By Barry Schwartz
Publication Date: 2025-11-19 12:05:00
Business Insider interviewed both SEOs and representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity on what it calls the “GEO rush.” The rush for SEO companies or other companies to sell GEO (AI SEO) related services. There are quotes from Danny Sullivan from Google, Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft and more.
I will pull out the quotes:
Google’s Danny Sullivan quotes:
Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose “track of the big picture.”
“Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?” he said. “That’s what we want to reward.”
Sullivan shared an example of popular advice from SEO/GEO experts that could soon go stale: that large language models favor bite-sized content.
“Maybe they’ve seen that this seems to work in some edge cases in some places,” but the model will inevitably change, he said. “All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term.”
Sullivan said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search.
“Plenty of sites succeed because they don’t do SEO, or hire SEOs,” Sullivan said. “They don’t think about it because they’re just focused on making great content.”
General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, ensuring Google’s search crawlers can actually get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, especially as AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core.
AI…