SEO & GEO
Are You Optimizing for AI Search, or Gambling On It?
By Emily Souydalay, Director of SEO & GEO @ Propellic
Everyone wants to “win” AI search. Almost no one is asking what happens if they win it the wrong way - and the downside isn't just a sudden sharp drop-off in traffic when LLMs decided your content is garbled, regurgitated AI slop - the real downside is slower to arrive, much more alarming, harder to diagnose, and far more difficult to reverse than any Google penalty ever was.
The biggest question in marketing right now is some version of, "How do I get visible in AI search? How do I show up ahead of my competitors, for the conversations my buyers are making about purchasing decisions?" It's a fair question, and an expensive one.
AI referral traffic is converting at rates that make the old playbook look quaint. When a channel converts nine times better than the thing that built your business, of course you’d want to join the GEO party!
So let me ask the question almost nobody is asking. Not "how do I win?" - but what happens if you win it the wrong way?
I don't mean wrong as in not optimizing well enough to become visible. I mean wrong as in against the rules - attaining visibility in AI search today through not so moral tactics that get you buried in the same AI answers tomorrow.
That's a completely different threat than risking lower visibility, and it's not a topic in the conversation.
With Google, we learned to fear the manual action. With LLMs and AI Search, we left the fear at the door.
Anyone who has run a site where your ability to generate revenue depends heavily on organic traffic knows the two scariest words in the Google business: manual action.
It’s worse than a core update because it is personal and deliberate - and for anyone who handles this day-to-day, it is the phrase most likely to trigger a week-long panic attack (for anyone I just triggered some real Google PTSD for, I’m so sorry).
But here’s what’s strange. That fear - that extremely valid, pervasive fear - which has lived in the hearts of every business operating a website in the age of Google search, did not make the leap to a similar threat entering the world of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Many people carried the clickbait optimization tactics over: the LinkedIn threads, the "ten tricks to get cited," the content scaled to blanket every prompt. But as a search-reliant society we threw caution to the wind. Why?
Maybe because the possibility of irreversible penalties in AI search simply haven't crossed most people's minds. They've crossed mine. I spend every working day in SEO and most of my spare hours learning about how AI search works, what makes it tick, and the question that keeps surfacing is the one nobody is putting on a billboard: what happens when this all goes wrong?
The alternative to guessing isn’t a clever exploit. The question I’ll leave you with - the one underneath all the "how do I get more visible" noise. Are you optimizing, or are you gambling? And if it’s the second: are you sure you can afford to lose a bet you won’t know you’ve lost until it’s too late?
If you’re genuinely unafraid of getting penalized, all the power to you! I’d just rather you make that call on purpose. For the rest of us, let’s keep things above board - for the robots, please.
WEBINAR - SEO & GEO for Hospitality
Hotel SEO and GEO best practices for 2026
How AI rewrote hotel discovery, and how to win the recommendation.
Travelers used to scroll a page of blue links. Now they ask an AI for a recommendation and book the answer. If your hotel isn't the one being recommended, you're losing direct bookings before the guest ever reaches your site.
Join Brennen Bliss and Javier Hernandez for a practical, no-fluff session on how AI decides which hotels it recommends, and the moves you can make this week to become one of them.
You'll walk away knowing:
- Why search became recommendation, and what it means for your direct bookings
- How AI scores your hotel on what you say and what the web says about you
- The fastest, lowest-effort fixes most hotels are still missing
Live Q&A at the end, so bring your questions.
📅 Thursday the 16th, 10am Central Time
Can't make it live?
Register anyway and we'll send you the replay.
TRAVEL MARKETING PODCAST
How Vaya Adventures Markets Hidden Gems at Scale
From one region to the whole world: how Vaya Adventures built a $30M travel business on bottom-of-funnel search
Jim Lutz didn't plan on travel. He planned on law. A year abroad before law school, plus a trip to Morocco, rerouted the entire flight plan.
In this episode, Brennen sits down with Jim Lutz, founder of Vaya Adventures, to trace how a former lawyer built a 35-person, $30M+ adventure travel company that's grown 25 to 35% a year for the last five years.
The center of the story is the decision that reshaped the business: going from a South America specialist to selling the entire world, and why that one move did more for repeat and referral than any single campaign could.
Jim is refreshingly candid about the parts most founders skip. Shrinking from 13 people to 6 during COVID. The discipline of fishing at the bottom of the funnel when Booking.com and Expedia are spending billions on the same intent.
He discusses why the wrong lead is worse than no lead at all. And the years he spent resisting the word "luxury" before he understood what it was quietly doing for his pipeline.
It's a conversation about building a proper business: the slow handoff from founder-led marketing to an in-house team, where AI earns its keep, and where the human on the other end of the trip stays irreplaceable.
If you're growing a travel brand, Jim's story is worth your time. Watch the full episode and tell us which takeaway you're stealing first.
Want To Level Up Your Travel Marketing?
Subscribe to the NavLog, our bi-weekly travel marketing roundup, where you’ll be the first to know about breaking news that impacts travel marketers and access exclusive performance marketing strategies and practical tips you can implement from the marketers at the leading edge of the travel industry.
