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I created GEO Academy by AISQ Growth (this one here) because I can see an enormous wave of change hitting digital marketing, and I don’t want good businesses to disappear simply because nobody explained the new rules to them.
I’ve made it my mission to help 1,000,000 business owners understand this shift.
Not just marketers and not just SEO professionals.
Business owners. Founders. Freelancers. Consultants. Local companies. Agencies. People who are very good at what they do, but who are becoming invisible online without understanding WHY. And for those with client works: they’re losing clients because their clients are losing business.
That is exactly why GEO Academy by AISQ Growth is free.
And it will ALWAYS remain free.
I’ve been waiting for this moment since 2010
Back in 2010, I wrote about what I believed Web 3.0 would become.
And NO: I wasn’t talking about crypto.
I was talking about intelligent agents. Machines talking to machines. Systems understanding information, forming conclusions and then making recommendations to human beings.
I talk about this in the Youtube Short below:
I believed this would become the next major stage of the internet.
During Web 2.0, people influenced other people. We discovered products through blogs, social media, forums, reviews and online communities.
In the next stage, machines would study all of those signals. They would try to understand businesses, products, people, locations and expertise. Then they would help humans decide what to trust, what to buy and who to contact.
That was the future I could see.
It sounded very far away at the time.
But I didn’t just keep talking about it. My team and I started building toward it. We built digital assistants, SEO systems, marketing automation and AI-powered products long before AI became the biggest topic in the world. You can see that journey in our AI innovations since 2010 and in the AI Agenda I published in 2024.
Now the future is here.
ChatGPT recommends companies. Perplexity recommends products. Gemini and Google AI Overviews decide which sources deserve to be included in an answer. Claude can study businesses and suggest options.
Machines are already influencing the decisions people make. Before you move forward, all the AIs are doing those kinds of things. What I wrote was for exemplification.
The thing I wrote about in 2010 is no longer a paper about the future.
It is the world your business needs to survive in TODAY.
Most business owners don’t experience this as an exciting AI revolution
People in the tech world love talking about the AI revolution. New models. New agents. New capabilities. New funding rounds. That’s not how the average business owner experiences this change.
They experience it like this: Traffic is slower. Leads have softened. Content that worked before barely moves the needle.
Competitors suddenly appear in ChatGPT answers, while their own company is nowhere to be found.
Their website is still online. Their services are still good. Their clients are still happy. They haven’t received a penalty and they haven’t knowingly done anything wrong.
But something feels off.
This is the cruel part of the change. DID YOU FEEL IT?
Many businesses are not losing visibility because they became worse. They are losing visibility because the system people use to discover them has changed.
- A brilliant local business can be invisible to ChatGPT.
- A consultant with twenty years of real experience can lose the recommendation to someone with a clearer digital entity.
- A company can have happy clients and still look inactive because its website, social profiles, reviews and third-party mentions don’t provide fresh enough signals.
That business didn’t suddenly stop being valuable. The machines simply can’t understand and verify its value. And if the machines can’t understand it, they will not confidently recommend it.
Machines look at very different things. I’ve told most of you who are reading this today (I’ve told you in a previous email) that writing needs to be done for AEO GEO purposes. Copywriting frameworks like Simon Sinek’s “Start with WHY” are a suicide mission right now. In Module 2 of the GEO Academy, I will have a whole video where I explain and show examples.
That is why I use the word survive.
I’m not trying to make this sound dramatic.
It IS dramatic.
Why I love teaching GEO
I love building software. Always have.
Software feels like digital magic to me because it helps people do things that seemed impossible before.
But there is a moment I love even more: the moment when somebody finally understands a complicated change and says, “Now I get it.”
The person stops thinking, “My marketing is broken and I don’t know why,” and starts seeing the exact system behind the problem.
That is what teaching can do.
Over the years, my team and I have built and sold more than 29 products, served over 25,000 paying business clients and taught more than 139,000 students. I’ve watched people use our lessons to become better marketers, consultants, founders and business leaders.
Some of them first learned from us back in 2013 and 2014.
Now they are coming back for GEO Academy.
Think about that.
They learned SEO and content marketing from us during one major era of the internet. More than a decade later, they are returning to learn how to survive the next one.
It’s an honor.
And it also creates responsibility.
If I’ve spent sixteen years studying this change, building technology for it, testing it on real websites and seeing what works for real clients, then keeping everything locked inside our company would be crazy.
I need to teach it:
I need to teach it. I really do. So if you know anybody, and I DO MEAN anybody who needs this, let them know about it and help them join us!
The order of GEO Academy is NOT accidental
I didn’t want GEO Academy to begin with 24 tasks, schema configurations and a giant checklist.
That would scare people away before they understood why any of it mattered. So we built the course around the journey a business owner actually needs to take. I’m not the only one who built this, and it was a super big group effort with the people in AISQ who had clear experience working on our brands and also on the brands we allowed to join Florin Muresan’s 90 Days Growth Program.
September 2025 to May 2026 were filled with tests, experiments and observations (plus tons of results for our clients, as you can see here)
- Lesson 1 begins with the feeling: something feels off.
- Lesson 2 gives the problem a name and helps you audit your AI visibility.
