO as well as SEO

and charged almost three times as much. And you know what?

There's enough business out there. There's business for everyone. So fill your boots,

mate. Enjoy paying triple for the exact same fucking thing.

And I posted about this on LinkedIn, as you do when you're annoyed and need

to vent into the void. And the response has made me really sad. People

I like, people I respect, SEOs who'd been doing this

for years. They admitted on the post and by direct

message that they'd reluctantly added GEO

to their headlines. One of them said it took more thought

than I expected, but they'd done it for clarity and positioning.

Another said their skills better represented now.

And a third one told me that they'd resisted for months but finally

caved because they were tired of losing pictures. And to people

offering the same thing with new terminology.

And again, I get it. I really fucking

do. When potential clients are choosing someone charging more

than you just because they've stuck three letters in their headline,

the temptation to play the same game is enormous. But

it really, really bothers me. If your

skills haven't changed, how are they better represented? By

adding a buzzword? If you're doing the same good work you

were doing six months ago, what clarity does GEO

add? None. It adds precisely buck all

except validation to the lie that GEO is somehow

massively different from SEO. And if you've read anything I've

written about GEO over the past year, and if you haven't,

where have you been? Then you'll know that I think a big part of

the whole concept is is marketing. Bollocks.

I called it out in a blog post called what the fuck is geo? Back

in April last year. I went after the self proclaimed

experts in June and in January this year, Danny

Sullivan from Google, you know, actual Google,

pretty much confirmed what I'd been saying all along. G E O

is pretty much SEO with a shiny new acronym.

The guidance is the same, their work is the same. The made up

terminology is just marketing designed to separate business owners

from their money.

So when SEOs, people who absolutely should know

this, and I'm pretty sure they do, add GEO to their

headlines anyway, pisses me right off. And it's

not because I'm judging them personally. Like I said, I

genuinely understand the pressure. When there are

people out there charging thousands for AI optimization

that just amounts to basic content structure and clients

are falling for it. Staying principled feels like bringing

a fucking knife to a gunfight.

Every SEO who adds GEO to their headline makes

the problem worse. Every single one,

every one of us who plays along validates the lie. We make

it harder for clients to tell the difference between someone doing

legitimate work and someone who's just repackaged the same services

with trendy terminology and a price hike. I

know I'm gonna sound preachy here, and I hate myself for

it a little bit, but I can't help it.

Part of being seen as an expert in your field is not just doing

the work, but educating people, helping

them understand what they're paying for and why. When a

client asks me what I did to appear in AI search results, I tell them

the truth. Good SEO. When they push back,

I explain that optimizing for search engines is pretty much

the same as optimizing for AI search. The fundamentals

don't change just because there's a chatbot on the other end.

When they're skeptical, I show them the results I've achieved without

doing anything specifically for AI. Just the same

SEO that works. When the SEO that works

changes, then I'll change what I do and not until then.

And that's harder than just nodding along and adding GEO

specialists to my invoice. But it's honest and in the

long run, it builds the kind of trust that keeps clients coming back

instead of chasing the next shiny thing that some dickhead on LinkedIn

invented. When we add GEO to our

headlines, we're not educating anyone. We're

reinforcing the idea that there's something meaningfully different about

AI optimization, something that requires completely

separate expertise and justifies separate pricing.

We're telling clients that their confusion is justified,

that this really is a whole new discipline,

that the Hustle Bros selling GEO services might actually be

onto something. And they're not.

We know they're not. And by playing along, we make it

harder for clients to figure that out. So what's the actual

fix here? What do we do when

staying principled means watching those Hustle Bros who hoover up the business?

I'll tell you what I think in just a minute.

Here's where I'm supposed to give you a nice, neat solution. The magic

answer to competing with people charging more for identical services

wrapped in buzzwords. And the truth is, I don't have one.

If I'd cracked that particular code, this would be a very different kind of

podcast, and I'd probably be a lot richer. But this is what

I do know. Maybe the answer is being

louder about calling this stuff out, making more noise than the

grifters. Maybe it's writing more content that helps business

owners understand what they're really paying for. More podcasts,

more articles, more guest spots. Maybe it's finding better

ways to demonstrate value that don't require playing

terminology games. Because what I do know is that adding

three letters to our LinkedIn headlines ain't it? So

every time someone asks me about geo, I have an opportunity

to explain why the term exists, who benefits from

it? Because it's not business owners and what the work

actually involves. And that conversation might lose me some clients who

want to believe in magic, but it might also build trust with

clients who appreciate straight talk. And honestly,

I'd rather be the SEO who told them the truth than the one who took

their money and validated their confusion. Here's what

I think we need to acknowledge. If we're being honest,

this mess is kind of our own fault. The

SEO industry's fault. The reason

GEO grifters have been so successful is, is that the SEO

industry has historically been absolute dogshit,

explaining what we do. We've hidden behind jargon.

We've made simple things sound complicated. We've treated our

work like dark magic that only the initiated can understand,

and that created the perfect environment for someone to come

along with a new acronym and convince business owners that everything

they knew about SEO was suddenly obsolete.

Oh, you've been doing SEO? Oh, that's cute.

But have you heard about Geo? It's completely different. You need

a specialist. It's not completely different. It's

not some revolutionary new technique that's different

from what good SEOs have been doing for a decade or more. But when

our industry has spent so long being deliberately opaque,

can we really blame clients for falling for it? Adding

Geo to our headlines doesn't fix this. It makes it worse.

It's another layer of jargon, another barrier between

business owners and understanding what they're actually paying for.

So here's where I've kind of landed on this. I'm not

going to add Geo to my headlines and my profiles, not

because I'm morally superior, I'm really fucking not.

But because I genuinely believe it would make me part of a problem

I've spent the last year complaining about. I'd feel like a

hypocrite. And quite frankly, I have enough to feel guilty about

without adding that to the list. Will it cost me

clients? Probably. Will some of

those clients end up paying someone else loads more for

identical work? Almost certainly. But if

I'm going to lose clients, I'd rather lose them while being honest about

what I can do than win them by playing the same games as

the people I've been calling out to, the SEOs who've added

geo to their headlines. I'm not trying to pick on you,

honestly. I'm just sad. I'm sad that the

industry has created a situation where good people feel they

have to do this to compete. I'm sad that clients are being trained

to look for buzzwords instead of expertise. And I'm sad that every

time one of us plays along, it gets a little bit harder to push

back. And I don't know how we fix this,

but I'm pretty sure that adding more letters to our headlines

isn't it. And if this resonated with you, don't keep

it to yourself. Make sure you're following SEO fucking what in

whichever app you're listening to right now so you don't miss the next episode.

Share this with your SEO mates. Share it with someone who's thinking

about adding Geo to their headline. Share it with a business owner

who's about to pay more money for the same work. If you want to

argue with me about this, do that as well. Find me on LinkedIn.

Always up for a scrap. Until next time. Get

found, make money. And for fuck's sake,

stop validating the Hustle Bros.