Is GEO Now A Scam? And Why That Doesn't Matter

Over the last couple of years, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has been marketed as the next great opportunity in digital marketing. Agencies have introduced new services, software companies have launched expensive AI visibility platforms, and consultants have spent countless hours explaining why businesses need to start optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and whatever other AI chatbot happens to be popular this week.

The pitch has been pretty straightforward: AI is going to replace traditional search, and if your brand isn't showing up in chatbot responses, you're going to be left behind.

There's just one little problem with that prediction. Where is all the traffic?

Despite the enormous amount of attention that GEO has received, recent research suggests that AI assistants still generate a remarkably small percentage of website visits. Meanwhile, chatbot adoption hasn't followed the uninterrupted growth trajectory that many expected, and the relationship between AI visibility and actual business outcomes remains difficult to establish.

So, is GEO turning out to be one big marketing scam? Maybe some of it is. But before we throw the entire concept into the dumpster, there's an important distinction worth discussing. Even if GEO never becomes the massive standalone marketing channel that some have promised, the fundamentals behind it may still be worth pursuing.

For all the discussion surrounding AI search, the actual referral traffic generated by AI assistants remains surprisingly small.

According to Ahrefs' AI vs. Search Traffic Analysis, which examined 115,254 websites, AI assistants accounted for just 0.43% of website traffic in September 2026. Traditional search engines, by comparison, accounted for 26.82%. In absolute numbers, the study recorded approximately 5.3 million visits from AI assistants compared to 337.7 million from traditional search engines.

That's not exactly the revolution we were promised.

Another study from The SEO Works examined 95 websites over a 12-month period ending in August 2026. It found that organic search generated 39 times more sessions than AI assistants. The study also found that, for every 100 conversions generated by organic search, AI referrals produced only 3.2.

To be fair, the study found that AI referral traffic had a higher average conversion rate than organic search, at 7.18% compared to 6.08%. That's an encouraging finding, and it suggests that visitors arriving from AI assistants can be valuable. But higher conversion rates don't automatically make up for the enormous difference in traffic volume.

It is also worth pointing out that AI referral traffic is growing. However, when dealing with such small numbers, impressive growth percentages can be misleading. Doubling your monthly AI traffic from 50 visitors to 100 visitors sounds fantastic in a conference presentation, but it probably won't have your CFO jumping for joy.

These findings don't mean that AI referrals are worthless, or that every website experiences the same results. Certain industries, audiences, and business models may see considerably more value than others. But for most marketing teams, the available evidence makes it difficult to justify treating AI referrals as a replacement for organic search.

Another assumption behind the GEO hype has been that consumers would rapidly shift their search behavior away from traditional search engines and toward standalone AI assistants.

That shift is happening to some extent, but the adoption trends aren't quite as straightforward as the early predictions suggested.

For example, Similarweb data reported in October 2026 showed that ChatGPT experienced a period of stagnation and volatility during the first half of the year before its website traffic rebounded. Meanwhile, competing assistants such as Gemini and Claude have gained market share, making the competitive landscape considerably more fragmented.

These trends shouldn't be interpreted as evidence that people are abandoning AI altogether. A decline in ChatGPT's market share doesn't necessarily mean a decline in the number of people using ChatGPT, much less the total number of people using AI assistants. Website traffic also doesn't capture all the usage occurring through mobile apps and other integrations.

However, the data does challenge the idea that adoption will follow a predictable path toward a single dominant chatbot replacing Google.

There's also another important issue: using a chatbot doesn't necessarily mean visiting the websites it references.

AI assistants are designed to answer questions directly. A user might receive a detailed product comparison, read a summary of an article, or learn about a brand without ever clicking through to the original source. From the user's perspective, that's often the entire point of using an AI assistant.

This creates a fundamental problem for marketers who have traditionally measured the success of discovery channels through website visits and conversions. Even as AI adoption grows, referral traffic might never grow at the same rate.

Before we start throwing around accusations of fraud, it's important to separate legitimate optimization practices from the industry that has emerged around selling them.

