Good SEO serves as a shortcut for GEO, yet excellent GEO ultimately rewards diligent, down-to-earth effort.

In recent years, generative AI has emerged as a new information gateway, making "GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)" a red-hot topic. Some view it as a replacement for SEO, others call it the ultimate form of SEO, and there's even a claim that SEO is obsolete – and that professionals with SEO expertise moving into GEO would be a "dimension-reducing strike".

These claims sound compelling, but if you’ve actually managed SEO projects, implemented GEO optimization in practice, and validated results repeatedly with real clients and businesses, you’ll likely reach a less sensational but more realistic conclusion:

A good SEO is inherently a good GEO practitioner; yet a good GEO practitioner, in terms of outcomes, doesn’t necessarily need to be a "good SEO".

This isn’t just a conceptual tongue-twister – it’s an industry insight refined through countless projects, trainings, deliverables, mistakes, and retrospectives.

SEO is a "shortcut" to GEO, not an entry ticket

While SEO and GEO differ in form, they are highly homologous in "understanding engines".

SEO solves: How to make search engines trust and understand you, and display you to users in relevant query scenarios.
GEO solves: How to make generative AI treat you as credible input when integrating multi-source information, and ultimately "write you into the answers".

The medium has changed, but the underlying logic remains essentially the same. Professionals who’ve truly done SEO – especially those with long-term project experience – develop several highly "instinctive" judgment abilities: you subconsciously focus on clear information structure, stable sources, verifiable content, and consistent brand messaging over time. These skills aren’t learned from SEO tutorials, but forged through repeated retrospectives asking "why didn’t this work" – lessons repeatedly taught by search engines.

GEO demands even higher proficiency in these abilities. Unlike the simple "crawl-rank-display" process of search engines, generative AI operates more complexly: cross-verification of multi-source information, fusion of semantic weights, authority weighting, and final output generation. Without experiencing the iterative algorithmic corrections of the search engine era, it’s hard to truly understand why AI "chose someone else over you".

Thus, SEO isn’t an entry ticket to GEO, but it is indeed a shortcut to understanding GEO. This explains why many current GEO practitioners are from SEO companies that pivoted – those with SEO expertise find GEO intuitive and grasp it quickly.

Strong technical skills ≠ successful projects; endurance is scarcer than tricks

However, we need to distinguish between two concepts: SEO technical research ability and project delivery ability have never been the same.

Professionals with strong SEO technical skills may excel at reverse-engineering algorithms, explaining principles, and writing analyses – yet struggle in real projects due to common issues: insufficient client content, inadequate resource investment, disrupted execution rhythms from business demands, or frequent mid-project direction changes. These are the norm.

The real challenge of SEO projects isn’t "knowing the technology", but completing a slew of basic, even tedious tasks with long-term consistency and high completion rates. SEO is a quintessential "slow variable" job. It requires continuous output, revision, and investment – often with no immediate feedback for extended periods.

This is why many "SEO-savvy professionals" don’t necessarily succeed in every SEO project. It’s not a matter of ability, but endurance – or resistance from clients who refuse to modify websites or add new content.

Simply put, SEO isn’t complicated: with client cooperation, success hinges on the discipline to execute basic tasks meticulously and consistently, like a student practicing calligraphy stroke by stroke.

The same logic applies to GEO

Many now envision GEO as a "more advanced version of SEO", assuming SEO expertise equates to a dimension-reducing advantage in GEO. But reality tells a different story.

GEO isn’t an upgraded SEO – it’s a foundational marketing service with entirely different delivery logic. In the SEO era, outcomes were clear and quantifiable: rankings, traffic, clicks, conversions – metrics that could be directly monitored, compared, and reviewed. In the GEO ecosystem, outcomes resemble a process of "being default-selected": whether your brand is cited by AI, recommended, or included as part of the "standard answer" – often happening without users even realizing it.

For this reason, GEO imposes even "heavier" requirements on content and branding. It doesn’t reward one-time sprints, but demands consistent long-term messaging, stronger credibility accumulation, and sustained, stable content supply. This logic is surprisingly challenging for practitioners accustomed to technical breakthroughs and efficiency optimization.

I’ve seen many SEO-background professionals "fail" in GEO projects – not due to misjudgment of direction, but poor completion rates. They excel at solving complex technical problems, yet underestimate basic tasks like organizing information, unifying brand messaging, and long-term maintenance – tasks that seem "unsophisticated" but ultimately determine GEO success.

This is why you can still excel at GEO without SEO expertise, as long as you’re diligent and committed. In fact, operational talents are naturally suited for GEO in many practical projects – they interact with users daily, think from real usage scenarios, and are willing to handle continuous, granular, yet essential tasks.

GEO is a field that relies heavily on "dumb persistence". It rewards not those with the most tricks, but those who execute foundational work thoroughly and sustain it long-term.

SEO and GEO are essentially foundational marketing services

Both SEO and GEO are part of enterprises’ "digital infrastructure building". Poor project outcomes are rarely due to insufficient technical ability, but incomplete execution: half-finished content, inconsistent structure, unstable sources, or intermittent updates.

Engines and AI excel at identifying this – whether you’re genuinely building a long-term "digital presence". This is amplified in the GEO era: AI won’t remind you "you’re almost there" – it simply chooses others when information is insufficient or untrustworthy.

Thus, effort itself is a barrier to entry in GEO.

Acknowledge SEO’s value, but don’t fetishize its aura

Of course, we must recognize: professionals with SEO expertise do have technical advantages in GEO.

SEO’s greatest value isn’t tricks, but a systematic way of thinking. When facing "complex issues" like incorrect AI citations, inconsistent brand information, multi-source conflicts, or semantic drift – without SEO experience, you may struggle to even identify the root cause. Those with real SEO project experience handle such issues effortlessly – not because they’re smarter, but because they’re accustomed to dealing with "opaque engine mechanisms".

For this reason, I prefer to view SEO as an "accelerator" for GEO, not an entry ticket.

I also hope the industry avoids two extremes: denying SEO’s value, or fetishizing its aura. Those who succeed in GEO are often those who respect SEO’s long-term accumulation while clearly understanding that technology is just the starting point. SEO teaches you to understand engines; GEO teaches you to re-understand the weight of "long-term content assets".

This is why my current work is straightforward: focusing on GEO training and project collaboration, holistic search marketing solutions, combined with foundational capabilities like website development and press release distribution – helping enterprises build consistent, long-term, and systematic information messaging across AI and search engines.

Whether it’s SEO or GEO, success ultimately doesn’t depend on buzzwords – but on who can persist in doing slow, foundational, repetitive, yet correct work over time.

This is why I continue to write, execute, and research in this field to this day.