What 75 SEO experts expose about turbulence in the GEO discussion [Research]

The SEO versus GEO conversation has dominated industry chatter over the last year.  New acronyms surface almost every week, opinions shift rapidly, and even long-respected experts often reverse positions they held only a few months before. This turbulence isn’t happening on the fringes of the field.  It’s being driven by a relatively small circle of high-visibility SEO influencers whose narratives about AI-era search evolve with news cycles, platform updates, and branding pressures. To gauge how pervasive – and how unstable – this conversation has become, we analyzed how 75 prominent SEO influencers talk about AI-driven search on LinkedIn.  The objective wasn’t to crown a winning acronym, but to track consistency, sentiment, and volatility in how influential practitioners describe the same fundamental transformation in discovery. In collaboration with Search Engine Land’s Danny Goodwin, we reviewed all 2025 LinkedIn posts from these influencers that mentioned AI-related SEO labels, including GEO, AIO, AISEO, AEO, LLMO, SXO, and ASO.  Using VADER sentiment analysis, we assigned each post a score from -1 to +1 and defined volatility as the standard deviation of sentiment over time.  All data was anonymized so we could study relationship patterns without identifying individuals. ‘SEO’ remains the dominant LinkedIn headline – even as AI terminology takes over post content  In 2025, industry leaders eagerly debated AI-era search acronyms in their LinkedIn posts, yet they were far more cautious about updating their personal LinkedIn “headlines” (shown below) to reflect those same terms.  Our data scrape shows that 43% of SEO thought leaders still feature “SEO” in their LinkedIn headline,…

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