There is nothing inherently fraudulent about helping a brand become more visible in AI-generated responses. Businesses have a legitimate interest in how their products, services, and expertise are represented across emerging discovery platforms.

The problem comes when that interest is used to sell unrealistic expectations.

We've seen an explosion of GEO platforms offering proprietary visibility scores, agencies promising improved chatbot recommendations, and consultants pitching supposedly revolutionary optimization techniques. Some of these services offer valuable insights, but others appear to be repackaging traditional SEO practices with a new acronym and a considerably higher price tag.

And measuring success can get especially questionable.

For example, a GEO platform might report that your brand appeared in 40% more AI responses this month. That sounds impressive, but what does it actually mean? Were those responses generated from prompts that real customers commonly use? Did the additional mentions influence purchasing decisions? Did they generate qualified traffic or measurable revenue?

If those questions can't be answered, the visibility score might tell you very little about the actual business value of your investment.

Of course, not every marketing activity needs to generate an immediate website visit. Brand awareness, recommendations, and consideration can influence purchasing behavior without producing a direct referral. The same has always been true of public relations, advertising, and other brand-building activities.

But that doesn't give GEO a free pass when it comes to accountability.

If an agency is promising substantial business growth from AI visibility, it should have a reasonable way to explain and evaluate that claim. Otherwise, businesses risk spending significant resources chasing metrics that look impressive on a dashboard but contribute little to their bottom line.

GEO itself isn't necessarily a scam. But some of the promises being made about GEO deserve a healthy amount of skepticism.

After all this criticism, you might expect me to suggest abandoning GEO entirely. But I actually think that would be a mistake.

The reason has less to do with ChatGPT or Perplexity and more to do with Google.

Much of the conversation about GEO has centered on standalone AI assistants as an emerging alternative to traditional search. However, that framing overlooks one of the most significant developments in search: Google is integrating generative AI directly into its existing search experience.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are bringing conversational responses, synthesized information, and AI-generated recommendations into the same ecosystem that already produces an enormous amount of website traffic.

And the scale of that ecosystem matters. In June 2026, Google reported that AI Overviews had more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and that AI Mode had surpassed one billion monthly users.

Those figures aren't equivalent to referral traffic, and they don't tell us how many users clicked through to external websites. But they do demonstrate that AI-powered discovery is reaching a much larger audience than standalone chatbot referral statistics might suggest.

This is where the distinction between GEO and traditional SEO starts to get blurry.

In its official guidance on optimizing for generative AI search, Google explains that its generative search features are rooted in the company's existing search ranking and quality systems. These features use techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve relevant information from Google's search index and incorporate that information into generated responses.

In other words, traditional search infrastructure still plays an important role in determining what information is available to Google's AI systems.

This is especially important because a visit originating from an AI feature within Google Search isn't necessarily recorded as a referral from a separate AI platform. Looking exclusively at traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity therefore provides an incomplete picture of how AI search may be affecting your website.

Google has also introduced dedicated generative AI performance reporting in Search Console, giving website owners greater visibility into impressions associated with AI Overviews and AI Mode. While these reports don't establish the full business impact of AI visibility, they provide a more direct way to evaluate participation in Google's generative search experiences.

The takeaway is that standalone chatbot referrals may be a relatively minor marketing channel today, but AI-driven search experiences are already becoming part of a much larger and more established channel.

And that changes how we should think about GEO.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Google's guidance is how familiar the recommendations sound.

Google advises website owners to maintain a clear technical structure, create original and valuable content, make information accessible to crawlers, and establish credibility through helpful, reliable information.

Sound familiar?

These are essentially the same principles that have guided successful SEO strategies for years.

In fact, Google's documentation for AI search features explicitly states that there are no additional technical requirements or special optimizations necessary to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Pages still need to be indexed and eligible to appear in traditional search results with a snippet.

Google has also cautioned against pursuing questionable GEO shortcuts, including unnecessary AI text files, artificial mentions, and content formatting tricks that don't provide meaningful value.

