Is GEO worth it? The honest, Reddit-style answer

The community skeptics argue three things, and they're not wrong:

• Overlap with SEO — much of GEO advice (structure, authority, good content, schema) is what competent SEO already does. Agencies rebadging old audits as "GEO audits" fuel the cynicism.
• Informational-query bias — a lot of AI-assistant usage is learning, not buying; the commercial impact varies by category.
• Hype merchants — "SEO is dead" content sells courses, not results. Search engines are becoming answer engines; the discipline extends, it doesn't die. Academic work (the original arXiv GEO paper) found structural optimizations raised citation rates substantially — but vendors quoting one number as universal deserve the skepticism they get.

What the skeptics under-weight:

• The zero-click shift is measurable — buyers form shortlists inside AI answers without visiting anyone's site. If your analytics look flat while competitors get named in ChatGPT, you won't see the leak in GA4.
• The gap is diagnosable — engines answer differently from training data vs live web search. A brand invisible in trained data but fine on web search (or vice versa) has a specific, fixable problem that classic SEO reporting never surfaces.
• Early-mover asymmetry — the comparison pages, definitions and community answers engines cite today are being written now, mostly by whoever bothered first.

GEO is worth dedicated effort when (a) your buyers plausibly ask AI assistants for recommendations in your category, and (b) you've measured a gap — engines don't know you, misdescribe you, or recommend competitors. Measure first: a scored per-engine audit costs minutes (BrandGEO's is free to start). If the audit says engines already describe you accurately and recommend you — congratulations, spend the budget elsewhere and re-check quarterly.