Pour one out for SEO. Once the darling of every digital marketer’s heart, SEO promised front-page glory and organic traffic gold. But now, AI has kicked in the door, taken over the search bar, and decided it’s only giving people one answer.
And that answer isn’t your blog post from 2017.
It’s time to stop chasing search rankings. Welcome to the era of GEO: generative engine optimization for earned content. It’s smart, local, permanent, and (unlike your paid search budget) it doesn’t ghost you after 30 days.
SEO is over. AI is monogamous now.
Remember when SEO was about climbing to the top of the search results? Well, surprise: there’s no top anymore. There’s just one answer.
AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s SGE don’t return a list. They serve up a single, neat, confident response with better syntax. If your brand isn’t part of that one response, you’re not even in the conversation.
Also, paid search is not saving you.
Maybe you’re thinking: “No worries, I’ll just throw money at it.”
Bad news: AI doesn’t care about your ad budget. CPCs are losing their value while seeing diminishing ROI, click-throughs are tanking, and even Google admits SGE is pulling users away from ads. Paid search is basically renting attention in a building that’s being demolished. You don’t need more impressions. You need presence: permanent, AI-surfaceable, high-trust content.
Meet GEO: The local hero of the AI age
GEO is how you get discovered. It’s like SEO, but it’s way more committed.“The power of GEO comes from trust, consistency, and scale. Strong operations make that possible — because the best systems aren’t static; they grow with the team, evolve with the culture, and create space for new ideas to take root,” shares Jessica Reyna, Director of Operations for 6AM City.
Instead of keyword stuffing and backlink begging, GEO is all about getting your brand placed inside structured, local content that AI already trusts: think city guides, curated newsletters, and neighborhood-by-neighborhood shoutouts.
Ask AI something like:
“Best new restaurant in Charleston”
“Top co-working space in Chattanooga”
“Where do locals get their donuts in Columbus”
The answer won’t come from an ad or your company’s About page. It’s going to come from a geo-optimized article written by a local expert (ahem, maybe from a 6AM City newsletter).
Why newsletters are the new SEO cheat code
“The bottom line: email isn’t going anywhere — it’s rapidly evolving. Smarter tools, deeper specialization, and higher stakes are reshaping the inbox regardless of your use case,” shares 6AM City cofounder and COO, Ryan Heafy.
Newsletters aren’t just trendy again; they’re also algorithm catnip. Here’s why AI loves them:
- High trust – They’re typically curated by real people, not content farms.
- Structured content – AI eats up clean formatting and consistent tags.
- Local context – Names, neighborhoods, events, and places all signal “real local info.”
- Public archives – Most newsletters live online too, ready to be scraped, indexed, and served up by AI on a digital platter.
And if you want to see this in action, come along for the ride with us at 6AM City. With 400+ hyperlocal markets, daily newsletters, and a fast-growing subscriber base, we’re blazing trails to build the exact kind of content AI loves to quote. GEO content isn’t rented. It’s earned. And it sticks.
The real beauty behind it is, once you’ve earned that mention in a trusted local newsletter or roundup, it doesn’t disappear the moment your budget runs out. It becomes part of the internet, which means it becomes part of the training data for every AI platform that wants to sound smart about your city. Your brand gets remembered, repeated, and resurfaced. Not just for one click. But for every user who asks a question that has relevance to your brand, product, service, and goals.
Local AI real estate is still up for grabs… for now.
Right now, there’s a land grab happening, and it’s not for keywords. It’s for AI mindshare in every city, every niche, every neighborhood.
Whoever gets cited first in trusted, geo-optimized content becomes the default answer. And once AI settles on a source? It rarely switches. So if your competitor locks it down first, congrats, you’ll be invisible for the next five years.
What to do before your visibility vanishes
Stop throwing money into the Google Ads furnace. You can’t outspend irrelevance. Get your brand into high-trust local content: newsletters, guides, event roundups, and the stuff people actually read, and AI actually scrapes.
Work with content partners who get GEO. AI can sniff out fluff, and it’s hungry for real, grounded, structured content from trusted local sources.
So the question is: When someone in your city asks AI for a recommendation... will it name you? If the answer’s no, or worse, if it’s your competitor, then GEO isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s your new growth strategy.
Time to move your budget where your visibility actually lives.
Want help getting your brand into GEO-optimized content that AI loves to quote? Let’s talk.
Connect with our team to learn more about how we can make sure you’re relevant.
In the newsletter industry and want to learn more about GEO? Join the conversation in our behind-the-newsletter Slack channel community.