The Verge Just Handed Every CMO an Excuse to Cut Their GEO Budget
The interesting thing about The Verge's piece on the AI SEO industry is the timing, not the argument itself. The argument has been circulating in trade press for months. Jeremy Moser at uSERP told Digiday back in the summer that 80 percent of GEO is good fundamental SEO, and that any vendor who won't say that out loud is "selling you snake oil." Tom Pick at Webbiquity wrote a "Beware the Snake Oil" piece in mid-2025 that laid out four reasons GEO probably wasn't what it was being sold as. Lily Ray at Amsive shrugged at the whole thing, saying "we've all lived through this a million times, and that's why it's been frustrating for us." None of these people needed The Verge to make the case. The Verge just happened to be the one that made it travel.
The Verge has been publicly and often sneeringly dismissive of the SEO industry for as long as I can remember. They don't chase Google rankings, they don't optimize for featured snippets, and they've published more than one piece mocking the SEO bro economy by name. That editorial stance is the context for why this article lands differently. When a publication that has never pretended to respect the discipline turns around and says generative engine optimization is largely a rebranding exercise sitting on top of a $1 billion valuation, the takeaway for your client is closer to "even the people who hate SEO think the new thing is worse."
The publication that hates SEO is the one that broke it
There's a version of this story where it lands as inside baseball. Another trade publication complaining about another marketing discipline, everyone shrugs, work continues. This version is different. The Verge gets picked up on Techmeme, quoted in Morning Brew, and forwarded by CMOs who don't read Search Engine Land. It is one of the three or four publications where a critical piece actually migrates out of the marketing echo chamber and into the broader tech conversation.
That's the mechanism that matters here. Your client didn't read Digiday's piece on the GEO hype cycle. They probably didn't read Webbiquity either. If they use Techmeme, a Bloomberg tech newsletter, or Apple News, there's a real chance they saw the Verge piece by lunchtime. On your next client call, expect some version of this: "I saw something about AI SEO being overhyped, what are we actually paying this vendor for?"
From what I've seen, that's the hardest question to answer cleanly, even when the work is genuinely good.
The skeptics weren't quiet. They just weren't The Verge.
If you have been in paid search or SEO long enough, none of the arguments against GEO are actually surprising. Most of them showed up in the Digiday piece:
- LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic. There is no stable ranking system to reverse-engineer the way Google's has been for twenty years.
- Reuters, The Guardian, and similar outlets are among the most-cited sources in AI answers. They still get less than 1% of their traffic from AI platforms.
- The same query, phrased two slightly different ways, returns different sources. That is structural, not something you can fix with better tactics.
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude treat the same prompt very differently, so "rank #1 in AI" is not a goal you can actually pursue against a single target.
None of these are new insights. The interesting thing is that the people running GEO agencies mostly don't disagree with them. The better ones argue that being cited matters even if referral traffic doesn't, which is defensible. Others argue that fundamentals-plus-some-structured-data is enough of a repackage to justify a new retainer line item, which is less defensible. Most clients will probably forgive the former and push back on the latter, especially once they have a credibility lever like the Verge article to point at.
The interesting internal tension in the GEO market has nothing to do with whether it's real. The question is whether the delta over standard SEO is enough to charge a separate fee for. The Verge piece makes that question louder.
Profound's $1 billion valuation just got harder to defend
Here's the part nobody in the GEO vendor space wants to talk about right now. Profound raised a $96 million Series C in February at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed, with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Evantic Capital participating, bringing total funding to roughly $155 million. Profound is about 18 months old, has fewer than 120 employees, and claims 700+ enterprise customers including Target, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. AthenaHQ, founded by ex-Google Search and DeepMind engineers, has been raising on a similar curve.
That is a lot of paper market cap riding on the premise that GEO is a discipline worth building a category company around. The Verge article doesn't move those valuations directly. What it changes is who is willing to sign off on a $100K to $250K annual contract for a GEO platform without a procurement fight.
Most of the skeptics in coverage of Profound have been conspicuously quiet about the platform itself, because the tracking and share-of-voice product is genuinely useful even if the broader "GEO is the new SEO" narrative is oversold. That distinction is going to get flattened in client conversations this week, and the product teams at Profound and AthenaHQ are probably going to have to sharpen their positioning fast. My guess is the winners stop selling "AI SEO" and start selling "AI brand monitoring with a citation-intelligence layer." Different pitch, same technology, much less blowback from a CMO who just read a Verge piece over coffee.
The question your biggest client will ask you Monday
If you run an agency, there is a specific question you should already be drafting an answer to: "We're paying $X per month for GEO. What does that get us that our regular SEO work wouldn't?"
The answer needs three things. First, a clean breakdown of what is actually in the GEO scope versus the SEO scope, with hours and deliverables, not buzzwords. Second, a citation-and-mention report that shows specific AI answers the client appears in this month that they didn't last month. Third, a realistic statement about referral traffic expectations, including the part where most cited publishers are getting under 1% of their traffic from AI platforms. If you can't answer those three things cleanly, you are one Verge article away from losing the retainer.
If you are on the client side, the question to ask your vendor this week is simpler. Show me the delta. Not the strategy deck. The actual incremental work and incremental result that wouldn't exist without the GEO line item.
We already wrote about the 11% citation overlap that breaks most platform-agnostic GEO strategies, and about how the whole AI visibility tracking stack can be rebuilt for around $100 a month if you are willing to do the work in-house. The Verge article doesn't change any of that analysis. It forces the conversation to happen earlier than GEO vendors wanted it to.
The version of this pitch that actually survives the quarter
I don't think GEO is worthless. Getting cited by ChatGPT or Gemini in a category where your competitor isn't is a real advantage, and the tooling to track that across four or five platforms is genuinely hard to build from scratch. What is happening, probably, is that the marketing around it raced too far ahead of the measurable impact, and The Verge just put a mirror in front of the whole industry at a moment when clients were already getting nervous.
The vendors who survive this cycle will be the ones that stop pretending GEO is a replacement for SEO, stop claiming AI referral traffic is about to explode, and start pricing their work like what it actually is: a monitoring tool for a new surface where your brand either shows up or doesn't. That's a real product. It is just not a $1 billion category on its own.
Whether Profound and AthenaHQ grow into those valuations is going to come down to whether they can pivot the pitch faster than their competitors. The Verge just shortened the clock.
Notice Me Senpai Editorial
