For twenty years the deal was simple: you publish, Google ranks, readers click. That deal is being rewritten in real time. AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity now synthesize answers from a handful of sources — and the click, when it comes, goes to the sources they trust.
That doesn't make SEO obsolete. It makes the fundamentals non-negotiable: pages machines can crawl and parse, entities they can recognize, authority they can verify, and work original enough to be worth citing. GEO isn't a separate discipline with a separate vendor. It's what good search strategy looks like now.
Most teams are fighting this with yesterday's playbook — volume, keyword templates, and traffic reports that stopped telling the truth two core updates ago. I work on the system: what you publish, how it's built, how it's measured, and who owns it.