Patrick Stox spent six and a half years inside Ahrefs before going independent, and his position on GEO is not the one the acronym wars want. SEO is a subset of it, not a synonym for it, because the fastest way to change what a machine says about your company is to fix the thing people are complaining about. The rest of the conversation is what an operator does once that is true.
If you’ve got a problem with your product, the easiest way to get the LLM or the AI search system to say something different? Go fix that. Because if people are complaining on the internet, that’s what it’s gonna say. So it’s business, it’s branding, it’s so much more.
— Patrick Stox
The claim is not that on-page work stopped mattering. It is that the ceiling on it is lower than the industry admits, because the systems are summarising a reputation you do not own. Stox draws a scale line through the middle of that: a local business can put an SEO on sentiment and move it. A large company cannot staff its way to changing the opinion of the internet.
Which makes GEO a business, brand and product remit that happens to include search work, rather than a rebrand of the search work.
SEOs got lucky with Google. We got Penguin, and for a few years that was really painful — and then they’re like, yeah, we forgive all your bad links. These AI search systems may make a different decision. How long will they hold a grudge against you?
— Patrick Stox
Google decided, around 2016, to stop holding historic link spam against sites. That decision could have gone the other way and stayed that way for another decade. Nobody at OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity has made the equivalent call, publicly or otherwise.
The practical reading: tactics that work today carry an unpriced liability. That is not an argument against moving fast. It is an argument for knowing...
