Referral traffic is drying up — but what’s more striking is how the industry is responding. Search engines, once reliable pipelines for traffic, now behave more like competitors than conduits stripping content for snippets that keep users firmly within their own platforms.
In theory that should make generative search optimization (GSO) a top priority for publishers. In practice, five publishers told Digiday they are holding back, skeptical of the hype and unconvinced that GEO offers a meaningful path forward for traffic referral and monetization.
GEO is pitched as the SEO (search engine optimization) of the AI era — a way to theoretically ensure content gets cited by large language models and answer engines. “This was all based on the assumption that somebody out there knows how to optimize for this,” said Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. “This whole conversation is not rooted in any fact. If there’s anyone who can prove to me that they can optimize the output of these rapidly developing tools, I would love to talk to them.”
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