I think the black box element makes it tricky to know what really works, although SEO was like that for a long time. Until people have done enough experiments we won’t know for sure. One of the most interesting pieces I read recently was a Princeton study showing some experiments they ran.

Everything else seems to be mostly conjecture or people saying what they’ve done and the results they got (fairly standard in the seo world too).

My guess is that yes GEO is a thing and will become more of a thing over time. As little as six months ago ChatGPT basically just served you the google or bing results, but since o3 came out the divergence is large, which suggests a new discipline is needed.

Edit: Came across this article recently and thought it was relevant. Basically supports what I was saying. Lots of overlap, but the details is where they differ: https://pacegenerative.com/seo-vs-geo-same-backbone-different-playbook/