Three SEO Veterans Agree The Acronyms Are Distractions. The Fundamentals Were Never Optional.
Mordy Oberstein told Brent Csutoras that "SEO isn't dead, strategy is dead." Ross Hudgens separately warned against branding yourself as an "SEO/GEO writer." Three practitioners arrived at the same conclusion within days: GEO is the wrong question, AI search is not a new discipline, and the unglamorous fundamentals sitting in plain sight were always the answer.
This illustrates a mechanism I like to call acronym displacement. When practitioners lack strategic foundations, they chase new terminology to feel current. The underlying principle is simple. Distribution channels change, but the requirement that your business logic drive your content does not. If your SEO was shallow before AI search, AI search merely exposed the shallowness. It did not create it.
Mordy Oberstein, Brent Csutoras, and Ross Hudgens each independently converged on the same position from different directions within days of each other, as reported by Search Engine Journal.
- Write down one sentence describing what your business actually does better than competitors. If you cannot, you have found your problem.
- Audit your top five existing pages and check whether each one communicates that specific advantage clearly. Expect to find at least two that do not.
- Rewrite those pages around the business advantage, not around keyword density. The expected outcome is content that would rank well regardless of whether Google, ChatGPT, or whatever comes next is doing the indexing.