Mapping GEO: Reputation, Reality, and the End (?) of the Website

An Interview with Jono Alderson

Jono Alderson, Award-winning technical SEO consultant

(And definitely not doubting my knowledge on the subject)

I've spent my career helping teams and brands optimize websites, improve user journeys, products, and experiences... But Jono calmly suggests that the entire concept of the "website" might soon be little more than a historical artifact. By the end of my conversation with Jono Alderson, I wasn't sure if the earth was shaking or if it was just me. 

Jono spoke about reputation hacking, AI-constructed reality, and the end of websites with the serene authority of a philosopher giving a TED talk during an earthquake, while I sat there, shaking like a leaf, trying not to spill my coffee and hoping he didn't notice.

When Systems Replace Searchers

When I asked Jono Alderson whether experimenters like me should be optimizing for humans or for AI systems, I expected I’d maybe experience a philosophical detour. What I got instead was a tectonic shift.

Jono explained his view that the role of websites is shrinking fast. Not in value exactly; more in significance. We’ve all built our careers around bringing people to websites, helping them move smoothly from interest → intent → action.

But according to Jono, that model is starting to dissolve. People aren’t coming to websites anymore. Systems are.

These shifts are part of what some analysts call the move from query-based to context-based discovery — where AI systems anticipate intent directly to mediate discovery (3, 14). Now, the systems are doing the searchers’ “intent” work. 

“The strategic significance of our websites and our own platforms will decrease significantly… the role of websites in that funnel diminishes as Google and ChatGPT and whatever else just *disintermediates and connects the user to the end product or thing.”

[*Vocab revelation: I had to look it up. Disintermediation is a fancy way of saying “cuts out the middle man.”]

He’s right. Tools like Perplexity and Gemini already skip the whole “click and browse” part, summarizing content into direct, synthesized answers instead (3).

Jono’s take? Websites aren’t dying — they’re just being demoted.

“Our website is now really just somewhere our stories live and where we manage our version of the narrative. It’s not where the sharp edge of transactional discovery happens.”

That line landed hard. For years, I’ve obsessed over frictionless paths, conversion funnels, upsells, cross-sells, and user experiences. But what happens when the “journey” doesn’t even include a visit to a brand’s website? When discovery happens in someone else’s ecosystem?

And — totally unrelated, of course — what does that mean for someone like me, who’s spent an entire career helping teams optimize those journeys?

As Jono explained it, in the GEO world, content lives as fragments, not flows; and URLs are containers for assertions, which are the units systems care about today (14). AI systems might pull a paragraph from one source, a stat from another, a definition from a competitor — and merge them all into one blended answer. There’s no neat story. No funnel. No guaranteed context.

Discovery happens in bursts of attention across dozens of connection points, where context continually shifts (23). GEO works the same way: your brand’s story is constantly being rewritten by a thousand invisible hands.

“Every paragraph has to support itself as a standalone piece. You can’t assume people have neatly landed on your homepage and progressed through your site.”

And honestly? That makes sense. Early UX research already shows that when AI overviews serve blended responses, users rarely click through (5).

That’s when it hit me: everything I’d ever optimized — every A/B test, journey, every carefully orchestrated user experience — depended on a world that (eventually) may no longer exist (15).

Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

Credit: Giphy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

The Great Visibility Meltdown

At some point in our conversation, Jono mentioned that today’s systems don’t just rank or retrieve; they decide what reality looks like. 

AI systems are deciding what reality looks like. ?! 

I don’t think I’ve stopped thinking about this since he said it.

We discussed how these new probabilistic systems (the AI searches of the world) don’t “search” in the classic sense. They pattern-match across the entire web, evaluating how people and organizations behave, not just what they say (14, 16, 17).

He described it as a kind of omniscient but slightly unhinged librarian, scanning every Reddit thread, product review, and podcast transcript for traces of human consensus — then stitching it all together into something it calls capital T Truth.

“Once upon a time, Google had a list of rules… Now you have an omniscient god that has access to all human knowledge through all space and time forever. It evaluates everything about you and your competitors and what every teenager has ever said on TikTok, and decides how it tells a story about what it thinks it knows.”

WHAT EVERY TEEN HAS SAID ABOUT YOUR BRAND ON TikTok, Y’ALL!

Credit: Giphy, Schitts Creek

“It’s no longer just about having links,” Jono told me. “It’s about the quality of those links — citations, evidence that you exist in a trustworthy, coherent ecosystem.”

