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Howdy Notebooker!
I recently read a post arguing that GEO is a brand positioning problem, not a technical one. The pitch: GEO lives at the executive level, the real upside is coordinating brand positioning and reputation across channels, and the SEO team only controls a sliver of how LLMs form an opinion of your brand.
I get why it's popular. It sounds smart and it’s half true.
But I’d argue that the SEO team *has all the tools and know-how to make this actionable for CMOs. Like, why the F#% shouldn’t SEOs, with all our know-how be the ones who demystify this for our clients?! The slice of the SEO industry the article attempts to devalue is a very narrow definition of what it means to be an SEO in 2026.
This kind of post tells you the problem is bigger than you and lives above your pay grade. It attempts to reposition the conversation without handing you a single thing you can do about it on Monday morning, except of course hire the author.
That's the move with a lot of these takes. Long on "you're all thinking about this wrong," short on "here's what to do."
So today is the opposite. This is practical advice on how you, as an SEO, can influence GEO at the company-wide level. We're starting with the most useful and most overlooked piece of technical know-how in the whole stack.
It's a format Everett Sizemore broke down in a post from last year, better than anyone I’ve seen. It’s all about your brand positioning using semantic triples.
And once understood by your clients’ org, it’s a game changer… and yes, they can thank the SEO team for this!
https://tenor.com/view/thank-you-bow-michael-scott-the-office-gif-18616386
Mentions in AI are all the rage. Rand Fishkin will tell it to you straight to your face, but a mention with no structure behind it is just your name floating in a sentence the model had to guess its way through.
A mention gets you named. A semantic triple helps the machine actually understand you. Those are very different outcomes.
P.S. The post also took jab at AI Info Pages touting them as a quick fix hack (which no one ever claimed). I mean, you can say all you want, they’re making their way into commoncrawl.org and we have the receipts on how often they influence LLMs for key questions about our clients’ brands.
More on that in future note. Let’s get into how you as an SEO can fix the GEO narrative problem for a CMO today…