Trust Architects

Last week, I was looking for a headless CMS for a client’s migration. Not a simple query, I needed something that played well with Next.js, had solid localization support, and wouldn’t break the bank at enterprise scale. I typed it into Google, and the AI Overview gave me a pretty thorough breakdown. Three tools were compared, pros and cons laid out, a clear recommendation at the end. I read it, made a mental note of Sanity and Storyblok, and closed the tab.

I never clicked a single link. But I walked away with two brands in my head that weren’t there before.

That moment, that completely unremarkable moment, is the entire future of our industry sitting in plain sight.

The Shift

For the better part of two decades, SEO has operated on a simple economic model: rankings produce clicks, clicks produce value. Every strategy, every metric, every reporting dashboard we’ve ever built is downstream of that assumption.

That assumption is breaking.

When an AI Overview synthesizes an answer from multiple sources, it doesn’t send traffic, it sends signal. The brands that get mentioned inside that answer aren’t “ranking.” They’re being recalled. And the distinction between ranking and being recalled is, I think, the most important conceptual shift in SEO right now.

This is where the three layers come in, and I want to be precise about how they stack:

SEO is the bedrock. Crawlability, indexability, speed, structure. None of this is going away. If anything, it matters more, because if an LLM’s retrieval pipeline can’t parse your site, you simply don’t exist in its world. Technical SEO isn’t the strategy anymore, but it’s the non-negotiable entry ticket.

AEO is the structured layer. Answer Engine Optimization has been around for a while: featured snippets, People Also Ask, knowledge panels. It works for queries with a single correct answer. “What’s the GST rate for SaaS in India?”, that’s AEO. Schema, clean formatting, direct answers. Transactional and efficient.

GEO is the influence layer. This is the new one, and it’s fundamentally different. Generative Engine Optimization isn’t about answering a question. It’s about being the entity that an LLM references when it synthesizes a recommendation. When someone asks ChatGPT “What’s the best SEO platform for enterprise?”, the brands that appear weren’t ranked by an algorithm crawling title tags. They were recalled because they had enough authority, enough signal, enough presence across the web to be considered worth citing.

GEO is reputation as retrieval. And we’re just at the beginning of it.

What Actually Changes

Three things, and they’re all mindset shifts more than tactics.

First, think in entities, not pages. Stop measuring your output in articles published per month. Start building a knowledge graph around your brand: who you are, what you claim expertise in, what you’re connected to. Schema isn’t a technical checkbox. It’s how you declare your identity to machines. The goal is to become a node in the AI’s understanding of your space, not just a URL in an index.

Second, apply the citability test. Every piece of content you publish should pass a simple filter: if an LLM summarized this topic, would it have a reason to mention us by name? If the answer is no, if the content is just a repackaged version of what ten other sites already say, it’s invisible in a generative world. Information gain isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the only game.

Third, be the primary source. Original research. Proprietary data. First-hand experience. “I ran this experiment and here’s what happened.” These are the only content types that AI cannot synthesize from its training data. In a world of infinite machine-generated summaries, the person who owns the underlying insight is the one who gets cited. Everyone else is training material.

The Irony

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

The more algorithmic and AI-driven search becomes, the more it rewards distinctly human qualities: original thinking, lived experience, earned authority, a point of view that isn’t hedged into meaninglessness.

We spent years reverse-engineering algorithms, finding patterns, exploiting gaps. And now the algorithm is essentially saying: stop performing for me and start being worth listening to.

SEO used to be about gaming systems. Then it became about serving users. Now it’s becoming about being worth citing. We’re not Technical Architects anymore. We’re Trust Architects. And the only building material that works is saying something that’s actually true, and actually yours.