These GEO Tactics Are Totally Overhyped! ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/FkgLaqMUl-4/maxresdefault.jpg) What was one 2025 search trend you think was total BS, and what should we be paying attention to instead of that BS hype? I think it's been fascinating, if anything, to watch, number one, an influx of new people entering the space claiming that they've discovered the secret sauce for appearing in ChatGPT. And then when you read the actual secret sauce, it's like optimized headlines using keywords in the URL, having a good title, you know, having a title that represents the way people search. I'm like, wow, guys. This is genius. Who would have thought of that before? So there's a lot of that happening, and I agree with Mark. Like, a lot of the vocabulary being thrown around is made to help is made to create this sense of fear and urgency in people and to make them feel like they don't know what's going on and to feel confusion when, in reality, I've experimented multiple times throughout the year, and a lot of the content that I write just using the same fundamental SEO best practices appears in all the different LLMs for months and months, you know, without doing anything different. So I think a lot of people are seeing that as well. But what I was gonna answer this question with is, believe it or not, this whole approach like, this is one approach that I see all the time as people describing as a GEO tactic and one that is, for now, actually quite effective, which is these listicles. Right? So listing, what's the best SEO agency or the best SaaS b to b software or whatever it is, and then having a blog post where you rank yourself number one and then some of your competitors, you know, two through ten, or maybe you have a bunch of different blogs on your site that are ranking all kinds of companies. And a lot of times, there's some pay to play thing happening in the background where they're all citing each other. I see this as spam. I see this as black hat. It is, yes, working for now. You know, LLMs in some cases are just too new and too dumb to understand that this is highly manipulated and and influenced, and people are putting themselves as number one, and it's appearing in LLMs as such. So for now, it might be working. And I think Will Reynolds actually did a great presentation on this a few times throughout the year where he talked about, yes, even though it's working, it doesn't mean that it's instilling trust in your users, especially if your clients are going to your blog and seeing that you're calling yourself number one. For me, that doesn't instill a lot of trust in the company. It just makes the company sound a little bit scammy. So I'd be really careful. Even if something works for AI search right now, it doesn't mean it's gonna work next year. It doesn't mean that Google is going to, you know, not create new policies and spam policies and penalties and everything around these types of tactics because when everybody jumps on the bandwagon and does the same thing that's not good for users, Google for twenty five years has created spam policies to patch that up. So I'd be very, very careful. Know, a lot of people are putting white text on a white background with prompt injections and things like this. Just be careful. What you don't want is to get your site penalized in such a way that you don't appear in AI search ever again because you tried to do this in year one. So that's just my advice, These GEO Tactics Are Totally Overhyped!, YouTube, 01kfk7rxae6hhzpv079gv0ws5n.