GEO, SEO and the slightly awkward business of merely existing

When I launched O'Reilly & Co in April, nobody knew it existed.

Apart from my circle of people who know me well, there was very little evidence online that O'Reilly & Co was a thing. Which is fair enough for a business that was approximately nine minutes old.

The internet isn't obliged to care just because I've bought a domain name.

It probably didn't help that I launched under my married name, O'Reilly, rather than Draper, which has existed in the communications industry for a long time. Twenty-five years of experience doesn't automatically transfer across when you change the sign on the door.

But it did make me curious about all the conversation around GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), the latest acronym attached to the challenge of being discovered online.

So I did what any comms person would do and started poking around. What I expected to find was a long list of technical tricks and optimisation tactics I could probably follow before engaging a specialist. What I found out instead was much more close to home.

AI doesn't seem particularly bothered by a bunch of things I thought it would be. What it wants is evidence. Evidence that I exist, that I have done the work before, that I have something useful to say, that other people know who I am and can vouch for me (I have a cracker of an invisibility story for another time.)

And that was an interesting piece of intel to this nerd, because, after 25 years in PR & communications and 20 years as a business owner across multiple industries, I found myself in exactly the same position as every other small business owner.

Starting from scratch.

Not in terms of experience. I've still got bucketloads of that, but in terms of visibility.

Nobody was searching for or recommending O'Reilly & Co, and why would they when the business and brand were so new, and virtually no evidence was out yet?

So I started making small changes to my website. Nothing remarkable, just a few dots of relevance here and there.

I added information about who I work with. I added some of the organisations I've worked alongside over the years. I started publishing more of my thinking and putting my name at the top of articles to help connect the dots.

I also took note of where I was being mentioned outside of my website.

Marketing Magazine included me in a feature on agency founders. I'm still ridiculously stoked about that. RNZ quoted me in a couple of articles. And I kept writing my somewhat questionable LinkedIn posts and doing my best to show up. Then it dawned on me that I wasn't actually doing GEO, I was doing PR!

That realisation was accompanied by the slightly awkward reality that most people who work in PR find the idea of doing PR for themselves deeply uncomfortable.

We're very good at helping other people tell their stories. Less good at telling our own. Put a client in front of me, and I'll happily explain why they should be publishing content, talking about their achievements and making it easier for people to understand what they do. Ask me to do the same thing for myself, and I'd much rather do almost anything else.

But starting this new business has been a useful reminder that visibility isn't vanity, but it is how people find you. And increasingly, it’s how AI finds you, too.

One of the more unexpected lessons from starting again this year is that people rarely remember the thing you think they'll remember.

Probably not the positioning statement or the website that took three hours to write, but they will remember the story or the opinion or the thing that made them laugh or the thing that made them think.

One of my most shared LinkedIn posts this past year involved me calling a door a c*nt.

Not exactly the sort of thought leadership content you'd see on LinkedIn, but people remembered it. And the posts people mention to me most often are rarely the ones where I am trying to sound clever, but usually the stories and observations or the ridiculous ideas - those seem to be the things that stick.

And that is probably the point because they are recognisable and consistent and on brand for me.

And the more I looked into what I was supposedly meant to be doing for GEO, the more familiar it all felt because instead of a new thing to learn, it was all just PR 101.

What is public relations if not helping people understand who you are, what you do and why they should trust you? Your reputation, credibility, experience, useful content, and sweet little third party mentions, all of those things seem to matter and all of them in one way or another are PR.

That thought in itself is pretty wild. Because if AI recommendations are being driven by reputation, mentions, content and credibility, do they sit closer to Earned Media than Search?

I'm not entirely sure yet. But aside from advertising, I don't know of a way to simply buy an AI recommendation. You still seem to need evidence, and evidence takes time to earn and build up.

Of course, there will be people trying to game it. There always are. Someone, somewhere, is probably already selling a shortcut. And perhaps we'll end up back where we were during peak SEO, when perfectly normal sentences were sacrificed to the keyword gods.

"Wellington communications consultant communications services Wellington communication strategy consultant Wellington."

Maybe GEO will go that way too, but I hope not.

Because if AI is increasingly being asked for recommendations, then maybe the answer is to become more trustworthy, because people remember people and stories and opinions. Whether it's a LinkedIn post, a media quote, a website article or a recommendation from a colleague, it all seems to lead back to the same thing.

Give people a reason to remember you.

That’s the main thing I've learned from starting again this year is that you can optimise a website in an afternoon, but you can’t optimise a reputation. You have to build it, and sometimes you gotta do that from scratch.

Look, I know I have written a lot here today. So the TL;DR is simply do good work, have something useful to say, show up as consistently as you can, and help people - be useful, I guess. Give people a reason to remember you, and if you do all of that, the rest tends to follow.