The absurd process of SEO hucksters trying to pivot their obsolete services into "GEO" as most ecommerce websites realize their entire value was a list of part numbers and prices.

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hombre_fatal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"GEO" (optimizing for agent search) is the legitimate sequel to SEO though.

I published a free macOS app three years ago to the app store and abandoned it. Over the last six months I received multiple emails per week from people asking where they can find it since it only shows up on the app store for older macOS.

I finally asked people how they found out about my app, and 100% of the time it was because they asked ChatGPT how to do something and it found my crappy website.

I had also written aspirational but nonexistent features on my website at the time (like a personal TODO), and ChatGPT told people my app had this feature they wanted.

So I took the time to put a 2.0 release together years later.

There's clearly a lot of power here, like how you can make claims on your website that LLM agents take at face value. It's like keyword stuffing all over again since LLMs are not hardened against it.

For ecommerce it's even more obvious. I asked an LLM why it thought Product A was better than Product B and it clearly just regurgitated a paragraph from Product A's website about how it's better than Product B. We've all probably hit this with Google Search's AI summary where it's regurgitating some nonsense someone wrote in a blog post or reddit comment.

	▲	ToucanLoucan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, I can see the bones of the point you're trying to make, but: * You describe your website as "crappy" yet ChatGPT was able to figure it out enough to get you traffic for an app you didn't maintain * ... with the caveat that it thought made up theoretical features were actual features So unless your website was "GEO"d by sheer accident, I really don't think this is a good example to cite as the demonstration of what you're saying.

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tehjoker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

GEO?

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xnx an hour ago | parent [-]

"Generative Engine Optimization" a phrase as dumb as the idea.

For 30 years marketers have been doing everything they can to avoid making sites useful for people, despite that being what Google rewarded from the start (e.g. relevant link text, page titles, and headings).

	▲	11101010010001 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		to be clear, marketers are not the only ones to blame for useless sites.
	▲	snailmailman 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It’s infuriating when I do a search and get an entire page of AI slop articles, “helpfully” prefixed with the search engines’ own AI summary of the AI slop articles I searched for a specific niche product the other day. Second result down was AI blogspam “what to buy now that product X has been discontinued. We reviewed these 9 alternatives now that the company shut down.” The company didn’t shut down. The 9 alternatives were the same product by the same company in different sizes and quantity counts. How kind of them to hallucinate so many glowing reviews for me after they hallucinated a problem into existence first. At least the search engine can summarize all the slop for me. It even cites sources! The sources directly contradict the summary almost every time, but why would you click through?