This article may contain lies

Less than 200 years ago, scientists were ridiculed for suggesting that hand washing might save lives.

In the 1840s, it was shown that hygiene reduced death rates, but the underlying explanation was missing.

Without a clear mechanism, adoption stalled for decades, leading to countless preventable deaths.

The joke of the past becomes the truth of today. The inverse is also true when you follow misleading guidance.

Bad GEO advice (I don’t like this acronym, but will use it because it seems to be the most popular) will not literally kill you. 

That said, it can definitely cost money, cause unemployment, and lead to economic death.

Not long ago, I wrote about a similar topic and explained why unscientific SEO research is dangerous and acts as a marketing instrument rather than real scientific discovery. 

This article is a continuation of that work and provides a framework to make sense of the myths surrounding AI search optimization.

I will highlight three concrete GEO myths, examine whether they are true, and explain what I would do if I were you.

If you’re pressed for time, here’s a TL;DR:

• We fall for bad GEO and SEO advice because of ignorance, stupidity, cognitive biases, and black-and-white thinking.
• To evaluate any advice, you can use the ladder of misinference – statement vs. fact vs. data vs. evidence vs. proof.
• You become more knowledgeable if you seek dissenting viewpoints, consume with the intent to understand, pause before you believe, and rely less on AI.
• You currently:
  • Don’t need an llms.txt.
  • Should leverage schema markup even if AI chatbots don’t use it today.
  • Have to keep your content fresh, especially if it matters for your queries.

Before we dive in, I will recap why we fall for bad advice.

Recap: Why we fall for bad GEO and SEO advice

The reasons are:

• Ignorance, stupidity, and amathia (voluntary stupidity).
• Cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias.
• Black-and-white thinking.

We are ignorant because we don’t know better yet. We are stupid if we can’t know better. Both are neutral. 

We suffer from amathia when we refuse to know better, which is why it’s the worst of the three.

We all suffer from biases. When it comes to articles and research, confirmation bias is probably the most prevalent. 

We refuse to see flaws in how we see things and instead seek out flaws, often with great effort, in rival theories or remain blind to them.

Lastly, we struggle with black-and-white thinking. Everything is this or that, never something in between. A few examples:

• Backlinks are always good.
• Reddit is always important for AI search.
• Blocking AI bots is always stupid.

The truth is, the world consists of many shades of gray. This idea is captured well in the book “May Contain Lies” by Alex Edmans. 

He says something can be moderate, granular, or marbled:

• Backlinks are not always good or important, as they…