Right now, someone is Googling the exact problem your business solves.

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And AI is answering them.

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There's a reasonable chance it's not mentioning you. There's also a chance it's recommending your competitor.

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This is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation, AI overviews, AI search, whatever you want to call it). And the founders who are getting it right aren't panicking or throwing budget at it. They're making one or two focused moves that compound over time.

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Our Organic Strategist Beka recently went live with Rick Tousseyn from Otterly AI, a team who actually run GEO experiments rather than just talk about them, to cut through the noise. They covered five myths that are causing founders to either freeze or sprint in the wrong direction.

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Here's what they found.

Myth 1: GEO is a new strategy I need to budget for

Sort of. It depends entirely on how contested your market is.

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Otterly AI ran an experiment creating a brand from scratch in a low-competition space. It took 16 external brand mentions to put that brand in the top 10 for AI search. That's a very achievable number.

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In a crowded market? Yes, you'll need more investment. But in a niche with limited competition, the barrier is lower than most people think.

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The bigger point: AI search is non-deterministic. You're not buying a guaranteed ranking. You're increasing your percentage chance of being cited. That changes how you think about the spend entirely.

Myth 2: I need to completely overhaul my content for AI

Not necessarily, but you do need to know what kind of content you have.

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Here's what's actually happening. AI is increasingly handling informational queries itself, without sending anyone to a website. If your traffic was built on "what is X" and "how does Y work" content, you're feeling it. That type of content is disappearing into AI's memory, not into your analytics.

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What does still get cited? Content that's specific, opinionated, recent, and human. Video content is also being surfaced heavily, and AI search is moving fast towards multimodal content.

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One practical shift worth making now: if AI reads your page and chunks it into tokens, the vital information needs to be in the top 30% of your article. Not buried at the bottom of a 2,000-word piece.

Myth 3: We need to do something technical to crack this

The technical basics that mattered in SEO still matter now, maybe more. A fast, well-structured, easy-to-read site gives AI crawlers less friction.

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One interesting development Otterly AI is currently testing: most AI platforms convert web pages into markdown before processing them. The question they're investigating is whether pre-formatted markdown pages get processed faster and ranked more favourably. Watch this space. Results coming soon.

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The short version: don't ignore technical SEO. Don't make it your whole strategy either.

Myth 4: AI overviews are eating my traffic and I'm losing

This one needs unpacking, because the problem is often measurement, not reality.

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Two things happened in parallel around 2024. AI search emerged as a serious channel. And cookies became a much bigger tracking issue. A lot of the "traffic loss" people are seeing is partly a measurement gap, not just an AI gap.

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The KPIs are genuinely shifting. If you're only measuring organic traffic, you're missing the picture. Branded search traffic is a useful proxy: if your brand search is increasing, AI may be recommending you without people clicking through. That's still working.

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One recommendation from Rick if you really want clarity: server-side tracking. It's the only way to get a clean read on what's actually happening.

Myth 5: SEO is dead

No.

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SEO is the foundation. GEO is the house you build on it. Without a website, without structure, without credibility signals, you're not going to rank in AI search either.

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AI search traffic is also still relatively small. Around 5% of all search traffic as of last year. Google is not gone. The people using ChatGPT are largely the same people still using Google. It's not either/or.

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What has changed is that AI looks beyond domain authority. Small, specific, credible voices are now competing with the TripAdvisors of the world. A local travel blogger with genuine local knowledge is getting cited ahead of generic content from a global platform. The playing field is levelling.

That's not a threat to good content. It's an opportunity.

Rick's three quick wins for 2026

If you want to do something useful this week, start here:

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• Update your footer: Add a non-branded description of what your product or service actually does. The prompt or keyword someone would use to find you. AI reads your footer on every single page. It's a fast, underused signal
• Get external brand mentions: AI doesn't prioritise backlinks the way Google did. It looks for brand mentions. Reach out for inclusion in relevant listicles and rankings. An exchange or outreach programme works well here
• Start tracking your AI visibility: Most businesses have no idea whether they're being cited in AI search at all. Tools like Otterly AI can show you where you stand. You can't improve what you're not measuring

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The thread running through all of this is the same one that runs through everything we talk about here. Strategy before activity. Foundation before speed. Understand what's actually happening before you start spending.

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GEO isn't a panic button. It's a layer on top of what you should already be building.

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If you want to go deeper, Otterly AI runs live GEO experiments and shares results publicly, no paywall, no gated content. Worth following if this is on your radar.

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And if you're not sure where your current SEO and content foundations stand, that's exactly the kind of thing we help with at The Scale Up Collective.