That idea floored me. For more than 25 years, we’ve been trained to believe that if we just optimized our content, structure, and tags, the algorithm would take care of us. Now it’s not about keywords or backlinks. It’s about whether the machine thinks you’re real (14).

And not just real, but trustworthy. At scale. Across the entire corpus of the web.

How does a brand become trustworthy to AI? It isn’t through optimizing the content on your website using any of the old tools (except for functionality tools! The machines are watching!)—remember, to AI, the website is just an envelope containing assertions, and those assertions aren’t facts that live in a record; they’re encoded into vector spaces as part of the model’s training. “Meaning is compressed, patterns are generalized, and retrieval is probabilistic,” says Jono. The system cares about the clarity and connectivity of your brand’s claims both on your site and across the entire web (14). 

“They rely on the statistical density of patterns across their training data. Assertions that appear consistently in high-quality contexts become stronger in the model’s representation. Outliers – claims that don’t fit or aren’t well-supported – carry less influence or risk being ignored.” 

Jono allows that today these models lean on search engines’ own results as a “proxy for trust,” often drawing from Bing or Google SERPS, but over time they’ll develop and differentiate how they weight relationships and filter noise, and that coherence and connectivity, not volume, will be what’s “trusted” (14).

In a way, today’s AI engines are running their own version of the Turing Test — and we’re the ones being tested. The irony, of course, is that a machine is the one deciding what “human” looks like.

Credit: Giphy, Schitts Creek

And if you look like everyone else, you’re just noise. “If you’re a largely undifferentiated organization, working in an undifferentiated office, selling undifferentiated products at the same price as everybody else, you’re never going to get recommended,” says Jono. “If you’re not the best at something, why would you ever get shown up?” 

Turns out, the antidote to sameness isn’t search engine optimization. Its originality. Real value comes from content that people trust, share, and actually use (15).

“And suddenly we all need to be thinking far more broadly about what is my legitimate product market fit, what my authentic positioning in this marketing in this market, what are my unique strengths... And for the first time, I think consumers and researchers and searchers are actually empowered to get straight to what is the right fit and what is the right answer. And it's profoundly exciting. I mean, it might break all of capitalism, and it certainly breaks a bunch of the open web, but I think it's liberating.”

And maybe that’s the ultimate Turing Test after all — convincing a machine that you’re human by creating work that humans actually value.

credit: Giphy

Alisa Scharf calls this the “trust gap” between brands and AI engines (3). Jono likened it to a reputational economy, where every signal counts: what your CEO says on a podcast, the tone of your Reddit mentions, even how your product documentation feels.

“You can’t fake that at scale. You can’t just build backlinks anymore. You have to build behavior.”

That’s the moment my inner optimizer curled up in a ball. Everything I’d spent a career quantifying — clicks, impressions, conversions — started to feel like sand slipping through my fingers.

“Be better at product-market fit… but do it twice as well as anyone else.”

Sure sure. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

I laughed, mostly to keep from crying. But also because he’s right. I know he’s right, and because “be better” isn’t a KPI you can track in Google Analytics (16).

Credit: Giphy

“If you assume that all content and all services are now essentially commodity and all websites are mostly the same and not interesting, the things that will survive and stand out are where reputable experts have interesting opinions that are differentiated from everybody else’s.”

So maybe the future of optimization isn’t about control anymore. Maybe it’s about credibility — about being unmistakably you. I CAN DO THAT!

“Be brave enough to differentiate and invest in quality and opinion,” says Jono.

If that’s the test, I guess it’s time to stop chasing the algorithm and start acting like the human it’s trying to find.

Credit: Giphy, Resident Alien

When someone tells you who they are, you should probably believe them the first time.

As Jono and I talked about brand reputations (the kind that machines are now learning to read), I kept thinking about how a brand’s reputation has always mattered. But in this new, agentic age, it probably matters more than ever.

Reputation isn’t just a PR concern anymore. In this brave, slightly terrifying new world, a brand’s reputation is measurable, comparable, and increasingly, machine-interpretable. 

Customers are searching for your services and products using AI (and AI knows everything about you). It knows who your CEO supported in the last election and which charities your company donates to. And consumers? They’re voting with their dollars.

“They’re now trying to evaluate, ‘Is this thing good?’ across the entire corpus of the web. Whatever the teenagers said on TikTok, whatever that journalist wrote, whatever your customers posted on Reddit—it all contributes to how visible and trustworthy you appear.”

