Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of GEO-related articles on LinkedIn, on blogs, pretty much everywhere. Most of them take a practical angle: how to build a strategy, what steps tofollow, what to optimise. That makes sense. When something new comes along, the first instinct is to figure out how to apply it, whether for yourself or for a client. Everyone is looking for relevance. That includes me.
At the same time, it feels like we might be skipping a step. Before we really understand what is changing, we’re already trying to turn it into an approach or framework. It might be more useful to first ask a different question: what does this development actually make visible? And what does that mean for the way we create content?
From visibility to being part of the answer
What I see in practice is that the role of content itself is starting to shift. For a long time, the focus was on visibility. making sure you show up at the right moment. Now, there’s another layer to it. It’s no longer just about whether your content can be found, but whether it gets used as part of an answer. That may sound like a small shift, but it has real implications. Visibility can still be influenced by structure, formatting and optimisation. But what matters more now is whether there’s a reason to use your content in the first place. And that’s where the real difference starts to show.
Good writing alone isn’t enough
Over the past few years, a lot of effort has gone into improving content as a product, especially on websites and blogs. Content that needs to perform: to be found in search, to convert, and to be produced at scale. Clear writing, logical structure, easy-to-scan formats.
That has improved the way content looks and reads, but not necessarily what it adds. At the same time, it has made a lot of content feel similar. You can see it when you compare articles on the same topic. More often than not, they say roughly the same thing it’s just phrased a bit differently.
As long as search engines mainly pointed users to sources, that wasn’t much of an issue. If multiple sources say the same thing, it doesn’t really matter which one you click on. In a world where answers are increasingly AI-generated, that changes. You start to notice much more quickly what is interchangeable. Not because it’s poorly written, but because it doesn’t add much to what’s already out there.
The bar shifts. It’s no longer about how well content is written, but whether there’s any reason to use yours at all. If it doesn’t add something that isn’t already out there, it’s unlikely to be used — by people or by AI.
The difference is made upfront
In that sense, GEO connects to a broader shift in how we think about content and communication. The value of content lies less in the format, and more in what it adds: a perspective, an observation, or an interpretation that goes beyond organising existing information. That’s not entirely new. In conversations with organisations, this has been coming up for a while. The question of how to create content that doesn’t just make sense, but actually stands for something. For a long time, though, that question was overshadowed by discussions about formats, frequency and distribution. It’s becoming harder to ignore now. Which may also explain why GEO is difficult to treat as a standalone strategy. There are definitely ways to better align content with how systems work. But that alone doesn’t get you there.
The difference is made earlier, in the choices you make. What you say, what you leave out, and whether you add something that’s worth using, not just reading. And it doesn’t stop at your own channels. You see it just as clearly elsewhere. Are you being referenced, quoted, recognised as a source? That depends not only on what you publish, but also on how others pick up and carry your story further.
Not new, just more visible
Seen from that perspective, GEO doesn’t feel like something entirely new to master. It feels more like a development that makes existing assumptions harder to ignore. It raises the bar for how we think about content and what we expect from it. Not just on our own platforms, but beyond them as well. Where you only get mentioned if you add something that isn’t interchangeable. Not because the rules have changed, but because the difference is becoming harder to ignore.
Petrick de Koning
Petrick de Koning is a senior content creator. He helps technology-driven organisations tell complex stories in a clear, human and credible way. With a sharp eye on emerging developments such as AI and GEO, he explores how technology can help make content more relevant, without losing the human perspective.