Every piece I've read on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) in the last six months has been written by someone trying to sell me software. Which is fine, that's how the internet works now, and I don't begrudge anyone making a living. But it means the advice tends to assume you have a content team, a CMS with the right plugins, a marketing budget, and a line item somewhere for “AI visibility tooling.” 

If you're a solo writer publishing essays from a Substack or a personal site, or a two-person team running a small magazine on a shoestring, almost none of that applies to you. And yet the underlying shift these pieces are describing is genuine and consequential. It keeps nagging me, because people who'd benefit most from understanding it are also the people the advice isn't being written for. 

The said change is because people are increasingly relying on ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews for their queries instead of scrolling through ten links. 

Gartner has predicted that traditional search volume will fall by around 25% by the end of 2026, and AI-referred web sessions grew by 527% year on year between January and May 2025, according to Previsible's report on the same period. ChatGPT alone now reportedly serves around 800 million users a week. None of this is a future scenario; it is happening right now, and the writers or publishers who'd most benefit from being cited in those AI-generated answers are not, by and large, the ones writing the guides on how to make it happen.

I noticed this only when I started looking around for advice myself. Every search led to the same type of handful of posts: agency landing pages thinly disguised as thought leadership and SaaS blogs pitching dashboards. But the more I read, the more it feels like a version of GEO built for clients with substantial budgets, not for writers with limited resources and a domain name they pay 12 dollars a year for.

I keep getting déjà vu reading all those landing pages and blogs, because SEO played out exactly like this. It started as a set of useful, mostly free observations about how search engines worked, and how a person with a small site could make their pages a little easier to find. 

Within a few years, it had been absorbed by an entire industry of tools, agencies, certifications, conferences, and consultants, most of whom made their living by convincing businesses that SEO was too complex to handle without professional help. By the time the dust settled, the field was effectively gated. You could still find good free advice if you knew where to look, but the default Google search for any SEO question put you straight into the funnel of a company that wanted to sell you something.

GEO is two years old, and we can already see the same pattern emerging. No one fully understands it yet; the research is still open, and the Princeton paper that coined the term GEO is free to read. That paper, published at the KDD conference in 2024, tested nine optimization tactics across thousands of queries and produced findings any writer can apply without buying a single tool. But almost every guide on GEO has been written with SaaS or commercial use in mind, which means the examples, the metrics, and the assumptions are all built for businesses, not writers.

Type any GEO question into Google or ChatGPT, and the top results will be a SaaS comparison post, an agency framework, a "definitive 2026 guide" written by someone whose actual job is selling audits.

This isn't a conspiracy; it's just how the internet works. Companies with money to spend on content marketing produce more of it, faster, and rank higher for it. 

Here is the part that frustrates me, because the research says the opposite. GEO, as a discipline, disproportionately rewards small and independent publishers. The same Princeton study that I mentioned earlier found that lower-ranking pages get a 115% visibility lift from citing their sources properly, a much larger effect than the same tactic produces on already-established sites. 

Statistics Addition, the single highest-impact tactic the researchers identified, gave content a 41% lift in AI citations regardless of where the page sat in traditional Google rankings. The structural advantages that big publishers spent two decades accumulating in SEO, domain authority, backlinks, and age do not carry over to AI search nearly as cleanly. 

Emarketer reported in late 2025 that fewer than 10% of the sources cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot ranked in the top ten Google results for the same query. The overlap between what wins on Google and what gets cited by AI has, according to several recent analyses, dropped from around 70% to under 20%.

In practical terms, a thoughtful essayist with a small site and a sharp argument has a better chance of being discovered than they had five years ago. Getting cited by an AI doesn't require schema plugins, audit tools, or a dashboard tracking your citation rate across four platforms, none of which a small-scale publisher could afford anyway. The research says the tactics that work are editorial. Cite your sources properly, use specific statistics, and write in a voice that doesn't sound like a press release. And I believe that every writer worth their salt already has these skills.

Not because GEO is going to stop working for small publishers, but because the public understanding of what GEO is, and who can do it, is beginning to look a lot like SEO did once the agencies had taken over. 

According to one recent industry survey, 47% of brands have no GEO strategy at all. Small writers should pay attention to this finding because the statistics suggest the field is not as crowded as the volume of vendor content makes it appear.

Once the big players take over, the field will become much harder to enter on your own terms, because every search for "how to GEO optimize" will deliver you straight to a sales funnel. We are still in the early stages of GEO optimization, the research is fresh, techniques are publicly available, and most of the advantages are within reach of anyone willing to read a few papers and rewrite their content following the guidelines.