OpenAI and Anthropic don’t care about GEO or AEO

Amid hundreds of consultants, influencers, and agencies touting the rise of GEO/AEO (generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization) and the death of SEO, OpenAI and Anthropic’s growth teams haven’t offered a single endorsement of either term.

In fact, they’ve done the opposite. Both have implicitly and explicitly criticized the GEO/AEO movement. So why aren’t the people leading organic search at the frontier labs jumping on the GEO/AEO bandwagon?

What we’re seeing with Anthropic

Eli Schwartz recently consulted for Anthropic on their SEO strategy and made a post promoting Anthropic’s new SEO Lead role. There’s no mincing words here: “They’re hiring for SEO. Not AEO. Not ‘AI search optimization.’ Not a marketing engineer. Not a ‘GEO specialist.’”

That post was then reshared and echoed by Austin Lau, Anthropic’s first growth marketer. SEO is what matters, despite the marketing hype around AEO and GEO.

Look at the JD for the SEO Lead role itself: there isn’t a single mention of GEO or AEO anywhere.

What we’re seeing with OpenAI

Paige Ford leads SEO at OpenAI. Here’s her post announcing she’d joined OpenAI “to focus on growth and acquisition for ChatGPT across web and SEO.” Again, no mention of AEO or GEO.

Now look at the actual job posting for that role, before Paige was hired. The official Ashby listing has since been removed, but I found a saved copy here. It reads: “We are seeking a full-funnel ‘growth athlete’ with deep expertise in SEO, web strategy, and CRO to help scale ChatGPT consumer and business growth initiatives.” Again, not a single mention of GEO, AEO, or any similar acronym.

What’s happening here?

Contrary to what your LinkedIn feed might suggest, top SEO practitioners widely agree: there’s no material difference in the tactical playbook for optimizing for AI search versus traditional SEO.

Let me say this again: there’s no separate “hack” for AI visibility that’s mutually exclusive from SEO best practices. I’ve validated this by reviewing client performance data across dozens of customers at daydream, the AI-native SEO agency I founded, and through countless 1:1 conversations with top agency leaders and in-house SEO practitioners.

Despite this, there’s a vested interest in portraying GEO/AEO as a distinct channel, simply because it’s lucrative. The myth was largely propagated by AI visibility-monitoring startups that used the “SEO is dead, long live GEO/AEO” slogan to market their products. Then a wave of consultancies, agencies, and in-house SEOs followed, rebranding themselves as “GEO/AEO experts” to cash in on the newly created interest.

OpenAI and Anthropic’s growth leaders clearly haven’t bought into the hype. They’ve staked the future of their own visibility in AI search on doing great SEO. If you’re thinking about your own brand’s AI visibility, you’d do well to follow their lead: take a long view on organic search, and focus on mastering the fundamentals that have always mattered.