Black Hat SEO Rerun: Are We Making the Same Mistakes With GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization is repeating the early mistakes of black hat SEO, according to a new opinion piece from Hospitality Net, and the warning lands squarely on hotel marketers and revenue teams now rushing to get properties surfaced in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
The piece argues that the hospitality industry, eager to win visibility in large language model outputs the way it once chased blue links on Google, risks reviving the same manipulative tactics that search engines spent two decades penalizing. As GEO becomes the new battleground for discovery, the concern is that marketers will default to keyword stuffing, content farming and other gray or black hat shortcuts dressed up in new terminology, rather than building the structured, trustworthy content that generative engines are actually designed to reward.
Impact
For hotels, brands and management companies, the stakes of GEO are already real. Guests increasingly start their research in conversational AI tools rather than traditional search engines, asking for recommendations on neighborhoods, amenities or family-friendly properties and receiving a short list of answers rather than ten blue links. Properties that are not cited in those answers effectively do not exist for that booking journey. That has pushed marketing teams to prioritize GEO alongside, or even above, traditional SEO in their 2024 and 2025 budgets.
The risk flagged by Hospitality Net is that the same players who gamed search rankings with thin content, link schemes and keyword manipulation are now applying those same playbooks to generative engines. Unlike classic SEO, where search engines gradually built sophisticated spam detection through updates like Panda and Penguin, generative engines are newer and their ranking and citation logic is less transparent. That opacity creates an opening for manipulation, but it also means engines like OpenAI, Google and Perplexity are likely to respond the same way search did: with increasingly aggressive filtering against manipulative content once patterns become clear.
For hospitality brands, that creates a compliance and reputational exposure point. Properties or agencies that lean into manipulative GEO tactics now may see short-term visibility gains, but they risk the same fate as black hat SEO practitioners who got deindexed or demoted once Google caught up. Given that AI platforms are still defining their own policies on content manipulation, there is also uncertainty about what qualifies as acceptable optimization versus manipulation, a gray area the article suggests the industry has not resolved.
Competitively, this creates a split in the market. Brands and management companies with the resources to invest in genuinely structured, accurate, well-organized content, think detailed, schema-marked property data, consistent NAP information, verified reviews and clear factual descriptions, are positioned to earn durable citations in AI answers. Smaller independent properties or those relying on cheap, high-volume content tactics risk investing in an approach that generative engines may soon penalize, wasting marketing spend on a strategy with a shrinking shelf life.
What to watch
Hospitality marketers should watch how quickly AI platforms formalize their own anti-manipulation policies, much as Google did with its webmaster guidelines and subsequent algorithm updates. Any public signals from OpenAI, Google or Perplexity about penalizing manipulative content patterns would be an early indicator of where enforcement is headed.
Teams should also watch their own content practices internally. Anyone currently treating GEO as a volume play, mass-producing AI-generated content stuffed with brand and location keywords in hopes of winning citations, should reassess that approach against the lessons of the Panda and Penguin era, when similar tactics led to sharp traffic losses once search engines adjusted.
Agencies and consultants pitching GEO services deserve scrutiny too. As with early SEO, the market will likely see vendors promising fast results through tactics that cut corners. Hospitality brands evaluating these services should ask pointed questions about methodology and whether proposed tactics would survive scrutiny if generative engines tighten their guidelines.
Finally, expect ongoing coverage and debate in trade press, including from editors who track search and AI behavior closely for an industry audience, as the definition of legitimate GEO practice solidifies. Until generative engines publish clearer standards, hospitality marketers are operating in the same uncertain territory that defined the earliest days of SEO, and the properties that avoid shortcuts now are the ones least likely to face a correction later.
Just as early marketers leaned on an auto backlink tool to inflate rankings with spammy links, some teams now risk repeating those shortcuts by chasing AI citations with low-quality content.
Just as early marketers once leaned on a seo backlinks builder to inflate rankings with low-quality links, some teams now risk repeating those shortcuts when optimizing content for generative AI search.
Just as some marketers once tried to get backlinks through link farms and paid networks, today’s rush to optimize for generative engines risks repeating the same shortcuts.
Source: Hospitality Net
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