We have reached the peak of the AI search hype cycle. Lately, for those of us in the search marketing industry, it feels impossible to open any social media feed without being flooded with posts or ads about how brands not investing in GEO will be invisible in AI search.

I made this collage of some of my favorites from the past few months:

Along with all this excitement about AI search comes a lot of bad advice, largely stemming from a lack of information about how LLMs actually work, and/or a lack of SEO experience which, as it turns out, is vital for earning and sustaining visibility within AI search responses.

I believe many new AI search case studies and success stories being shared are problematic and should be questioned, for a few common reasons:

They show a rapid growth in SEO/AI search visibility, but do not account for the subsequent crash that often follows after search engines eventually demote the site

They assume GEO exists in a vacuum, and deny or ignore that existing SEO performance had…