That stopped me cold. And made me want to apologize to every AI I’ve ever screamed in frustrated ALL CAPS at.

Because what Jono described isn’t some abstract theory of future search. It’s happening now. The machines are constructing your reputation reality. 

They’re listening to your headlines, your hiring practices, your customer responses, your CEO’s tweets. The processes, data, and experiences you’re providing (17). What other people say and share about you on the entire web. Every action leaves a signal, and those signals form the map systems use to decide whether you belong on your customer’s journey at all.

Credit: Giphy

Brands used to measure awareness. Now they need to focus on perception. Does the reality the AI creates, remembers, and shares about my brand align with what my brand is at its best?

Authenticity has become the cornerstone of brand survival. Real authenticity isn’t about slogans or polish; it’s the visible harmony (at scale) between what a brand (says it) believes and what it does. When those two things line up, trust follows. When they don’t, audiences and algorithms pick up on the dissonance immediately (18).

Jono writes, “the loop is subtle: positive framing → positive behavior → positive framing. It’s not instant, but once established it can be self-reinforcing for years” (16). That’s why many companies are beginning to turn to digital ethnography (a kind of digital anthropology) to understand how they’re really perceived. Instead of asking consumers what they think, brands can now watch what communities actually do. How people talk about them, meme them, remix them, defend them (or dismiss them) across digital ecosystems. These digital anthropologists track the microcultures forming around brands, the language of shared values, and the moments of cultural friction that can make (or break) trust. It’s less focus group, more digital fieldwork. And it’s how leading brands are learning to listen, not just broadcast (19).

“What your brand is and does and stands for (and managing that through time) becomes far more important,” Jono said.

That line lingered. Because what Jono described wasn’t the reputation management we used to know. It’s reputation as constructed reality. Every post, policy, website experience, and product decision is part of a living ethnography that AI systems are already reading, interpreting, and scoring.

Reputation isn’t a static asset anymore. It’s a living scorecard that reflects the sum of your actions, your audience, and your authenticity.

Or, as Jono might say: reputation isn’t what you tell the world about yourself. It’s what the world tells the machines about you.

Credit: Giphy, The Good Place

The New Role of Websites (Or Optimism for Optimizers) 

1. Make your website high-quality. 

   • While the website is no longer the important monolith it used to be, it’s a bit brands can control. A website must work, and systems must be able to work with it reliably. Focus on the fundamentals like accessibility, and focus on making your content clear and coherent so it can be connected to the impressions your behavior makes across the corpus of the web, i.e., your AI-constructed reputation, your brand reputation, and making sure you do it all well. 

2. Reconsider what’s good.

• For the past 20 years, brands have been trying to convince search engines that they are inherently trustworthy or the best fit, when often they're not necessarily. As Jono says, “The age of content marketing was neither about content nor marketing.”  Now systems have a different understanding of what good actually looks like. They don’t count links or evaluate URLs. They’re actually trying to figure out, in much the same way humans might, ‘is this thing good.’ And they’re doing it ACROSS the web. So. Is your website good? For humans? 

3.  Double down on less.

• Market-fit! Don’t be everything to all customers. Be better.  Do more with less in this age of AI, and you’ll stand out.

4. Your marketing strategy must change. 

• You don’t need people to funnel people or draw attention to your evangelism; you need to influence the way people imprint on the corpus. Not only do you need to grow through acquisition, you need to grow people behaving in a way toward your brand that leaves the kind of evidence you desire. If you can close these feedback loops, you can compete and win.

5. Experimentation has two new areas to play.

• Look to the broader corpus to test how your off-site strategies affect systems’ salience and preference, says Jono. “Not necessarily website conversions. Because those [off-site] things change people’s behaviors, which leave an imprint, which changes how you get recommended.” So, test areas of the web that are the most effective, efficient places for brands to put their resources. Test offline. Test the full experience between the customer and the brand.

• Measure and test inputs to the system. “So much of the industry is looking at, ‘When I prompt this, what is the output?’ Nobody is looking at, ‘How do I affect the corpus and shape its content in a way that influences all the stuff that happens after that? ' Brands should seek to understand the coherancy of their inputs to the systems and how tweaking those inputs influence their capacity to be recommended. 

Rapid Fire with Jono Alderson

After an hour of brain-bending conversation, I figured we could both use a breather — so I kicked off the first-ever “Rapid Fire” round: five quick questions to end on a lighter note.

