{"id":11098,"date":"2026-06-03T18:43:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T00:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11098"},"modified":"2026-06-03T18:43:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T00:43:13","slug":"why-its-just-seo-could-cost-the-industry-billions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11098","title":{"rendered":"Why \u2018it\u2019s just SEO\u2019 could cost the industry billions"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/burning-money-costs-costing-loss-800x450.png\" class=\"attachment-large size-large wp-post-image\" alt=\"Burning money held by someone wearing a business suit.\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Search has managed to do something impressive. At the precise moment it should be becoming more important and valuable to clients, large parts of the industry have chosen to argue themselves into irrelevance.<\/p>\n<p>The real argument is about ownership.\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Who gets to define what search becomes next?<\/li>\n<li>Who gets the budget?<\/li>\n<li>Who gets to explain what happens when search stops being a list of links and starts becoming a machine that recommends answers, brands, and actions?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s just SEO\u201d has done so much damage. It sounds calm and experienced, like the sort of thing a serious search veteran would say to quiet the room.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s not strategy. It\u2019s a meme constraining one of the biggest commercial opportunities the search industry has had in years.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why memes matter to search<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S0303264721000356\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Memetics<\/a>\u00a0isn\u2019t new. Richard Dawkins\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2525646-the-selfish-gene-at-50-why-dawkinss-evolution-classic-still-holds-up\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">coined the term<\/a>\u00a0in \u201cThe Selfish Gene\u201d in 1976, proposing that ideas, behaviors, and phrases spread through culture using the same logic as genes spread through populations. They replicate, mutate, and compete. The survivors aren\u2019t necessarily the most accurate. They\u2019re the easiest to copy.<\/p>\n<p>Susan Blackmore took this further in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/220327365_The_Meme_Machine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Meme Machine,<\/a>\u201d arguing that humans are essentially meme machines: brains built to imitate, transmit, and store cultural information. The ideas that spread aren\u2019t the truest ones. They\u2019re the stickiest.<\/p>\n<p>Consider \u201cHappy Birthday to You.\u201d The melody is simple enough to remember after one hearing. The words require no expertise to learn. The social context \u2014 a celebration, a cake, a room of people \u2014 gives everyone a reason to join in. Nobody decides to keep it alive. It keeps winning the competition for space in human memory and behavior.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJingle Bells\u201d works the same way. It has no official guardian. It spreads because copying it costs nothing and signals belonging to a shared culture.<\/p>\n<p>Slogans, rumors, political lines, and professional clich\u00e9s travel the same way. They don\u2019t survive because they\u2019re correct. They survive because they\u2019re easy to repeat, socially useful to the person repeating them, and emotionally charged enough to keep spreading. Accuracy isn\u2019t part of the selection criteria.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/guide\/what-is-seo\">SEO<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo-444418\">GEO<\/a>\u00a0have a serious memetic issue.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.semrush.com\/lp\/semrush-one\/en\/?utm_campaign=ic_semrush_one&amp;utm_source=searchengineland.com&amp;utm_medium=overlay&amp;onboarding=off\" target=\"_blank\"><\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"headline-responsive\">\n        Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand <span>shows up<\/span>.\n      <\/div>\n<p>\n        The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.\n      <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n      <span>Start Free Trial<\/span>\n    <\/div>\n<div>\n<div>Get started with<\/div>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp\" alt=\"Semrush One Logo\" \/>\n    <\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How \u2018it\u2019s just SEO\u2019 became the dominant meme<\/h2>\n<p>When GEO entered the industry conversation, the reaction was immediate. Some people looked at generative search and saw a materially different interface. They saw AI systems summarizing, recommending, citing, and generating answers in ways that didn\u2019t behave like classic search results. They saw a need for new tools, workflows, measurements, and thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Others saw a threat. For much of the SEO influencer community, the response was containment. \u201cIt\u2019s just SEO\u201d became the line. Then the chant. Then the weapon.<\/p>\n<p>The phrase worked because it was perfect meme material: short, repeatable, and certain without requiring much investigation. It also protected status.<\/p>\n<p>If GEO is just SEO, the existing hierarchy stays intact. The same speakers keep the spotlight. The same consultants keep the authority. The same agencies keep the same budgets, or avoid having to rethink how the new landscape changes their work.