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I’ll be honest: my conversation with Federico Fancinelli of GeoSonar rearranged how I see my own job. He’s spent two years in a GEO research lab, and the picture he paints is less “optimize a page” and more “work a royal court.”
The court has new sovereigns
I floated an allegory that I can’t stop using, and Federico summed it up in two words.
Jeremy: “SEOs are playing the role of the courtier who goes to the court of the king to influence popular opinion. It used to be Google was the king, with Bing over in the corner. But now we have a whole court — ChatGPT, Anthropic, Copilot. You’re whispering to everyone in the room, building connections, getting referrals so you and your patron get recognized.”
Federico: “An oligarchy.”
That’s the whole game now. It’s why I keep arguing that authority is what other people say about you, and why distribution is the last moat standing. Link building, in this frame, is just getting the queen to speak well of you to the king.
You rank entities, not pages
Federico’s core finding: AI search ranks entities, and big brands are entities by definition. Coherence across every channel is what earns recognition. And no, one optimization doesn’t carry across every model — which is exactly why AI search is not SEO 2.0, and why entity engineering is the work most of us are still skipping.
Perception, reputation, and the grudge
Because it’s your entity on the line, mistakes cost more. The LLMs hold a grudge on repeated bad reviews — a pattern Patrick Stox and Darren Shaw have both flagged — and the fix is often the product, not the page. It also means the agentic future (bots buying for their users, which I got into on robots with wallets) rewards brands that speak the machine’s language.
SEO lives inside GEO
Jeremy: “I used to think of GEO and SEO as an overlap on a Venn diagram, but I’ve changed my mind. SEO is in the middle, and GEO overlaps it entirely — everything we do as an SEO is included, and then there’s more. Would you say that’s accurate?”
Federico: “Precisely. It’s spot on. What changed is not the name, not the discipline — it’s the channel. It was all before only the website; right now it’s the ecosystem.”
That’s the reframe I’m keeping. The channel changed; the discipline didn’t — and relevance is still the metric that survived.
Meet Federico
GeoSonar · Research Lab · LinkedIn. Hear the full episode on the Unscripted SEO Podcast.