I didn’t want to sell my last agency. I had to. The writing wasn’t just on the wall; it was in the source code. We’d built a £10M business on the predictable science of SEO, and I could see the entire model dissolving into irrelevance. The game of chasing rankings is over. The click is dying. Welcome to the new reality: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). If your marketing strategy doesn’t account for it, you’re already a ghost at the feast.
For fifteen years, the playbook was simple: find a keyword, build a page, get links, rank first, get traffic. It worked. It printed money. But now, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google’s own Search Generative Experience (SGE) are becoming the primary interface for information retrieval. They don’t give the user a list of ten blue links. They synthesise an answer and present it directly. When the answer is the destination, the value of your link collapses to zero.
Your traffic will disappear. Not overnight, but with the steady, grinding certainty of a glacier. The existential threat to most marketing agencies and SaaS businesses isn