<\/p>\n<p>Then came the uglier meme: \u201cGEO grifter.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That one did even more damage. It didn\u2019t just question the term. It framed anyone using it as suspect. It turned curiosity into suspicion and experimentation into opportunism. It encouraged dismissal instead of investigation.<\/p>\n<p>This is how professional consensus often forms online. Visible people repeat a simple framing, algorithms reward it, and repetition starts to look like agreement.<\/p>\n<p>And this is where the search industry started harming itself. As the framing spread, consultants repeating it gained visibility and social reinforcement, while clients and brands increasingly saw generative search differently.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Clients buy certainty, not acronym wars<\/h2>\n<p>Marketers outside the SEO echo chamber are already ahead of many search specialists. They can see the interface changing because they use generative systems every day.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve seen it firsthand. At BrightonSEO and several recent conferences, I asked the room a simple question: Who here is using AI to make decisions, solve problems, or get work done?<\/p>\n<p>The hands went up. Not a few hands. All of them.<\/p>\n<p>Hundreds of people in different rooms gave the same answer without needing to be briefed, persuaded, or dragged through a 30-post LinkedIn argument about terminology.<\/p>\n<p>When marketers and business people are already changing how they search, decide, and work, the industry doesn\u2019t get to sit in the corner insisting nothing has changed.<\/p>\n<p>Clients don\u2019t buy theological disputes. They buy certainty.<\/p>\n<p>SEO has never been an easy channel to sell. Many companies have been burned by vague retainers, vanity metrics, and content strategies that produced a library of articles nobody needed.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, good SEOs have built companies, saved jobs, and created revenue. Both things are true, which is why the current argument is so dangerous.<\/p>\n<p>If the industry can\u2019t explain what has changed, buyers will defer. They\u2019ll move budget into paid search, paid social, or whatever advertising unit Google, OpenAI, or Meta sells them next.<\/p>\n<p>Organic search won\u2019t get the exploratory investment it needs because the people who should be leading the conversation are still arguing about whether the word GEO is allowed to exist.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The B2B Institute already called this<\/h2>\n<p>LinkedIn\u2019s B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute make this clear in their report, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/business.linkedin.com\/marketing-solutions\/b2b-institute\/easy-to-find-being-where-b2b-buying-happens\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Easy to find: Being where B2B buying happens<\/a>.\u201d The argument isn\u2019t built around acronym point-scoring. It\u2019s built around mental and physical availability. B2B brands grow by being easy to think of, find, and buy.<\/p>\n<p>Physical availability covers three dimensions: presence, prominence, and portfolio. In a digital world, that means being discoverable across every environment where buying actually happens, not just the ones that existed five years ago.<\/p>\n<p>The report explicitly describes GEO as \u201cthe new wave of SEO\u201d and states that generative engine optimization rewards foundational brand-building: authority, relevance, thought leadership, authentic reviews, and earned mentions. It also notes that generative search and LLM-powered discovery are reshaping how information is surfaced, with relevance determined by content authority and context, not keywords.<\/p>\n<p>The marketing scientists aren\u2019t saying \u201cwrite more keyword articles and relax.\u201d They\u2019re saying discoverability is changing, but the underlying fundamentals remain.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Be easy to think of and easy to find.<\/li>\n<li>Build distinctive assets, create authority, and show up where buyers are looking.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This isn\u2019t a choice between SEO and GEO. It\u2019s a physical availability problem in a new search environment.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. test<\/h2>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s just SEO\u201d collapses too much into one bucket. SEO already means different things to different people. To one person, it means technical hygiene. To another, content production. To another, digital PR. To another, ecommerce feeds, internal linking, and category pages. To another, local search or revenue-focused organic growth.<\/p>\n<p>So when someone says GEO is \u201cjust SEO,\u201d the obvious question is: Which SEO, exactly?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJust SEO\u201d sounds simple until you ask what it means between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>What are you doing today to increase the likelihood that a generative system recommends your brand in a buying situation?<\/li>\n<li>What are you measuring?<\/li>\n<li>What sources are you influencing?<\/li>\n<li>What third-party evidence are you earning?<\/li>\n<li>What brand associations are you strengthening?<\/li>\n<li>What prompts, citations, and recommendation contexts are you monitoring?