What Google, Microsoft and Perplexity Say About the GEO Rush — and the “GEO Detox” Coming Next

Business Insider did something useful recently: instead of asking SEOs about GEO, it asked the platforms. Google, Microsoft and Perplexity all had representatives on the record about the rush to sell generative engine optimisation, and their answers are worth reading together because they are more consistent than the vendor market would like.

Then John Mueller made the joke that should be printed on a t-shirt.

“Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?”

That question came from Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search. His argument was that any GEO tool advising you to design content solely to rank and be visible “loses track of the big picture.”

He picked a specific piece of popular advice to make the point. You have probably heard it: large language models favour bite-sized content. Sullivan’s response was that maybe people have seen this work in some edge cases in some places — but the model will change. And then the sentence that applies to every tactic in this space:

“All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term.”

He also said something that will annoy both sides of the argument: plenty of sites succeed because they don’t do SEO, or hire SEOs. They just focus on making good content.

What he did endorse was unexciting. General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, particularly making sure Google’s crawlers can actually reach the relevant content — especially since AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core. On multi-modal queries, he noted that images and videos may help you now that assistants can handle them, “but they would have helped you anyway.”

That last clause is the theme. Nothing about AI search has created a new discipline. It has raised the price of the old one.

“Be skeptical of shortcuts”

That is Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager at Microsoft Bing. His framing is the cleanest description of what genuinely changed: companies now have to think about being included in a synthesised answer, rather than appearing in a list of links.

That is a real change in the shape of the problem. It is not a change in what makes you worth including. An answer that names three products is assembled from sources that agree; a list of ten links tolerates disagreement. The mechanism rewards corroboration more sharply, which is the opposite of what most shortcut-selling advice recommends.

The joke that is also a forecast

Ian Lurie complained on Bluesky about people breathlessly selling GEO while their big tactic turns out to be better content plus cloaked AI-bot-only pages. Mueller replied: “Don’t forget all the GEO-Detox work that will be paid for next year. The cycle of ‘SEO’ life.”

He is not being subtle. We watched this with link building services, and then with link detox services sold by some of the same firms. We watched it with content services, and then with content pruning. The pattern does not require anyone to be dishonest; it only requires a service that optimises for a metric the buyer cannot independently verify.

What to take from it

Three things, and none of them are new tactics.

Treat “the model prefers X” claims as time-limited. Sullivan’s point is not that the observation is wrong; it is that it is dated the moment it is published, and you carry the maintenance cost.

Optimise for inclusion, not position. Madhavan’s reframing is the useful one. Inclusion is earned by being described consistently in credible places, which is slower and more durable than winning a ranking.

Assume the detox invoice is coming. If a tactic would look embarrassing written down in plain language in front of your board — “we published pages only for bots to read” — it is going to need cleaning up.

The durable half of this work is unglamorous: being described accurately and consistently by people who are not you. That is what a directory-and-profile programme is for, and it is the reason the mechanics are worth outsourcing even when the strategy is not — https://backlinksubmit.org matches your product to relevant directories and communities from a handpicked list, submits manually with written copy, and shows in a console which platforms have been submitted and how each is progressing.

FAQ

Is GEO a fad?

GEO as a label is a packaging exercise. The underlying work — being legible to machines that assemble answers — is real and persistent. The parts that will need detoxing are the ones designed to satisfy a metric rather than a reader.

Did Google, Microsoft and Perplexity contradict each other?

No. All three landed on scepticism about shortcuts, plus the observation that inclusion in a synthesised answer is the new shape of the problem.

What should I stop doing?

Anything whose justification is a model preference you cannot verify and whose cost is maintenance you will carry after the preference changes — including bot-only pages and content reformatted purely for a claimed AI reading pattern.

What should I keep doing?

The boring hygiene: reachable pages, clean structured data, and a consistent, accurate description of your business in the third-party places that describe it.