Don’t throw away all of your best practices

Greg says: “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t throw out all of your SEO best practices just because we're in the hype cycle of GEO.”

How do we know which SEO practices to throw out and which ones to keep?

“Right now, we're simply adding on and not throwing out.

We are working with the assumption that roughly 90% of GEO best practices are rooted in SEO. We need to tweak a little bit and add in some new best practices, but most of our SOPs are still valid.”

Is there anything that you have thrown out?

“Currently, with AI Mode, the number one spot that we all used to covet in the traditional SERPs isn't as relevant today.

Recently, there was a discovery in ChatGPT's ranking algorithm: Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). It's a weighting mechanism that looks at how many times you rank in the top 10 and adds that all up to determine the likelihood of you being cited in an LLM's response.

Rather than gunning for number one, which was the old SEO best practice, because people don't scroll down and click below that, we're now going for a blended approach and trying to be recommended by an LLM and hoping people click through on that recommendation that it's pulling from the top 10.”

You say that strong copywriting still works, but how much of the human element should you retain?

“At our agency, we are certainly tempted to generate words more cheaply. It's a temptation all businesses have, agency or not. I totally understand that, but I highly recommend having a human editor in place before the loop is closed and you actually publish that content.

I don't support auto-publishing (or auto-outreaching in our case) without a human editor. These LLMs are still hallucinating. They're still unable to do basic math. They're fantastic tools, but they need humans to manage them.

For me, to produce content you're putting on-site or sending off-site, you need a human in the loop providing oversight.”

Why do you believe that strong product still works, and how do you deliver a strong product?

“We're approaching a ‘what’s old is new’ moment, because listicles have come back in a big way.

You may have seen an increase in demand for roundup content. We have certainly had former and new client demand for getting their products listed alongside other products in comparison articles and ‘Best of X’ content.

The way you're going to do that legitimately is to have a strong product that someone actually wants to review positively. I'm not an ‘all press is good press’ kind of guy, so I want to make sure those reviews are positive when they're happening.”

Do listicles need to appear on authoritative industry-relevant websites?

“With LLMs like ChatGPT, their algorithms are evolving rapidly. It's a little hard to put a finger on it, but I've seen some interesting studies recently. BuzzStream recently compared the public data from the license deals that OpenAI has with publishers against the responses' citations. Interestingly, they didn't line up as neatly as you might expect.

Currently, this is a bit of a moving target, but a very popular and well-known option is Reddit. Remember, although OpenAI looks at Bing, Bing often reflects Google, and Google did a deal with Reddit.

If you're looking to have your brand or product mentioned favourably in LLMs (again, having a strong product is key), there's a lot of UGC content over on Reddit. You really want that product talked about favourably, specifically on Reddit right now.”

Is the way to optimize for AI Mode in Google the same as optimizing for the older version of Google?

“It's not precisely the same.

AI Mode appears to be on track to completely replace the old 10 blue links. Certainly, Google has rolled back the ability to see beyond 10 blue links on one page, so it seems that that is the way we're headed.

We all know the phrase ‘the best place to hide a body is on page two of Google’. That still applies. The more you scroll down, the less value there is. The one saving grace with AI Mode is that it uses the same kind of logic that we're seeing with LLMs right now, so the top 10 or so links are combined with weighting to create a suggestion for the user.

In that sense, it is a new presentation of that data to the searcher.”

Are the things that you have to do to optimize for bots different compared with optimizing for visitors?

“The vast majority of your traffic isn't human; it’s bots, and this isn't anything new for SEOs. We are all used to our sites being crawled and scraped and all these kinds of things. Everyone who's worked in this field for a decade or more remembers the evolution from writing for the algorithm to writing for humans. That was a huge prioritisation that Google put on websites.

One thing I'm toying with for 2026 (and I don't have conclusive data on this) is the idea that we may need to start writing content even more explicitly for the bots. We still need to concurrently create human-driven content, but LLMs are known to prefer the Q&A format, for example. So, you can have a lengthy Q&A written for a bot and stash it somewhere that a human wouldn't necessarily navigate to, but an LLM might cite from.

By contrast, you can have a piece of content that is formatted in a way that a human might prefer. For example, LLMs don't really like things that flow in circuitous ways; they prefer much more linear content. I don't have data on this today, but thinking forward, this may inform your content strategy.”

Could you have a piece of content above the fold that targets the human, and then include content for AI engines to crawl below?

“I would definitely run an A/B test on that. I wasn't thinking about it being on the same page; I was thinking that you could create separate pages. I'm not even sure where my head's at in terms of categories or subdomains or how this all fits together right now. I haven't tested it out yet.

I like the idea of using the same page and just structuring that page to suit both audiences. Maybe someone else has done this research, but I would need to dive deeper into exactly where bot traffic enters a page and where they jump to. At this time, I don’t understand their behaviour well enough to fully structure a page for them.

You'd certainly hope that having a single page would increase the authoritativeness of that as a resource for a particular topic, and therefore make it more likely to be picked up by an AI search engine. It's about experimentation, and setting up an experiment is the right way to approach it. Then, you come to a bit more of a conclusive decision.

We're all just trying. I really admire the more scientific SEOs in the community. I recently sat in a 30-minute taxi ride with someone who explained Reciprocal Rank Fusion to me, query fan-out, and how these things integrate. I’m learning a lot as I go.”

Are people still buying links, and how does paid traffic influence ranking and visibility nowadays?

“Absolutely, people still buy links. We don't, but people do.

One interesting thing that people do is they will get a site published on someone else's website and run paid ads to that comparison article so that that web page’s rankings could potentially move (like I said, what’s old is new). Then, they can get it in the mix of that top 10 and get cited by an LLM.

This is a practice that has been run for a while. I am not an expert at PPC, but one thing you can do with it, in the link-building space, is influence the authority of that page, and then increase the value of that ‘link juice’. That's one of the ways that paid traffic is influencing ranking, and influencing LLMs through that weighting.

These algorithms are always evolving. Just this week, I was in a discussion on LinkedIn about the fact that engagement there is way down for a lot of everyday posters. We can see it. The algorithm has changed on us, and some of the old best practices may not apply anymore, or maybe we need to add in some new ones.

In the SEO space, that's what we're trying to grapple with right now, with AI Mode rolling out and the market shifting to GEO as well.”

Greg, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“90% of what you've read about SEO and practised to date is still valid. Don't disregard all of the work you've done on-site, off-site, and in your own personal development.

However, that isn't enough to carry you forward into GEO. You can't rest on your laurels if you are ranking in position one, two, or six.

Reciprocal Rank Fusion is a new content strategy you can deploy to get yourself in the best position. Today's LLMs are not just looking at what is ranking number one, and that is what the user wants to see. With AI Mode, Google released a press release in July explicitly stating that it uses query fan-out.

The big picture here is that there's more information and more context now. I love the phrase less is more, but in this case, you need to add a little more to what you were doing if you're focussing on GEO in 2026.”

Greg Heilers is Co-Founder at Jolly SEO. Find out more over at JollySEO.com.