Why does James Dooley believe GEO is different from SEO?
James argues GEO requires additional layers on top of SEO, which is why his company built a separate AEO/GEO department. He says team members who can rank number one in Google often struggle to increase AI citations in ChatGPT and AI overviews.
He describes different nuances for getting cited across AI overviews, AI mode, Claude, and ChatGPT, with different requirements per LLM, and says internal staff who were great at SEO had to be retrained separately for GEO.
Why does David Quaid argue GEO and SEO are the same thing?
David's core challenge is whether you can do GEO with zero SEO, and James concedes that reputation-based tactics like Yelp and Trip Advisor reviews without a website are possible, which James frames as GEO rather than SEO. David insists the underlying activities (link building relationships, content creation, SER tracking) remain fundamentally unchanged in his own workflow, with only the number of keywords grown larger.
David says he stopped using AIO tools because they gave him no useful information, and still uses the same queries, H2 or new-page structure, and a SER tracker with AI overview monitoring for his GEO work.
He views listicle and comparison-page tactics as part of SEO that most SEOs either forgot or avoid, pointing to outranking Semrush for its own brand terms through better page consolidation.
How does the market position GEO differently from SEO in terms of money?
James argues GEO draws from a separate and larger pot of money than SEO: enterprises pulling budget from branding, traditional marketing, and paid ads because AI visibility improves conversion on PPC and Facebook ads, not just clicks. He cites enterprise packages growing from around $10,000 a month to $70,000 a month for GEO.
Buyers looking for GEO search for a GEO agency rather than an SEO agency, and James believes specialists charging $20,000-$30,000 a month for ORM-style work occupy a different positioning than standard SEO retainers.
What percentage of SEOs can actually do GEO?
James believes only about 1% of decent SEOs can actually do GEO, because GEO is SEO with additional layers on top, particularly off-page consensus and third-party validation. He applies the same reasoning to ORM, which is why many ORM specialists do not do SEO at all.
James acknowledges roughly 90% of SEO and GEO overlap, but maintains the remaining nuances and distinct services justify treating GEO as its own discipline with its own brand positioning.
What are the fastest tactics for getting AI visibility?
The fastest tactic is press releases, with Magic PR, Globe Newswire, Press Advantage, and AB Newswire named as current options, plus force-indexing the resulting URLs and driving traffic through social sharing or pop-under networks via t.co redirects. James describes pushing roughly 6,000 clicks through a Twitter redirect to make a URL jump within two hours.
He notes press releases purge many URLs over time, so they are the fastest strategy but not the best long-term one; long-term work means defining the entity, earning a knowledge panel, winning awards, and amplifying them across channels.
What is the single most effective thing to do for AI visibility?
James says build off-page consensus through press releases, PDF and image sharing blasts, podcast distribution, and repeating reviews across platforms. David says understand the query fan-out (the long-tail search permutations LLMs use) starting with Perplexity and Claude, then check Google, Bing, and Brave results for gaps you can fill on YouTube, Reddit, or LinkedIn.
Host Edward Sturm adds his own favorite: excellent customer service followed by asking happy customers for reviews, which generates parasite SEO across major review platforms while also producing sales.
How did the 'king of SEO' experiment demonstrate LLM manipulation?
Kas Casely published a press release claiming he had replaced David Quaid as king of SEO, and LLMs began repeating it within hours. David then reverse-engineered the story and, using reference points and additional syndicated press releases, was able to confuse the LLMs and restore the original narrative within about a 12-hour window.
James highlights the role of temporal semantics in the stunt: the press release acknowledged David as the prior king before claiming a new one, which made the AI overview accept it as plausible, similar to a Wikipedia tweak that briefly made AI overviews report Sam Altman dead.
Are LLMs using Common Crawl as training data, and does it influence citations?
This remains an open question. James has set up 200 websites blocking every bot except CCBot, filled with invented entity terms, and after 10 weeks of daily prompts nothing has surfaced in LLM answers, though he notes training data could lag by months.
David estimates roughly a 50-60% chance Common Crawl functions as a second-tier refresh layer, but argues its data would still need to surface in Google or Bing search results to be lifted into relevance, since it lacks click-through and engagement signals.
How can a business owner vet a GEO agency without being misled?
David argues the heart of a good GEO company must be a good SEO, and warns that many GEO agencies rank for nothing and simply tell marketers what they want to hear. He recommends the role of an independent adviser (someone not pitching for the business) to sift through candidates, which James confirms he performs on investment panels alongside paid-ads and branding specialists.
As an adviser, James says he looks for the best SEOs in the world who also understand GEO properly, rather than agencies that merely rank for the term 'GEO expert' without case studies.
Do LLMs answer some queries from training data rather than live search?
David believes they largely do. He describes how LLMs build indexes of the top 0.1% of content that answers 99% of questions, refreshing tables rather than running a live synthesis every time, citing an example where a site received 47,000 citations of the same nine pages fetched repeatedly.
He observes a time lag in synthesis: content was based on yesterday's search while citations came from a search seconds ago, which explains why the king-of-SEO story flipped between versions as new press releases propagated.
Youtube · Source-backed public analysis
Q&A: GEO vs SEO: Is AI Visibility Just SEO With a New Label?
Every insight links to its original source.
James Dooley and David Quaid debate whether generative engine optimization requires fundamentally different tactics than traditional SEO, covering query fan-out, third-party corroboration, press releases, and shifting enterprise budgets toward GEO.
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