Why GEO Is Becoming the New SEO – Rich Brooks on AI Search

Rich Brooks founded flyte new media in the late 1990s when the internet was still a curiosity. Twenty-nine years later, he’s still running it — and hosting The Agents of Change, a podcast now past 600 episodes. That kind of longevity in digital marketing isn’t luck. It’s pattern recognition, and the pattern Rich keeps coming back to is this: the tools change, the humans don’t.

In this conversation, Rich breaks down what Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) actually is, why his Remarkability Formula matters more in the age of AI slop, and what separates the agencies and creators that survive major platform shifts from the ones that disappear. No hype. Just the honest view from someone who has been through all of it.

What GEO Actually Is — and What It Isn’t

Generative Engine Optimization is SEO adapted for AI-powered search. The goal is the same — get your business found, get recommended, drive traffic — but the surface you’re optimizing for has changed. Instead of ranking in a list of blue links, you’re trying to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s AI overviews, or whatever flavor of AI assistant your potential clients are using to answer questions.

Rich is careful not to over-mystify it.

“A lot of this GEO stuff to me at least just sounds like really good marketing and PR. A lot of the stuff is SEO, and then a lot of the stuff is about getting citations and other people saying good things about you — whether through reviews or mentions in media, whatever it is. But that’s just digital PR. So it’s new, but it’s not all new.”

That’s a useful reframe. If you’ve been doing solid SEO — building authority, earning mentions, getting reviews, producing genuinely useful content — you’re already ahead of most businesses when it comes to GEO. The structural work transfers. What changes is the tactical fine-tuning: how you organize content on-page with H2 and H3 tags, how clearly you answer questions, how consistently you signal to AI crawlers who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

Rich is also skeptical of the FAQ obsession that’s circulating in GEO advice right now. His take: FAQs aren’t magic. They’re just a convenient format for creating question-and-answer content, which happens to be easier for AI to parse right now. The underlying principle — clear, well-organized, authoritative content — is what actually matters. A FAQ-stuffed page with thin answers won’t outperform a well-written service page that directly addresses what your clients need.

Is Traditional SEO Dead?

Short answer: no. Longer answer: it’s changing shape, and some of what you were getting from it is gone for good.

Rich is direct about what’s actually happening to search traffic. Across the board, organic traffic to most websites is down. That informational content — the blog posts designed to pull in top-of-funnel readers and shepherd them toward service pages — is being absorbed by AI overviews and conversational AI tools. People get their answer in the chat interface and never click through.

But transactional searches are different. When someone needs a landscaper in Southern Maine or a web studio that converts, they still have to go to the business. The search might start in an AI tool, but the conversion happens in the real world. That’s where GEO starts doing the work SEO used to do.

The Yellow Pages analogy Rich uses is apt: people have always searched for answers. The medium keeps shifting. What doesn’t shift is that businesses with clear messaging, genuine credibility, and consistent visibility tend to get found — regardless of which platform is doing the finding.

The Remarkability Formula — and Why AI Made It More Urgent

Before GEO was a conversation, Rich was already working on the underlying problem: how do ordinary businesses stand out when everyone has access to the same tools, the same platforms, and the same playbook?

He developed what he calls the Remarkability Formula — a four-lens framework built around the words Find, Focus, Forge, and Frame.

• Find: There’s already something remarkable in your business. You just haven’t identified it or given it a name. The work here is excavation, not invention.
• Focus: Niche down until you’re the only person offering your specific solution to your ideal client’s specific problem. Generalism is invisible.
• Forge: Create something that reflects your belief system but doesn’t require someone to hire you first. For Rich, that was the Agents of Change Conference — an event that was genuinely hard to replicate and made flyte new media impossible to ignore in the regional market.
• Frame: Reposition how you describe your offering so your ideal client immediately recognizes it as exactly what they’ve been looking for. If your framing is off, you’re competing on price with people who appear to do the same thing you do.

Rich built this framework before COVID hit, when the dominant marketing conversation was about Facebook ads and organic social optimization. His point at the time: all of that is table stakes. Everyone’s doing it. Doing it well doesn’t make you remarkable — it just keeps you in the game.

That logic applies even harder now.

