Business Insider interviewed both SEOs and representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity on what it calls the "GEO rush." The rush for SEO companies or other companies to sell GEO (AI SEO) related services. There are quotes from Danny Sullivan from Google, Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft and more.
I will pull out the quotes:
Google's Danny Sullivan quotes:
Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose "track of the big picture.""Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?" he said. "That's what we want to reward."
Sullivan shared an example of popular advice from SEO/GEO experts that could soon go stale: that large language models favor bite-sized content.
"Maybe they've seen that this seems to work in some edge cases in some places," but the model will inevitably change, he said. "All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term."
Sullivan said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search.
"Plenty of sites succeed because they don't do SEO, or hire SEOs," Sullivan said. "They don't think about it because they're just focused on making great content."
General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, ensuring Google's search crawlers can actually get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, especially as AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core.
AI formats are also getting better at multi-modal queries — a user might ask "what's in this video?" for example.
"If you've still been a text-only kind of player, more images and videos may help you. But they would have helped you anyway," Sullivan said.
Microsoft's Krishna Madhavan quotes:
"Be skeptical of shortcuts," Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager for Microsoft Bing said.What is new, Madhavan of Bing said, is that companies must think about optimizing for inclusion in a synthesized answer, rather than simply a list of links on a search results page.
"Think beyond keywords to user intent, question‑answer structure, and machine‑readable cues that make your content easy to parse," Madhavan said.
Madhavan said the fundamentals of SEO are still critical, including structure and freshness signals that make content easier for AI to consume. This includes using Q&A sections, sitemaps, and schema, a code that helps search engines understand your site, as well as adopting IndexNow, a protocol that lets search engines know when your site changes.
Stylistically, Krishna also suggests lists and tables instead of long walls of text, and advises keeping punctuation simple, including avoiding em dashes and symbols.
Perplexity quotes:
"There's going to be a lot of people who benefit from implying that they're very good at GEO. And then there's going to be a lot of tech companies, specifically AI companies, who benefit from saying that it's all hogwash," said Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity. "The reality is always somewhere in between."With the shift from SEO to GEO, "the biggest mistake you can make is to just try and transfer your understanding apples to apples," Dwyer said — and a lot of the companies offering GEO services are doing just that.
Dwyer said he's also been advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old-fashioned brand marketing. AI removes the "friction" of search and lets people buy things just by asking for them. As a result, building a strong brand will become increasingly important, he said.
A lot to chew on here... You can read the full story over here.
Forum discussion at X.
