5 months ago, someone posted a leaked creator brief on Reddit that confirmed what a lot of us in the SEO industry already suspected.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1nm6daz/fyi_geos_ugly_campaign_of_intentional/

A company called Search Party, a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) startup that just raised $3.5 million in venture capital, sent outreach to top SEO creators offering paid sponsorships and long-term equity. In exchange, those creators would push a very specific message to their audiences.

The brief said, word for word:

“GEO is the future. Traditional keyword-first SEO is becoming outdated.”

That’s not a hot take. That’s a script. With a check attached to it.

This is the post I’ve been wanting to write for a while. Let’s talk about why they did it, why it matters to you, and why the data says they’re completely wrong.

Why They Did It: You Can’t Sell a Solution Without a Problem

Search Party came out of stealth in October 2024 with $3.5 million in funding and a product to sell. The problem? Businesses were already spending money on SEO. If SEO works, nobody needs what they’re selling.

So they created the problem.

This is the oldest playbook in tech marketing. You can’t sell a painkiller without pain. You can’t sell a life jacket to someone standing on dry land. So you have to convince people the ground is underwater.

Here’s how the operation worked, based on the leaked brief:

Phase 1: Paid creator partnerships. Starting October 7th, they launched sponsored content deals with SEO influencers. These creators would produce content “introducing Search Party to the market and helping define what generative engine optimization means.” In other words, paid advocates framing the narrative in Search Party’s favor.

Phase 2: Creator Advisory Board with equity. For select partners, they offered long-term equity in exchange for “consistent feedback, product shaping, and ongoing advocacy” over a two-year engagement. Not just a one-off sponsored post. A two-year commitment to push the brand.

The talking points they wanted amplified:

• “AI agents replace manual GEO complexity”
• “GEO is the future. Traditional keyword-first SEO is becoming outdated.”
• “[Our platform] helps brands influence how they show up in LLMs”
• “This isn’t another SEO tool, it’s a new model”

These aren’t organic opinions from independent creators doing their own research. These are coordinated messages, paid for by a VC-backed company, distributed through trusted voices to their audiences, most of whom have no idea the content is sponsored.

This is not illegal. The FTC requires disclosure of paid partnerships. But disclosure gets buried. A small “#ad” tag at the bottom of a post doesn’t undo the psychological weight of a trusted voice telling you your SEO strategy is obsolete.

And Search Party isn’t alone. They’re the one who got caught. The broader GEO software category, tools that claim to help you “optimize for AI,” has a collective financial interest in making you believe SEO is dying. The GEO tools market is growing fast, and every dollar that moves from SEO budgets to GEO subscriptions is a win for them.

Meanwhile, 81% of marketing leaders reported pulling funds away from SEO to spend more on social and influencer marketing, exactly the outcome these campaigns are designed to create.

Why It Matters: Real Businesses Are Making Bad Decisions Based on Paid Narratives

I work with HVAC companies, plumbers, roofers, and electricians. These are small business owners running crews, managing jobs, and trying to figure out where their next customer is coming from. They don’t have time to sift through whether a LinkedIn post is sponsored or genuine. They trust the people they follow.

When a trusted voice tells them SEO is dead, some of them believe it. And then they make decisions based on that belief.

They pull back on the content they’ve been building. They stop investing in their Google Business Profile. They start chasing the next thing: some new tool, some new strategy, some new subscription, because they’ve been convinced the thing that was working for them is no longer worth the investment.

That’s a real business harm.

According to Search Engine Journal, organic search remains responsible for over half of all website traffic. And for local service businesses specifically, the stakes are even higher. When someone’s furnace goes out at midnight, they’re not asking ChatGPT. They’re Googling “emergency HVAC near me.” That search goes to whoever shows up in the local pack. That’s SEO. That’s a real customer with a real problem and real money.

The businesses that abandon SEO based on a funded narrative aren’t just wasting their subscription dollars. They’re ceding ground to competitors who kept their heads down and kept building.

