I’ve been putting this one off.
Not because the argument is hard to make – it isn’t – but because the behavior it’s about has been a fixture of the SEO industry for as long as I’ve worked in it. The shiny new object arrives, the FOMO kicks in, the conference decks update, and an entire professional class reshuffles its vocabulary to match whatever acronym landed that quarter. I wrote recently about how AI content scaling is just content spinning with better grammar – the tools change, the qualitative wall doesn’t. The acronym cycle runs on the same engine.
But this time, the shiny object didn’t emerge from practitioners observing a genuine shift and trying to name it. It was manufactured upstream – by venture capital, amplified by engagement farming, and adopted by professionals whose primary motivation isn’t “this is real” but “I can’t afford to look like I’m not keeping up.”
So here we are.
The Investment Thesis
In May 2025, Andreessen Horowitz published a blog post titled “How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Rules of Search.” It appeared in their enterprise newsletter, written by two a16z partners, Zach Cohen and Seema Amble. Public, on their website, available to anyone with a browser.
The post declared that the “$80 billion+ SEO market just cracked” and that “a new paradigm is emerging.” It name-dropped three GEO tools – Profound, Goodie, and Daydream – as platforms enabling brands to track how they appear in AI-generated responses. It described a future where GEO companies would “fine-tune their own models” and “own the loop” between insight and iteration. a16z promoted it across their social channels, including a post from the firm’s official account: “SEO is slowly losing its dominance. Welcome to GEO.”
Also: a16z is an investor in Profound.
The blog post creates demand for the category. The category creates demand for the tools. The tools are in their portfolio. A sales funnel with a byline.
Marc Andreessen’s “Software is eating the world” wasn’t just an essay – it was a prospectus dressed in editorial clothing. The GEO post follows the same logic: identify the wave, position your bets as the inevitable response, publish the narrative that makes both feel like settled truth. Even sympathetic coverage noticed. The Alts.co write-up noted plainly that “a16z is drawing attention to GEO because it’s a chance to peddle/pump their own investments.”
What Happens When Nobody Checks The Source
Ten months later, in March 2026, someone on X described the blog post as “a 34-page internal memo” that a16z had “quietly published” and which had received only “200 views.” It cited a specific statistic: portfolio companies ranking No.1 on Google saw “a 34% drop in organic traffic in 12 months.” I’m not interested in the individual. This post is one of hundreds following the same pattern, and the pattern is…
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