It turns out Jono doesn’t really do light. But his answers were so good that this became a permanent part of every Mapping GEO interview that followed.

Q: In one sentence, what’s the biggest change in how people find things today vs. five years ago?
Jono: “They don’t click. They find their answer and have their problem solved in situ — and that fundamentally changes the role of the website and breaks capitalism.”
(No notes. Just quiet, existential dread.)

Q: If you were advising a brand tomorrow, what’s the single most important thing they should do differently to stay visible in the age of AI?
Jono: “Be brave enough to differentiate and invest in quality and opinion.”
(Simple. Terrifying. True.)

Q: What’s one thing SEOs or experimenters should stop doing right now because it no longer works?
Jono: “Publishing ‘content’.”
(Cool, cool, cool. Love that for me. <checks notes.> Yep, currently publishing content. Yep - that was definitely a nervous laugh you heard in the video.)

Q: What’s the most misunderstood thing about AI and search?
Jono: “That prompts matter. Everyone’s obsessed with tracking prompts, but that’s short-term thinking. Counting keywords and measuring query strings is going away.”

Q: Given how AI is changing discovery, if you could recommend one resource — a blog, book, podcast, or person — that every digital professional should know about right now, what would it be?
Jono: “Aleyda Solis. Her newsletters are phenomenal. She rounds up the significant and relevant news on marketing, SEO, and AI better than anyone else.”

Closing Thoughts

By the end of my conversation with Jono, I felt like I’d just audited an entire semester of “Advanced Philosophical SEO” and somehow still managed to get a failing grade. He speaks in frameworks, sees patterns where the rest of us see only chaos, and manages to make the end of the website sound both inevitable and oddly poetic.

What stuck with me most wasn’t the technical part; it was the invitation. To be better. To care more about meaning than mechanics. To stop chasing algorithms and start creating work that machines (and people) recognize as unmistakably human. As authentic. (I’m TRYING!)

Explorer’s Log

Here’s our running reading list so far. It’s a cumulative trail of everything we’ve discovered (and occasionally tripped over) along the way. It includes articles referenced in our first Mapping GEO piece, this one, and a few that we’ll likely cover in future installments. I’m keeping the numbering consistent for those joining the journey mid-map, because honestly, I’m learning right alongside you.

Credit: Giphy, Muppets

1. How Search Works – Google Search Central Blog: Google’s official guide to crawling, indexing, and ranking. Helpful for understanding what they say drives discovery (and what probably doesn’t). https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works.

2. SEO for AI Search Engines: An Early POV – Alisa Scharf (Seer Interactive): Alisa breaks down what optimization means when the “search engine” is an AI model instead of a crawler. Context and entity understanding now outrank keywords.
https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/seo-for-ai-search-engines-an-early-pov.

3. Study: The AI Search Landscape Beyond the SEO vs GEO Hype – Alisa Scharf & Marketa Williams (Seer Interactive): A comprehensive industry study on how AI-driven discovery systems interpret and deliver information and where traditional SEO falls short. https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/study-the-ai-search-landscape-beyond-the-seo-vs-geo-hype.

4. 2024 Zero-Click Study – Rand Fishkin (SparkToro): Quantifies how often users find what they need directly in search results, explaining why “visibility” no longer means “traffic.” https://sparktoro.com/blog/zero-click-searches-2024-study/.

5. The First-Ever UX Study of Google’s AI Overviews – Kevin Indig (Growth Memo): Early research showing how AI Overviews reshape user behavior, trust, and attention, and why “top ranking” might not matter anymore. https://www.growth-memo.com/p/the-first-ever-ux-study-of-googles. 

6. The Impact of AI Overviews on SEO – Kevin Indig: Quantifies the ripple effect of AI Overviews on traffic and click-through rates. A practical must-read for visibility watchers. https://www.growth-memo.com/p/the-impact-of-ai-overviews-on-seo. 

7. How AI Overviews Are Impacting CTR: 5 Initial Takeaways – Nick Haigler (Seer Interactive): How Google’s AI Overviews shift clicks and impressions, revealing why CTR benchmarks are no longer reliable indicators. https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/how-ai-overviews-are-impacting-ctr-5-initial-takeaways.