As one independent analysis put it, the real risk for small businesses isn’t losing search visibility to AI. It’s overreacting to scare tactics and wasting budget on “GEO packages” that don’t deliver.

Why They’re Wrong: The Data Doesn’t Support the Narrative

Let’s talk about what’s actually happening in search, not what a VC-backed startup needs you to believe.

Google is not dying.

Google still controls 89% of all U.S. web traffic. That’s not a dying platform. That’s a monopoly. And Google search grew by 21% in 2024, the same year everyone was telling you AI was going to kill it.

ChatGPT is not replacing Google search.

Semrush data shows that only 30% of ChatGPT prompts are similar to how people use search. The rest is chatting, writing, brainstorming. People using ChatGPT to plan a recipe or debug code are not the same people who were going to Google “best HVAC company in Burlington.” These are different behaviors, different use cases, different audiences.

AI Overviews are not a traffic apocalypse.

Yes, AI Overviews show up in about 13% of Google searches. Not 60%, not 80%. Just 13%. And blog posts and news articles make up the majority of sources cited in those AI Overviews. Meaning the content you’ve been creating for SEO is now also feeding AI responses. That’s not a threat. That’s an expanded distribution channel for the same work.

The SEO industry itself is growing.

The global SEO services market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16.2%. Companies don’t pour billions into a dying channel. 91% of marketers in 2024 said SEO had a positive impact on their website performance and marketing goals.

Google still dominates AI traffic too.

Google drives 345 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined. Read that again. 345 times more. GEO optimizes for a channel that sends a fraction of a percent of the traffic that Google sends.

Now, to be fair: search is evolving. It always has. AI is changing user behavior at the margins, especially for informational queries. Young people are using TikTok as a discovery tool. Zero-click searches are a real thing that reduces traffic to some websites. These are legitimate trends worth paying attention to.

But none of that is “SEO is dead.” What it is, is SEO evolving, the same way it has evolved through every major algorithm update since I started building websites in 1999. Panda. Penguin. Hummingbird. Mobile-first. Core Web Vitals. The people who declared SEO dead at each of those milestones were wrong every time.

As one sharp observer put it: “Imagine claiming that photography died when film cameras became obsolete. Digital photography didn’t kill the art form. It transformed it.”

What Good GEO Advice Actually Looks Like

Here’s where I’ll give credit where it’s due: there are legitimate things happening in AI search that are worth understanding.

Benjamin Houy, who actually built a GEO platform and then shut it down despite having paying customers, said something worth remembering: the best way to show up in AI-generated answers is to be an authoritative source on the topic you care about. Create real content. Earn real mentions. Build a real reputation.

Sound familiar? That’s SEO.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. Build something worth finding. Help real people with real questions. Show up consistently. The channel that surfaces your content has changed shape over the years. The underlying principle never has.

You don’t need a $3.5M funded subscription to do that. You need to actually know something, actually say it clearly, and actually be useful.

The Bottom Line

Search Party got caught because someone posted the brief. But there are dozens of companies running similar playbooks right now that haven’t been caught. Every time you read a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, or a YouTube video from an SEO creator telling you “SEO is dead, here’s what to do instead,” ask yourself who’s paying them and what they’re selling.

That’s not cynicism. That’s how you protect your business from making expensive decisions based on someone else’s marketing budget.

I’ve been building digital marketing for home service contractors for 25 years. I’ve watched the “SEO is dead” cycle repeat on a near-annual basis. Every time, the businesses that kept their heads down and kept doing the fundamentals came out ahead.

SEO is not dead. Shortcuts are dead. Gullibility is expensive. And some people are betting real money that you won’t notice the difference.

Now you know.

Stephen Quick is the CTO of Red Barn Media Group, where he’s spent 25+ years building digital marketing solutions for HVAC and home service contractors. He started his career during the first dot-com era and still believes the best technology is simple, beautiful, and works.

Have questions about your SEO strategy? Contact Red Barn Media Group.