Every other newsletter this year told me my SaaS needed GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Write an llms.txt. Add "AI-only" schema. Chunk your content for the models. So before sinking a weekend into it, I read one contrarian source, opened Google Search Console for my tool, and looked at the actual numbers. The verdict was boring and freeing: for Google, optimizing for AI answers is still just SEO. The real problem wasn't my markup — it was that almost nothing about my site was discoverable in the first place. Here's the data, the three fixes that mattered, and the two places I face-planted.
Why I didn't buy the GEO hype
I'm building Mimi Seed, an open-source MCP server that lets indie devs drive Play Store / App Store / Firebase releases from inside Claude Code or Codex. Classic indie-hacker situation: tiny audience, and a constant temptation to chase the shiny new growth lever.
The single most useful thing I read was a curated list (awesome-geo) whose thesis is blunt: most "GEO" advice is repackaged SEO with a markup tax. Their reading of the primary docs:
Google has publicly said optimizing for AI Overviews is the same SEO you already know. No special schema required.