8. Why 2020’s SEO KPIs Won’t Work in 2024 in a GenAI & Data-Scarce World – Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive): Argues that success in the GenAI era can’t be measured in clicks. He makes a convincing case for measuring authority and usefulness instead. https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/why-2020s-seo-kpis-wont-work-in-2024-in-a-genai-data-scarce-world.

9. The Next Big Thing: AI Browsers – Alisa Scharf, John Lovett & Jordan Strauss (Seer Interactive): Explores how AI browsers summarize and filter web content, potentially replacing traditional search altogether. https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/the-next-big-thing-ai-browsers-what-marketing-leaders-need-to-know-now.

10. Claude’s Economic Index Reports – Anthropic: Regular updates analyzing how AI tools are used globally by whom, for what, and how often. A macro view of GEO’s evolving audience. https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-economic-index-september-2025-report.

11. AI Memory Features Will Transform Search and Marketing – Christian J. Ward: Why AI “memory” makes discovery personal, creating continuity between queries and transforming how people find (and re-find) information. https://www.bedatable.com/p/ai-memory-features-will-transform-search-and-marketing.

12. The Growth Plateau: Why Investing in Brand Awareness Is Your Next Strategic Move – Brittani Hunsaker (Seer Interactive): Argues that when performance plateaus, strong brand signals become the differentiator and the foundation of long-term growth. https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/the-growth-plateau-why-investing-in-brand-awareness-is-your-next-strategic-move.

13. Personas Are Critical for AI Search – Kevin Indig & Ryan Johnson (Growth Memo):  Explains why personas are still essential in the age of AI search. They help feed systems the right context.
https://www.growth-memo.com/p/personas-are-critical-for-ai-search.

14. The URL-Shaped Web – Jono Alderson: Explores how the web is evolving from pages and links to entities and meaning and how that changes “ownership.” https://www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/url-shaped-web.

15. The Sea of Sameness Problem in Content Marketing & SEO – Wil Reynolds: Reminds us that ranking isn’t the goal; helping people is. Real value lies in content that’s original, trustworthy, and shareable. https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/the-sea-of-sameness-problem-in-content-marketing-seo.

16. Propaganda, Perception & Reputation Hacking – Jono Alderson: A provocative look at how algorithms manipulate what audiences see and believe and why reputation is now a survival skill. https://www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/propaganda-perception-reputation-hacking.

17. Machine Immune Systems – Jono Alderson: Explains how algorithms evolve to defend their own definitions of “truth,” filtering the digital environment like living immune systems. https://www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/machine-immune-systems.

18. Brand Authenticity and Consumer Trust in the Digital Age – Aditi Mehta: Explores how genuine behavior (not performative authenticity) builds long-term consumer trust. https://management.eurekajournals.com/index.php/IJTOMM/article/view/992.

19. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice – Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis & Jo Tacchi: A foundational work in studying online culture and behavior through anthropology. Key to understanding brand perception in digital spaces. https://www.christian-cohen.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Pink-et-al-Digital-Ethnography_-Principles-and-Practice-Sage-2016-compressed.pdf.

20. The Optimizer’s Playbook: Expert Strategies for Digital and Real-Life Success – No Hacks Podcast, San Manic: Candid interviews with optimization pros on where strategy meets psychology (and humility). https://www.nohackspod.com/episodes.

21. When Humans and AI Work Best Together — and When Each Is Better Alone – MIT Sloan Management Review: Explores how humans and AI complement each other in decision-making. Useful for understanding collaboration in GEO systems. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/when-humans-and-ai-work-best-together-and-when-each-better-alone. 

22. As AI Meets the Reputation Economy, We’re All Being Silently Judged – Harvard Business Review: Explains how AI-driven reputation systems continuously evaluate people and brands (often invisibly), shaping access, trust, and opportunity. https://hbr.org/2018/01/as-ai-meets-the-reputation-economy-were-all-being-silently-judged.

23. Juliana Jackson’s Talk: “Aligning Insights, Intent, and Impact” – TLC Talk: Juliana dismantles the linear “customer journey” and reframes discovery as fragmented; argues for content-market fit over funnels. https://youtu.be/iCuVLTSdGD8.

24. The Zero-Effort Lie: How AI is Accelerating the Death of the Internet: exposes how AI’s promise of effortless creation is eroding creativity, meaning, and quality—turning the internet into a flood of confident mediocrity—and urges creators to reclaim value through effort, authenticity, and human contribution. https://nohacks.substack.com/p/the-zero-effort-lie-how-ai-is-accelerating