Real talk: AEO, GEO, LLM-SEO, AI-SEO. Is any of this a real discipline or are we rebranding SEO again?
Putting this out for the room.
I've sat through three pitches in the last month from agencies offering 'GEO services' at 2-3x their old SEO rate. The deliverables list was: schema audit, content audit, comparison pages, one press release. I priced the same scope as 'SEO' a year ago. It was half the price.
Not saying nothing is new. Some things ARE new:
- Different engines retrieve from different corpora (Reddit vs docs vs press). That's new.
- Training-data lag means brand presence in 2023-2024 content carries weight a 2026 launch doesn't have. That's new.
- Hallucinations as a brand-protection problem (Leo's saga, that pricing-swap thread). That's new.
But the playbook a 'GEO consultant' actually executes is 80% SEO fundamentals (entity clarity, structured data, content depth, link credibility) with a 20% layer of prompt-level monitoring. Calling that a separate discipline is a sales move.
The question I want sharp opinions on: is the 20% new layer enough to justify the discipline label, or is this just SEO with a citation tab?
Genuine question. Petr, if you're reading this, I'd actually want the founder take. Not the marketing version.
2 replies
- Sara
From the buyer side: I sat through two of those same pitches this quarter. The thing that flipped my decision was when one agency couldn't explain why their methodology differed from what an SEO agency would do. The other one walked me through the per-engine retrieval point and showed me a per-engine citation report on a current client. Same deck title, completely different depth. The discipline isn't real yet, but the practitioners who get it are.
Petr here — honest founder take, no marketing version. The 80/20 split feels roughly right to me. The 20% is real but it's not a discipline yet, it's a measurement layer. The agencies charging 3x for 'GEO services' are mostly capturing the 'CMO is anxious about AI and wants a line item' budget, not delivering 3x more work. I'd say in 18 months either the 20% deepens into something genuinely separate (per-engine optimization, retrieval-corpus targeting) or this gets reabsorbed into SEO as 'AI-readiness'. Right now it's both at once and that's why the pricing is all over the place.