That doesn't mean the way content is retrieved, interpreted, and presented hasn't changed. Generative systems can synthesize information from multiple sources, and businesses should consider how accurately their brand is represented across those sources.

For example, maintaining consistent product information, brand messaging, and factual claims across your website, social channels, and third-party publications is a sensible approach. So is developing original research, earning credible citations, and publishing information that demonstrates genuine subject-matter expertise.

But those activities also have established benefits outside of GEO. They contribute to stronger content, more effective public relations, clearer brand positioning, and potentially better traditional search performance.

The opportunity is to expand how we think about these existing practices, not necessarily replace them with an entirely new optimization discipline.

And while strong SEO provides a solid foundation for participation in generative search, it doesn't guarantee that your content will be cited or recommended. AI-generated answers can vary considerably depending on the query, context, and system producing them.

Still, if the same foundational work can support both traditional search and Google's generative features, the argument for investing in those fundamentals becomes considerably stronger.

For in-house marketing teams, the most sensible response is neither to abandon GEO nor to make it the centerpiece of next year's marketing budget.

Instead, GEO should be approached as an extension of an established search and content strategy, with investments prioritized according to their measurable value.

Start by continuing to improve your website's technical SEO foundation. Crawlability, indexation, internal linking, information architecture, and rendering remain important because search engines need to discover and understand your content before they can reliably surface it. Fixing these issues supports existing organic search performance while also making your website more accessible to the retrieval systems powering generative search.

Next, focus on producing content that offers something genuinely useful and original. As AI-generated summaries of existing information become increasingly common, publishing another generic article that simply repeats what everyone else has already said is unlikely to provide a meaningful competitive advantage. Original research, expert insights, first-hand experience, and comprehensive explanations offer stronger reasons for both users and search systems to recognize your content.

Marketing teams should also think beyond their websites. AI systems can draw upon information from multiple sources when constructing responses, making accurate and consistent brand representation increasingly relevant. This is a good reason to coordinate content marketing, public relations, and social engagement around a unified strategy. However, that work should prioritize legitimate engagement and credible coverage rather than manufacturing artificial mentions solely to influence AI responses.

Finally, teams should establish realistic expectations for measurement. Monitor AI referrals in GA4, examine their conversion performance, and use Search Console's generative AI reports to understand visibility within Google's AI features. AI citation tracking tools may offer useful directional insights, but their results should be evaluated carefully, especially when based on synthetic prompts or proprietary scoring systems.

Most importantly, don't redirect substantial resources away from profitable marketing activities simply because a GEO vendor says the future of search depends on its platform.

Experiment with emerging opportunities, establish benchmarks, and look for evidence that those experiments are producing meaningful business outcomes. As those opportunities mature, your investment can grow alongside the evidence supporting them.

It's entirely possible that the marketing industry got a little carried away with GEO.

We took an emerging technology, predicted that it would fundamentally disrupt consumer behavior, invented a new acronym, and immediately started selling software and services to help businesses prepare for the disruption.

If you've worked in digital marketing long enough, that sequence of events probably sounds familiar.

But the disappointing referral numbers and uncertain adoption trends don't necessarily mean that generative AI will have little impact on how people discover information online. They may simply indicate that the opportunity looks different from what we originally expected.

Rather than becoming a massive new standalone referral channel, generative AI may have its greatest impact by changing how established search platforms retrieve, organize, and present information.

For marketing teams, that means the fundamentals of GEO remain relevant, even if the hype surrounding the industry doesn't.

Good technical SEO, original content, credible references, consistent brand messaging, and a well-coordinated digital presence are valuable investments regardless of whether a visitor discovers your business through a traditional search result or an AI-generated response.

So, is GEO a scam? It depends on what someone is trying to sell you.

But here's the good news: If GEO turns out to be the next big thing, good SEO will help you prepare for it. And if GEO turns out to be the next big marketing fad, good SEO will still be worth the investment.

WebMCP:

One more thing: AI is only as good as its operator, and if you are reading this newsletter, you’re better than most!

Till next time,

PS: Let me know what you think of this issue, or anything else here: [email protected]