Headlines predicting another “AI winter” are beginning to emerge, and the numbers back the skepticism. MIT reports that while 80% of organizations have piloted GenAI and 40% report deployment, only 5% have reached scale, with seven of nine sectors showing no structural change. McKinsey finds the same disconnect: 36% of executives report no revenue impact, only 19% say revenues have grown more than 5%, and 87% admit growth is still years away. Adoption is everywhere, but impact is almost nowhere.
But those headlines and numbers miss what’s happening inside enterprises right now. SEO leaders are being tapped to guide GEO—generative engine optimization. Not because we’re AI experts. Not because we know how every large language model works. We don’t. Much of it is opaque. We’re being asked to lead because SEO has always been about empathy—and that empathy now demands more than ever.
SEO has never been just about keywords or rankings. At its core, it’s empathy on two fronts. Empathy for search engines: understanding that Google’s real goal has never been “quality content”—it’s maximizing queries and ad revenue. And empathy for users: removing friction so they can get what they want, even when the incentives of the platform weren’t aligned with theirs.
Now comes a third empathy. Not for machines—they want nothing. But for the growth-at-all-costs giants building them. Their incentives are clear: maximum adoption, maximum stickiness, maximum usage. And just like Google, they’ll happily sacrifice accuracy to get it.
Most SEO practitioners don’t want to admit this, but “just create good content” was always a lie. Google rewarded backlinks and its chosen favorites, nothing more. An algorithm built on patterns can’t tell garbage from great—and AI providers will be no different. Pretending otherwise is naïve.
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Capitalize on shifting incentives
And this shift in incentives is already reshaping how teams inside the enterprise work together. Only weeks ago, PR blocked digital outreach requests from my team. But when I pitched a GEO pilot—using the same product descriptions across third-party sites to strengthen how generative engines interpret our offering—they were all in. That’s the difference: the same function that resisted collaboration suddenly leaned in when the frame moved from SEO to GEO.
And empathy doesn’t stop at visibility. When someone finally does land on our site, the question isn’t “did we optimize for a keyword?” but “did we optimize for the journey?” Do they see the right message, the right next step, delivered with minimal…
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