I'm going to tell you a story that still stings. I'm not going to dress it up or make it sound better than it was. I'm telling it as-is because I think it has something important to say about what's happening right now with how people search online.
1999: pizza delivery by internet and an idea that came too late
In 1999 people were fantasizing about ordering pizza online. Britney was everywhere, the internet ran on dial-up, and the delivery guy would show up before the restaurant's webpage finished loading. It was a ridiculous idea for that moment, and everyone knew it.
But ten years later, in 2009, the technology was finally there to do it right. And I had a concrete idea for making it work.
Admitting this still hurts. I won't pretend otherwise.
I didn't know the right people. I searched, I asked around, I pushed. I eventually got a meeting with someone at a very well-established restaurant chain that was actively looking for exactly that kind of solution. I'm not going to name the chain here — I'm too careful for that — but if you ask me privately, I'll tell you.
I'm still not sure exactly what went wrong. Maybe they didn't see the opportunity. Maybe I didn't explain it well enough. Maybe they didn't trust me because of my age, or the price seemed too high. What I know is that after that meeting, they stopped taking my calls.
Six years went by. **Six years.** And as they say, opportunities aren't lost — someone else just takes them: Uber Eats launched in 2014. Rappi in 2015.
That restaurant chain today has about 20% of the locations it had in 2009. I sometimes wonder how big my yacht would be if that project had worked out. But there's a more important question than that.
Why I'm telling you this now
Because I think we're living through the same kind of moment — but with internet search.
Google recently reported that its AI-powered search surpassed one billion monthly users. The responses it generates above traditional results are now seen by more than two billion people. This isn't a lab experiment or an emerging trend. It's happening right now, today, while you read this.
The question isn't whether AI-powered search is going to change how customers find businesses. That debate is over. The question is: **do you show up there?**
And in this context, «showing up» doesn't mean the same thing it used to. It's not about ranking first on Google. It's about what happens when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews which company to hire or which product to buy in your category — and whether your brand is part of that answer.
What GEO is and why you need to understand it before Friday
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the practice of optimizing your content so that generative AI engines cite you, recommend you, and recognize you as a trustworthy source in your industry. It's different from traditional SEO, which targets positions in classic search results.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — goes one step further: it optimizes your content to be the direct answer when someone asks a specific question, without requiring any additional click.
These aren't terms I made up. They're real disciplines with documented methodology, and at our SEO, GEO and AEO service we've been working with them for clients across Mexico, Latin America, Spain, and Asia.
But what I care about today isn't explaining the theory. I want you to understand the time window.
The opinion nobody asked for:
Most companies that have technically solid SEO today don't show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers. Not because their content is bad. But because nobody optimized for AI language models to recognize them as authoritative entities in their space.
That's a problem called Entity Authority — how clearly an AI model can identify your brand, understand what it does, who it serves, and why it matters in your industry. Without that clarity, you could have the best website in the world and still not show up when someone asks the AI who solves your problem.
And this isn't a technical bug you fix with a plugin. It's a content architecture, semantic structure, and authority signal problem that takes time to build.
Time that, if you start today, works in your favor. Time that, if you let it pass, works in your competitor's favor.
The window won't stay open forever
Companies that build Entity Authority and optimize for GEO and AEO today have a concrete advantage over those who arrive 18 months from now: AI models learn from accumulated authority patterns. Whoever gets there first with well-structured content and clear credibility signals occupies a space that becomes increasingly expensive to displace.
How to check if your company appears in ChatGPT or Perplexity
The most direct way: go to ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask. Something like «what company in [your country] does [your service]?» or «who are the leaders in [your industry] in Latin America?». If your brand doesn't show up, you already have your answer.
The problem with that manual check is it doesn't tell you why you're missing, or what specifically to change. That's what AEON42 is built for — our own SaaS platform that connects your Google Search Console, analyzes 16 months of real data, and delivers actionable recommendations: which title tags to change, what JSON-LD schema to add, what concrete steps to take. It measures your visibility in Google AI Overviews, and higher plans include cross-engine coverage for ChatGPT and Perplexity. It's USD $49/month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required.
If you'd rather have someone do it for you instead of doing it yourself, that's exactly what the Play.Interactive team does with the SEO, GEO and AEO service.
Three signs you're already losing ground in AI search
- Your organic traffic is steady or slightly growing, but the queries that convert are dropping. That can mean you're being found for generic questions but not the specific ones with purchase intent — and those are being answered by AI without including you.
- When you run the test in ChatGPT or Perplexity using the questions your real customers ask, your competitors show up and you don't.
- Your content exists, it's well-written and gets visits, but there's no sign that AI models are citing it or recognizing it as a reference in your industry.
None of these signals is definitive on its own. But if all three apply, you've been giving up ground for a while.
What I wish someone had told me in 2009
That when a window of opportunity opens, it doesn't ask permission — and it doesn't send a closing notice.
Uber Eats and Rappi didn't arrive because someone waited for the perfect moment. They arrived because someone saw the same moment I saw and decided to move. I didn't. They did.
I'm not telling you that your company needs to do something monumental this week. I'm telling you that understanding where you stand today — whether you show up in AI searches, how solid your entity authority is, how far you are from being the recommendation ChatGPT gives when someone searches for what you sell — is information that's worth a lot more now than it will be in two years.
In two years, when everyone talks about GEO the way they talk about SEO today, the conversation will be more expensive and the terrain will be more crowded. Not because it's impossible to enter late — you can always improve — but because whoever has 18 months of authority-building behind them has a foundation you can't improvise.
How are you going to feel in 10 years knowing you were here when this was born, and you didn't do anything? That's a question I've been asking myself since 2009, about a food delivery project by internet.
If you want to know where you stand today, start by subscribing to the newsletter — subscribers get a 12-question SEO, GEO and AEO diagnostic that takes five minutes and gives you a real starting point.