AI search, where tools like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode answer queries directly instead of listing links, rewards the same things Google has always valued: clear, consistent content and a coherent presence across the web. Three veteran practitioners reached this conclusion independently within days of each other. Their shared finding: the brands that feel most disrupted are those whose SEO was built on tactics, not on substance.
Why Does AI Search Feel So Disruptive to Some Brands?
Because for those brands, it genuinely is disruptive. Writing on Search Engine Journal, website optimisation consultant Slobodan Manić laid out the core argument directly: if your SEO was publishing shallow content to chase temporary rankings, this shift is real and it will keep feeling harder. The tactics that produced short-term results do not produce the trustworthy, consistent entity (a stable, recognizable brand presence that information systems can rely on) that a language model can accurately represent.
If your SEO was focused on fundamentals, Manić writes, “this is not new. You have been doing entity work and consistency work the whole time, even if nobody called it that.”
What Did Three SEO Veterans Actually Agree On?
Within days of each other, three practitioners arrived at the same position from different starting points, according to Manić’s reporting on Search Engine Journal:
- Jono Alderson, a technical SEO consultant, argued on the No Hacks podcast that “SEO vs. GEO is the wrong question” and that AI is not a new discipline.
- Mordy Oberstein, speaking with Brent Csutoras, framed it as: “SEO isn’t dead, strategy is dead.”
- Ross Hudgens warned against branding yourself as an “SEO/GEO writer.”
Manić’s interpretation: “When that happens, it usually means the naming fight has become a way to avoid a simpler and less flattering conversation.” That conversation is whether your SEO was ever genuinely built on fundamentals in the first place.
What Is Actually New in AI Search?
One thing is genuinely different, Manić writes: the weight placed on off-site presence, and not in the traditional backlink-building sense. Entity optimization (making sure your brand name, description, and key facts appear consistently across every platform, directory, and third-party site where you exist) matters more now because a language model assembles its understanding of your brand from everywhere it can read, not from your homepage alone.
As Manić puts it: “The mechanism changed. The thing being rewarded did not.”
What Is the One Concrete Step Practitioners Recommend?
Manić identifies what he calls “the whole move”: stop checking whether you appear in category-level AI queries and start asking the model directly what it knows about your brand.
The distinction he draws:
- A category query (“best CRM for small teams”) tells you where you rank on one phrasing today.
- Asking the model what it believes about your brand, and watching which sources it cites, shows you what it actually knows and where that belief comes from.
The second approach produces a map of the specific pages and profiles that need attention. “The map is worth more,” Manić writes.
There is also a longer-term dimension in Manić’s argument. The same AI systems that read your website to answer questions will increasingly use that information to take actions on behalf of users, including purchases. An accurate, consistent brand entity is the prerequisite for that, not just a citation win.
Before Running AI Visibility Tests: A Quick Check
- Are every key page on your website accurate, specific, and self-consistent?
- Do your off-site profiles (Google Business, LinkedIn, industry directories) match what your website says?
- Are your product or service descriptions phrased consistently across your site and third-party sources?
- When you prompt a major LLM (large language model, i.e., the AI behind tools like ChatGPT) with your brand name, do you recognize the description it returns?
- Can you trace where the model’s information about you comes from?
- Are there sources the model cites that contain outdated or incorrect information?
- Is there any key page or profile where the model appears to be hallucinating (generating confident but incorrect facts about your brand)?
What This Means for AI-Search Visibility
This is Hingewise’s read, stated as such.
The plain version first: if the digital picture of your brand is inconsistent or thin, an AI tool will get you wrong, and users will trust that wrong answer. Think of it like two buyers asking around about your company. One checked your website. The other has read your website, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business profile, your mentions in industry press, and a few forum threads. If all those sources say the same thing, both buyers walk away with the same accurate picture. If they contradict each other, the more widely-read buyer ends up more confused, not better informed.
That is what a language model does. It reads widely and assembles a composite picture. If your digital presence was consistent and clear before AI search arrived, the model’s picture of you is likely accurate. If it was built around ranking tricks and thin content, the model’s picture is unreliable, and that shows up as hallucinations and omissions when users ask about you.
The insight the source does not spell out explicitly: entity consistency was not a GEO tactic to layer on top of SEO after the fact. It is what good SEO was supposed to produce all along. GEO did not create a new requirement. It made visible which brands had skipped the underlying work.
Hingewise’s position: the practitioners arguing that the fundamentals have not changed are right. The more useful question for any brand is whether its current content and off-site presence would give a language model an accurate, consistent picture of what the business actually does. For many brands, honestly answering that question reveals a gap that predates AI search by years.
What to Watch Next
The naming debate (GEO, AEO, AI SEO) will likely continue. The more actionable question is simpler: does the internet’s collective picture of your brand match reality? That was worth asking before AI search became prominent. It is considerably harder to defer now that AI tools are the first stop for a growing share of commercial queries.
Worth tracking: how Google’s AI Mode and third-party LLMs reconcile conflicting information about a brand when multiple off-site sources disagree. That is the mechanism most likely to determine which brands get cited accurately and which get paraphrased poorly.
Lam Nguyen · Hingewise
Source: Search Engine Journal: “AI Search Only Feels New If Your SEO Was Shallow,” Slobodan Manić (2025)