Stop chasing the shiny lure

Every year brings a new shiny lure. GEO. AEO. AI agents. New platforms, new "proven" frameworks, new acronyms with conference tracks attached. Many of these things genuinely matter - and the tactic still keeps becoming the strategy, which is backwards.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has been in digital marketing long enough. A new channel or technique appears, early adopters see outsized returns, the case studies circulate, and within a quarter there's pressure from above to "have a strategy" for it. The question stops being whether it serves the business and becomes whether you're doing it yet.

The question underneath all of them

The biggest fish rarely comes on the newest lure in the tackle box. It comes from the right presentation, in the right conditions, for the fish you're actually trying to catch. Marketing works the same way, and the question that should sit above every tactic is unglamorous: does this move profitable revenue for the customers we actually have?

That question doesn't make GEO less important. It makes GEO answerable. If your buyers are increasingly starting in AI answer engines, generative-engine optimization matters enormously - and you'll know why, which means you'll know how to do it well rather than performatively. If they aren't, no amount of urgency changes the math.

Why the lure keeps winning anyway

Tactics are concrete and strategy is abstract, so tactics win the calendar. It's far easier to staff a GEO initiative than to answer "who is our highest-value customer and what actually persuades them." The tactic has a deliverable. The strategy has a research problem underneath it that most stacks can't solve on demand.

That's the honest reason tactics keep getting promoted to strategy: the strategic question requires knowing your audience in a way that's expensive and slow to establish by hand, and the tactical one doesn't. So teams optimize what they can measure and staff, and the audience question gets deferred indefinitely.

How to evaluate the next one

The next acronym is already coming, so it helps to have a filter ready. Three questions usually settle it: Do our actual customers spend time in this channel, or do we just assume they might? Can we measure it against revenue rather than activity? And does pursuing it make the rest of our marketing sharper, or does it pull resources sideways into a parallel effort?

A tactic that clears all three deserves investment and probably urgency. One that clears none deserves a note in a file and a revisit next year. Most land in between - worth a contained test, not a reorganization.

What actually compounds

The question for a growth leader was never "do we have a GEO strategy." It's how AI search, SEO, paid media, content, CRM, and email work together to drive profitable revenue - and which of them deserve weight for which customers.

The companies that win won't be the ones buying every new lure. They'll be the ones who understand the customer well enough to know exactly why each tactic belongs in the spread - and which ones to skip without anxiety. That understanding is the only asset in marketing that compounds instead of depreciating, and it's the one thing no new acronym will hand you.