The sense and nonsense of SEO and GEO tools

Another new pile of tools has arrived

A few years ago every marketer wanted you to get a rank tracker, a keyword tool on top of it, and an SEO plugin that announced with a green dot that all was well. Now there's a new shelf in the store: "AI discoverability", GEO audits, dashboards that give you a number for how often ChatGPT mentions you. The sales pitch is almost the same as ten years ago, only now it says "AI" in front.

I'm not against GEO, far from it. A while back I wrote a whole piece for Proud Nerds on why generative engine optimization is becoming the new standard next to SEO (you can read it here). The shift is real: people increasingly get their answer from an AI system instead of from ten blue links, and I cited forecasts from Gartner, among others, that a good share of search traffic is moving that way. So yes, something fundamental is changing.

It's just that between "something is changing" and "buy this tool" there's a gap. And in that gap quite a few vendors sell you a dashboard instead of a result.

Where most SEO tools get stuck

The classic SEO tools come from a world with one search engine and a keyword mindset. They measure whether your keyword is in the title, whether your meta description isn't too long, whether you have enough internal links. Useful hygiene, but they're proxies: signals that once correlated with ranking, not the ranking itself. A green dot in your plugin isn't a position in Google, and certainly not a citation in an AI answer.

The sting is in what they have you optimize. Keyword density, for example, a number suggesting your page gets better the more often you repeat a word. That's been nonsense for years, and for a model reading your text it's nonsense altogether, because it looks at meaning and structure, not at how often a term shows up. You end up optimizing for a yardstick nobody uses anymore.

What GEO really is, and what it isn't

At its core, GEO is one question: can an AI system understand, cite and trust your page? That's not a button and not a score, it's a property of your content and your structure. In practice it means a direct answer at the top instead of three paragraphs of lead-in, a clear heading hierarchy, structured data (schema.org) that matches what's on the page, and signals that a person with knowledge is behind it: name, date, sources. Google calls that E-E-A-T, but it boils down to one thing, who's saying this and why would a machine believe you.

What GEO isn't: a setting you switch on. You can't inject "AI discoverability" into your site the way you drop a cookie. It's work on the content itself, and that's exactly the part a tool doesn't take off your hands.

The tools that earn their place

Some tools really do something. A validator that checks whether your JSON-LD is right and whether a field is missing. A plugin that writes correct schema.org instead of generic boilerplate. An analysis that points out what you're missing: a citable fact, an opening answer, a missing source. What they have in common is that they change something or show you something verifiable, and that they can explain why something is red or green.

That last point is the criterion that matters. A tool that shows you a shortcoming and tells you how to fix it earns its place. A tool that only makes a number go up and down doesn't.

The tools that don't

And then the other half. The "AI visibility score" from 0 to 100 with nobody telling you how it was measured. The one-click GEO button that pastes some loose schema snippets into your head and calls it "done". The monthly report with a graph that creeps up or down without you being able to steer it. The pattern is always the same, they sell you a number, not an outcome, and if you ask where the number comes from, it goes quiet.

In my opinion it's often just old wine, too. A keyword tool with an AI sauce on top still does what a keyword tool did, only now it costs more and goes by a different name. The promise is new, the tool underneath isn't.

How you spot the difference as a business owner

You don't have to be a developer to tell the useful tools from the useless ones. A few questions do most of the work:

• Does this change something on my page, or does it just give me a number? A score without an action is an invoice with a chart.
• Can it explain why? If nobody knows how a number comes about, it's a feeling, not a measurement.
• Does what it writes match what I actually offer? Generic schema.org that fits every site doesn't describe your business.
• Am I locked in? Your data and your structure should be yours, on your own site, not held hostage in a vendor's dashboard.

Why I do it this way

This is exactly why I built my own plugin, Aura, the way it is. No vague traffic light, but a verdict per page on two axes, SEO and GEO, with a checklist showing what's present, partial or absent. A coherent JSON-LD graph derived from your own pages, so both Google and an AI search system understand what you offer and who's behind it. And the output stays on your own server, because discoverability you rent isn't something you own.

GEO isn't hype, but most of the tools around it lean on it all the same. The real work is boring and simply holds up: good content, honest structure, data that says what you do. A tool may help you with that, none does it for you, and whoever promises it is selling you a dashboard.