[hombre_fatal]

"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.

[cyanydeez]

I'd say it's the illegitimate, because SEO was about getting human traffic to buy human things.

There's no evidence that agent traffic follows the same pathway.

[ToucanLoucan]

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.

[hombre_fatal]

I'd liken it to accidentally getting a high ranking website on Google without thinking about it.

It doesn't mean you can't deliberately game the bot. It means you can analyze how and then replicate it (aka SEO).

If I can unintentionally sway the LLM agent, then I can figure out how and do it intentionally (aka GEO).

Either way, if you've used LLMs, then you it's trivially possible to sway them. That's the only proposition you need to accept for GEO to be possible. Though it's far worse than possible: I'm sure it's widespread and ubiquitous.