The 96% that doesn't depend on you: why GEO is fundamentally an off-page discipline — Esteve Castells

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Hello dear reader!

It's been a good while since the last issue of Seopatía. I wrote the previous one before going all-in on building LLM Pulse, and ever since it's been non-stop. Between building and growing the product, keeping up with consulting clients, and living through what is probably the biggest moment of change I've seen in this industry in 10+ years... I haven't had a single quiet hour to sit down and write.

But today I'm back with something I've been thinking about for months. A thesis I'm increasingly confident in, backed up by what I see every day in LLM Pulse data, and that I think is worth sharing.

We've never talked about GEO on this blog (from here on I'll skip the thousand acronyms — I'm going with GEO). It's the first time. And I want to start by being blunt: I think GEO is real, I think it's going to be huge, and I think it's fundamentally an off-page discipline. And that last part is exactly what explains why a good chunk of the SEO community doesn't even want to look at it.

Let's get into it.

First things first: GEO is real

Before we talk about off-page, let me get something out of the way that should be obvious but in 2026 still sparks debate: GEO is a real discipline, with its own metrics, its own tactics, and measurable results. It's not "just do SEO well and you're done." It's not an empty buzzword. It's a shift in how users discover and choose products, services, and brands.

And when I say "its own metrics," I mean it. In GEO we talk about citations, mentions, sentiment, AI share of voice. There isn't just one bot — there are many: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, plus Google's own AI surfaces. Each has its own sources and its own way of generating answers. And the user journey is radically different: in AI search, most of the experience happens inside the AI engine itself. The user asks, drills down, compares, refines... all without leaving the conversation. That's why direct visits from AI are low, and measuring GEO success purely by web traffic makes no sense.

Why am I so sure? Because I see it in the data every single day. Because Vercel reported that at least 10% of their new sign-ups came from ChatGPT (and it's their fastest-growing acquisition channel). Because in my B2B clients I already see between 5% and 10% of traffic coming from AI platforms. Because our biggest customer at LLM Pulse came in directly from AI search — not from Google, not from LinkedIn, not from a referral.

So what exactly is GEO, and how is it really different from SEO? This is where I think most people get confused. And it's where I want to lay out my thesis.

What GEO has in common with SEO

If we look at "on-page GEO," honestly it isn't that different from on-page SEO. Having a well-structured site, clear content, up-to-date data, solid architecture... that's still necessary both for Google and for an LLM to understand and cite your site. Same with technical GEO: if your site can't be crawled properly, if your robots.txt is a mess, or if it can't be rendered by crawlers that don't execute JavaScript... that hurts you the same in SEO as in GEO.

I like to say that SEO and GEO are similar in their ingredients — but the dish you end up with is different.

So where's the real difference? In off-page. And it's an enormous difference.

In SEO, mentions have never really mattered (no matter how many people now claim they were measuring mention-based success for years 🤣).

SEO's complicated relationship with off-page

SEO has always had several pillars: on-page, content, technical, and off-page (everyone names them slightly differently, splits them into three or four buckets, some people pull content out as its own pillar, others lump on-page and technical together, some call off-page "authority"... but it all amounts to the same thing). The reality is that the vast majority of SEOs — I'd say 80% of those working in large companies — have spent their careers focused mainly on on-page and technical. And there's a logic to it.

In enterprise, off-page was hard to justify. If you work for a brand with 100,000 backlinks/referring domains, what difference do 100 more make? Almost none. The effort wasn't worth it. On top of that, off-page depends on others: you don't control who links to you, what a journalist writes about you, or what someone posts about you on Reddit. It's also expensive and the ROI is hard to measure. Only in problematic industries has off-page been pushed at scale: casino, crypto, adult, and a few outliers elsewhere. SEOs are very used to everything depending on us: my audit, my implementation, my spreadsheet. When something slips out of our direct control, we get uncomfortable.

And link building drags a brutal stigma behind it. Years of spam, link buying, PBNs, penalties......