Win the AEO/GEO Battle. Don't be The General of the Last War
written by Steve Sobenko
|July 2026
I have the privledge of joining Sitecore and Nishtech at SKO 2026 as we collaborate on strategy for FY27.
As I'm sitting and listening to the presentations around their newest weapon Scrunch (more on that later), the topics kept bringing me back to a line that has stuck with me from Stanley McChrystal in his book Team of Teams: "Don't be a general of the last war." Maybe not the direct quote as it's attributed to many military scenarios in hisory, but a concept Winston Churchill echoed too: "It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war."
What I'm getting at is how we are still deploying our SEO strategies in an AI world. McChrystal built a career on a hard lesson: armies lose when they get very good at the war they already know how to fight. I listened to the focus around AEO/GEO presence and how SEO was becoming... irrelevant?!
In Iraq in 2004, McChrystal took command of a task force that was, on paper, the most capable special operations force ever assembled on the planet, and it was losing. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was slower, poorer, and less trained, but it operated as a network. McChrystal's force operated as a hierarchy. Every advantage his side had was an advantage in the last war, not the one in front of him.
Marketing teams are in the same spot right now, and most of them are completely blind to it.
You're losing the AI battle
The war we learned to fight: SEO
SEO trained an entire generation of marketers and website builders to think a specific way. Me included. We mastered it.
Google's rules. Google's battlefield.
The mission:
Get to the top of the results page.
Page 1.
Top slot.
Earn the backlinks.
Win the click against ten blue links competing for the same eye.
It was mechanical and it was measurable, which is exactly why people got so good at it. Some even building entire SEO strategy agencies around it. Rank, position, organic traffic, click-through rate. You could see the scoreboard. You could measure at every step.
The doctrine assumed one thing above all: that a person would see a list of options and choose yours. Everything in the SEO playbook exists to win that moment of choice.
Now, hard reset. New war.
The AI battlefield already moved
Welcome to the AI search generation. Generative AI features now touch nearly 60% of total search journeys.
Someone opens ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google's AI Overviews and types "what's the best car for a family of 5" or "what are the best places to stay, eat at and visit in Boston?" What comes back is not a list of links. It's a conversation between a human and an AI.
The model reads its knowledge base, maybe searches the web, decides what's true, writes the answer in its own words, and presents a few options with some short explanations.
Your user has their answer and gets on with their day. You have no idea it even happened. Did your brand come up in the recommendations? If it did, how was it presented? Good? Bad? Indifference? You have no clue.
No results page. No ten blue links. Often no click to anyone's site at all. Zero click.
Every tactic built to win the click now fires at a target that isn't there. You can rank first for a query that a model answers without ever showing your page. This is the McChrystal moment in miniature: the other side stopped fighting the way your doctrine assumed, and doing the old thing harder makes it worse, not better.
Who speaks for your brand now
You used to hold the megaphone. Your site, your copy, your positioning, in your words, at your pace. If a customer wanted to know what you did, they came to a page you wrote.
Now AI describes you to your buyers, and it wasn't trained by your brand team. It might describe a product you sunset two years ago. It might get your pricing model wrong. It might use a competitor's framing of your category because that competitor published more about it. In the worst case, someone asks for the best option in your space and the model recommends the other guy, confidently, in a sentence you'll never see.
Try it. Ask ChatGPT to describe your company and to recommend the best tool in your category. Most brands who run that test for the first time find at least one answer that's outdated, off, or quietly selling for the competition. That answer is running right now, to real buyers, and your SEO dashboard has nothing to say about it.
The question stopped being "am I ranking." It became "what is the AI saying about me, and is it what I would say myself."
What McChrystal actually changed
The task force didn't win by getting better at the old approach. It won by rebuilding how it operated.
McChrystal replaced the hierarchy with what he later called a team of teams:
- Shared awareness across the whole force
- The authority to act pushed down to the people closest to the fight
- Information moved sideways instead of up and back down
- Decisions happened at the speed the enemy was moving
Three parts of that transfer directly to what marketing teams face now.
- See the battlefield in real time. McChrystal's force built a common operating picture so everyone saw the same reality at once. Most brands have the opposite: zero visibility into how any model describes them. You cannot adapt to something you can't observe, and right now most teams are blind to the single channel that increasingly decides the buyer's first impression. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." ~ Sun Tzu
- Eyes on, hands off. (Another McChrystal line, from another book.) Push the authority down to those closest to the fight. Agentic workflows monitoring, analyzing, recommending, and making pivots to your content in real time. Workflows that move sideways, adjusting the content you already have to be appropriate for LLMs and not just for human visitors.
- Speed of adaptation beats perfection of the old plan. The teams reworking their approach this year will shape how they get represented for years, because models learn from what's published and cited now. Waiting for the SEO playbook to feel outdated enough to abandon is how you become the general still perfecting a strategy for a war that already ended.
The tool for this war
Scrunch by Sitecore is built for exactly this.
Nishtech, as Sitecore Gold partners, have this capability to deploy for you, right now.
What is Scrunch? Scrunch is an AI customer experience and visibility platform that helps brands monitor, track, and optimize how they appear inside generative search engines and large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Sitecore acquired Scrunch for a reason worth noting. When a major martech platform folds a capability into its core stack, that capability has stopped being a fringe experiment and become table stakes. The companies treating AI visibility as infrastructure are the ones who'll own how they're described. The ones treating it as a side project are the generals still drilling last decade's tactics.
The point of McChrystal's story isn't that the old force was bad.
Your existing content is not bad. It's brilliant!
It's that brilliance at the wrong war is a liability, and the side that notices the rules shifted and moves first is the side that wins.
See what AI is saying about your brand today, and decide whether it's the story you'd tell.
Reach out to me and let's run a Scrunch report together on your site.
