I was trading text messages with someone this morning, and then I realized something that I hadn’t thought about before.

They were sharing with me an idea somebody had for gaming AI search by doing shady GEO AEO things.

This is how I responded:

“Eventually, AI will start banning companies or reducing their rankings when they detect companies are trying to game their systems. I didn’t think about that until this morning. Same thing happened with SEO, one minute you are at the top of Altavista in 1997, the next minute your domain is banned or relegated to page 2. That was a typical penalty back in the day, a 10-position demotion, so if you were 1, you became 11. So the best things to do instead are transparent non-gaming things that won’t get you penalized.”