When Everyone's Chasing the GEO Hype, I Chose to Go Back to First Principles

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the buzzword of the moment. I’ve been deep in the research myself—the market is flooded with flashy products: AI agents, AI search detection tools, analytics dashboards, llms.txt generators. Each one looks impressive, each one promises to be “the future”.

But when I stepped back and really thought about it, one question kept nagging at me: When everyone is chasing the same trend, what is GEO actually about? Who is it really for? And what’s the right way to approach it?

This post is my attempt to break down GEO using first principles thinking.

What AI Search Actually Changed

In the traditional search era, users typed keywords—“best Italian restaurant NYC”. The search engine returned a list of links, and users clicked through, filtered, and judged for themselves.

But in the age of AI search, user behavior has fundamentally shifted. People no longer type keywords. They describe scenarios:

“I’m planning a dinner next Friday with a client who’s vegetarian and prefers quiet places for conversation. Budget around $80 per person, somewhere in Midtown Manhattan. What would you recommend?”

To get more accurate answers from AI, users willingly provide extensive context—their specific needs, constraints, preferences, and situations.

This creates a structural change: an explosion of long-tail queries.

In the past, businesses only needed to optimize for head terms like “best restaurant NYC”. But now, user questions have become incredibly specific and diverse—and the internet has almost no content addressing these specific scenarios.

Where does the AI find answers? It searches the web, only to discover that most B2B companies haven’t created content for these long-tail needs at all.

This is the real opportunity window for GEO.

The Essence of GEO: It’s Not Technology, It’s Content Marketing

Once I understood this, I arrived at a core insight:

GEO is fundamentally content marketing. What we’re really doing is providing high-quality context for AI.

Think of AI as the fulcrum of a lever. On one end is the context users provide. On the other end is the context businesses provide.

The user side of this equation has become richer than ever in the AI era—people are willing to spend time describing their real needs in detail. But what about the business side? Most B2B companies’ content is still stuck at the “product feature list” level. They haven’t created content addressing users’ actual scenarios.

So the core work of GEO isn’t chasing fancy tools. It’s doing something deceptively simple: creating content that people genuinely want to know about.

So, Who Is GEO Really For?

Based on this understanding, I believe GEO is most valuable for two groups:

First, B2B companies—organizations with specialized knowledge that can provide deep content in specific domains. You already have industry know-how; you just haven’t converted it into content assets that AI can reference.

Second, solopreneurs and independent experts—consultants, specialists, and creators. You have deep expertise in a vertical niche, but you might not realize yet that your knowledge can become a source AI recommends to users.

For both groups, GEO isn’t some separate “technical skill” to learn. It’s an upgrade to your content strategy: expressing what you already know in ways AI can understand and cite.

What We’re Building: A Blog Template Focused on Content

Now let me tell you what we’re actually working on.

If the core of GEO is content, then what we should be doing is lowering the barrier to creating quality content.

That’s why we chose to build an open-source blog template.

Why a blog? Because a blog is the purest vessel for long-form content. I’ve noticed something about our generation: our attention is fragmented across countless platforms. But AI search is rewarding those who think deeply and write seriously. A well-crafted blog post is far more likely to be cited by AI than a hundred social media updates.

Why Build Another Blog System?

The market isn’t short on blog tools—WordPress, Wix, Ghost, Webflow. So why build another one?

First, we’re focused on dual GEO + SEO optimization from the ground up. Most systems weren’t designed with AI search in mind.

Second, we pursue radical simplicity and practicality. We’re doing subtraction—keeping only what’s truly necessary.

Third, zero-cost deployment. We built on the Astro framework, which can be deployed directly to GitHub Pages for free.

Fourth, we designed for seamless integration. Whether you’re starting fresh or already have an existing website, our template can plug in smoothly.

Fifth, open source with continuous iteration. We’ll update on a two-week cycle, adding new features continuously.

Our Core Promise

Here’s what we want to achieve: when you use our template, you can customize it to your needs, get started quickly, deploy in minutes, and integrate seamlessly with your existing systems.

After setup, you should only need to focus on one thing: your content, not the technical details.

The infrastructure problems are ours to solve. You just focus on what you have to say.

This Is Just the Beginning

To be honest, our template is still simple right now. It solves the core problem: helping you quickly own a blog optimized for both GEO and SEO.

But this is just the beginning. Our roadmap includes much more: a backend management system, AI-powered tools like automatically generating cover images, and traffic analytics.

Our goal is straightforward: let users care only about “what to write,” not “how to deploy, how to optimize, how to operate.”

Final Thoughts

GEO isn’t some mysterious technology. Its essence is simple: provide high-quality context for AI, so your content becomes the source AI recommends.

To do this, you need two things: a stable content platform you actually own, and the commitment to consistently produce quality content.

If you’re interested in this project, check out our open-source repo on GitHub. Let’s build content assets that truly belong to us in the age of AI.