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If the answer is \u201chelpful content,\u201d we\u2019re in trouble.<\/p>\n<p>Helpful content isn\u2019t a strategy. It\u2019s a phrase so vague it means everything and nothing.<\/p>\n<p>Brands need extractable, repeated, credible information about the problems they solve and the situations in which they should be chosen.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why GEO is closer to digital PR, brand strategy, and content marketing than many people want to admit.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">No name, no budget<\/h2>\n<p>Markets don\u2019t fund things they can\u2019t name.<\/p>\n<p>A name isn\u2019t decoration. It\u2019s a buying mechanism. It\u2019s how a nervous CMO turns a vague threat into a line item. It\u2019s how procurement understands why last year\u2019s SEO retainer isn\u2019t automatically the answer to this year\u2019s generative search problem.<\/p>\n<p>If GEO is \u201cjust SEO,\u201d it gets dragged into the existing SEO budget. And most SEO budgets are already fighting for oxygen. So the industry\u2019s grand commercial plan is this: take a new interface, a new buyer behavior, a new measurement problem, and a new competitive surface, then hide it inside the same budget clients were already reluctant to increase.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s commercial self-sabotage.<\/p>\n<p>Call it GEO, AI search visibility, or SEO evolved. The exact label matters less than creating a commercially legible category. Once a category has a name, it can have a brief. Once it has a brief, it can have a budget, a team, a process, a dashboard, and a target.<\/p>\n<p>Kill the name, and you don\u2019t protect SEO. You shrink the market it should\u2019ve owned.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.semrush.com\/lp\/semrush-one\/en\/?utm_campaign=ic_semrush_one&amp;utm_source=searchengineland.com&amp;utm_medium=overlay&amp;onboarding=off\" target=\"_blank\"><\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"headline-responsive\">\n        See the <span>complete picture<\/span> of your search visibility.\n      <\/div>\n<p>\n        Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform.\n      <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n      <span>Start Free Trial<\/span>\n    <\/div>\n<div>\n<div>Get started with<\/div>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp\" alt=\"Semrush One Logo\" \/>\n    <\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.semrush.com\/lp\/semrush-one\/en\/?utm_campaign=ic_semrush_one&amp;utm_source=searchengineland.com&amp;utm_medium=overlay&amp;onboarding=off\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.semrush.com\/lp\/semrush-one\/en\/?utm_campaign=ic_semrush_one&amp;utm_source=searchengineland.com&amp;utm_medium=overlay&amp;onboarding=off\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A better way to frame the shift<\/h2>\n<p>There\u2019s a simple way out of this mess.<\/p>\n<p>Call GEO \u201cSEO evolved\u201d if that helps. Call it \u201cSEO rebranded for generative search\u201d if that allows people to cross the bridge without losing face. But stop pretending nothing has changed.<\/p>\n<p>Search is becoming generative, and brands need to become easier for AI systems to retrieve, understand, and recommend.<\/p>\n<p>The goal is no longer just to rank. It\u2019s to be recommended. To be:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Present in the answer.<\/li>\n<li>Visible in the journey.<\/li>\n<li>Credible sources.<\/li>\n<li>Easy to choose when a buyer moves from curiosity to consideration.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That requires SEO skills. It also requires digital PR, brand strategy, technical understanding, measurement, and serious marketing thinking. GEO is SEO growing into the rest of marketing.<\/p>\n<p>The brands that adapt to that shift will earn visibility as search changes. The ones still treating it as a naming debate risk missing the commercial opportunity entirely.<\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/martech.org\/why-its-just-seo-could-cost-the-industry-billions\/\">Why \u2018it\u2019s just SEO\u2019 could cost the industry billions<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/martech.org\/\">MarTech<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Search has managed to do something impressive. At the precise moment it should be becoming more important and valuable to clients, large parts of the industry have chosen to argue themselves into irrelevance. The real argument is about ownership.\u00a0 Who gets to define what search becomes next? Who gets the budget? Who gets to explain &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11098\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Why \u2018it\u2019s just SEO\u2019 could cost the industry billions&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"medium":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"large":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"inspiro-featured-image":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"inspiro-loop":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"inspiro-loop@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-masonry":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-masonry@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_cinema":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_portrait":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_portrait@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_square":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}