“As everybody gets a little bit better to this level of mediocrity, your real opportunity to stand out is to create content that doesn’t look like everybody else’s, that doesn’t sound like an AI voice did it. And even if it’s rough — spend time focusing on what makes my voice worth listening to.”

His comparison to interior design is worth sitting with. The average American home looks significantly better than it did 50 years ago. It also looks almost identical to every other American home, because everyone is shopping at the same stores and stealing from the same catalogs. AI content is heading the same direction — technically competent, aesthetically familiar, and completely forgettable.

The creators and businesses that beat that gravity are the ones investing in genuine differentiation: a distinct voice, a specific point of view, content that could only come from their actual experience.

29 Years of Platform Shifts — What Actually Separates Survivors from Casualties

Rich has watched the browser wars, the rise of Google, the email newsletter era, the blogging boom, the mobile revolution, and social media. He’s seen platforms he was convinced would be transformative (AMP pages, push technology, RSS feeds) fizzle into irrelevance. He’s also watched AI go from an industry curiosity to something that, in his words, might be bigger than the internet itself.

His read after attending the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) a few years ago was unambiguous: this was bigger than social media. He went back to his team and told them to rethink everything. That kind of early pattern recognition is what’s kept flyte new media operational for nearly three decades while comparable agencies have folded or aged out.

But pattern recognition alone isn’t the lesson. The harder lesson is what you have to be willing to let go of. Rich is explicit: every time he thought his business was settled, that comfort was a warning sign. The businesses that survive aren’t the ones that found the right model and defended it. They’re the ones that stayed willing to abandon what was working when the signals said it was time to move.

Entrepreneurship, in his framing, isn’t the freedom fantasy — it’s a 24/7 mental load. You get to set the rules, but you never actually clock out. The tradeoff is real, and anyone considering building the kind of career Rich has should go in clear-eyed about it.

Podcasting as a Business Development Tool (Not a Vanity Project)

Rich’s podcast origin story is instructive. His first attempt failed after six episodes — too much time for too little return. His second attempt worked because he changed the format: instead of producing solo content, he started interviewing other experts. The cognitive load dropped. The relationship value went up.

After 12 years and 600+ episodes, he can trace specific client relationships directly back to the podcast. One of flyte new media’s longest-running clients found them through an early episode, connected on Twitter, and has been working with them for roughly a decade.

The framework he uses is worth stealing. When a client has a specific problem — a PR crisis, a technical challenge outside his team’s core expertise — he finds an expert in that area and invites them on the show. The expert gets the platform and the reach. Rich gets the education and the relationship. The client gets the benefit of that expertise, indirectly. Everyone wins, and no one had to pay consulting rates for a one-off conversation.

He’s also honest that podcasting isn’t flyte new media’s strongest lead generation channel. He keeps doing it because he genuinely enjoys it, because it keeps him connected to a broader professional network outside of Portland, Maine, and because it still converts — just not at the top of the funnel.

That’s the honest case for a podcast as a business development tool. Not that it’ll flood your pipeline, but that it builds relationships, deepens expertise, and creates a long-tail credibility asset that compounds over time.

How to Get Cited by AI — The Practical Version

Rich’s final advice on GEO and AI discoverability strips the complexity down to something actionable.

Know who you are, what you do, and who you serve. Put that clearly on your website, your social profiles, your marketing materials. Say it consistently enough that AI crawlers can categorize you accurately. That’s how you start showing up when someone asks an AI tool to recommend a business in your category.

The tactical layer — guest posts, podcast appearances, local media mentions, review volume, Google Business Profile optimization — all amplifies that core signal. But none of it works if the core message is muddled. AI tools are pattern-matching. They’re looking for clarity, consistency, and corroboration from third-party sources. That’s also, not coincidentally, what good marketing has always required.

The adaptability point runs underneath all of it. Whatever message you develop today, be ready to evolve it. The pace of change in digital marketing isn’t slowing down — if anything, Rich expects it to accelerate. The businesses that make it to year 30 aren’t the ones with the best strategy in 2025. They’re the ones that recognize when the strategy needs to change and move before they’re forced to.

Learn more about Rich’s work at flyte new media and listen to The Agents of Change wherever you get podcasts.