Generative Engine Optimization Tide

When I started my first company back in 2018, the advice was simple: write blog posts, stuff in some keywords, and wait for Google to notice. It worked, slowly. By month six we had enough organic traffic to justify a small content team. Today, if I were launching that same startup, I would not follow the same playbook. Search behavior is splitting. People still type queries into Google, but more and more they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's own AI overviews for a direct