- Lesson 3 introduces the solution: Generative Engine Optimization. We spent a ton of time between the versions we crafted for GEO Academy to get this middle point right. It’s one of the most important lessons, but for most people it won’t mean anything if they don’t go through Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 first.
- Lesson 4 shows the complete task list across freshness, authority, structured data, social presence, entity clarity and review velocity.
- Lesson 5 turns everything into action with a monthly checklist, a weekly social post template, a progress tracker and a 90-day calendar.
You don’t get buried under tactics before you understand the change. You move from recognition to clarity. From clarity to a solution. From the solution to execution.
That is how I like to teach and what my team found was most efficient. I don’t want you to memorise a trendy acronym. I want you to look at your own business differently by the time you finish.
Why one million businesses?
One million is a BIG number.
It should be.
This is not a small algorithm update. It is not another social media feature and it is not a tactic that will disappear next quarter.
The way people discover, compare and choose businesses is being rebuilt. Every business that depends on being found online will be affected by it.
I talk about this in the following Youtube Short:
There will ONLY BE TWO WAYS to do online marketing!!!
The giant companies will adapt. They have teams, agencies, budgets and experts watching every change.
I’m thinking about everyone else.
The family business that has done brilliant work for twenty years but hasn’t updated its website in eighteen months. We’ve worked with you guys. We know what we’re talking about.
The consultant whose best knowledge exists only inside private conversations with clients. Guess who else is sometimes guilty of this? – I feel all of you.
The local company with fantastic reviews scattered across different platforms and no clear entity connecting them. This happens so often, it became part of Month 1 of the 90 Days Program.
The founder who keeps publishing but has no idea why the content doesn’t produce the same results anymore.
The solo marketer who is expected to understand SEO, social media, content, email, AI visibility and everything else at once.
Those are the people who are getting crushed by this wave.
I want GEO Academy to become the map and the guiding star for 1,000,000 businesses.
Why GEO Academy is free
We learned something important after sending thousands of outbound messages about our newer services.
The people who responded most seriously were usually people who already knew Squirrly or AISQ. They had learned from us before. They had used one of our products. They already understood how we think and why our work is different.
That told me something. You can’t sell people a solution to a change they don’t understand yet. First, you need to help them see the change.
Then you need to give them the language to explain it. Then you need to show them what can be done. Education comes first.
GEO Academy is not a little lead magnet with three vague lessons and a paywall hiding the useful parts.
All five lessons are free.
The self-audit is free. The complete GEO task list is free. The worksheets, templates, monthly checklist and 90-day plan are free.
No premium chapter suddenly appears when you reach the important part.
Free now. Free forever. Module 2 drops soon! That one will also be free.
Because nobody should need to hire our company just to understand what is happening to their business.
GEO Academy teaches the system. AISQ Growth executes it.
I want to make this distinction very clear.
GEO Academy teaches the new rules freely.
AISQ builds the technology.
AISQ Growth executes the connected system for businesses that want our team to handle the work.
Some people will finish the Academy, take the checklists and do everything themselves.
Good. That is why we created them.
Some will give the task list to an employee, freelancer or agency.
Also good. We need agencies alive and well! Who else will get AISQ Meteor from us (hint, hint) without many agencies doing good works for clients?
And some will realise they understand what needs to be done, but they don’t have the time, team or desire to manage 24 tasks across six different signal categories.
That is where AISQ Growth can help.
No pressure. Genuinely. The education must be useful even if you never buy anything from us.
Otherwise, it isn’t a mission. It’s just a funnel wearing a teacher’s hat. I kinda hate that. I think those of you who’ve been with us for at least a decade already know that. I see you, by the way. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
It’s been a ton of personal satisfaction to see some of the Squirrly SEO clients from 2013 and 2014 return to us for the GEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO and the GEO Academy to learn from us once more. I don’t think there can be a great honor than that.
What GEO really means to me
GEO is often described as “getting mentioned by ChatGPT.”
That is a result. It is not the whole idea. To me, Generative Engine Optimization means making your business understandable, trustworthy, current, citeable and recommendable in a world where machines increasingly influence human decisions.
It means making sure the internet contains enough clear evidence of who you are, what you do, who you help and why your work deserves to be trusted.
It means keeping your entities alive. Those of you who purchased Squirrly DigitalPack (the Tier2) received my Expectation Marketing Book in that yearly package. Expectation Marketing is more relevant than it has ever been before. Sometimes I feel that LLMs were taught what online trust is based on that book (sweet dreams, right?)
My 2014 agency thrived and grew very fast to 20+ employees because businesses required people who could keep the internet filled with amazing content about their companies and brands. With GEO, you need constant streams of fresh information and news about:
- Your company.
- Your brand.
- Your founders and experts.
- Your products, services, locations, knowledge and client results.
This is not about tricking an AI. As I told you, since 2015, our Expectation Marketing book and the course was all about these aspects. And if you don’t believe it, check out the course inside Education Cloud PLUS about Expectation Marketing. The book is a whole lot better, especially the 2026 edition, but you’ll still get the point.
It is about making the truth about your business easier for machines – and people – to find, understand and verify.
That is a much bigger idea than ranking for a keyword.
The tidal wave is already here
I don’t believe we have years to sit around and decide whether AI discovery will matter.
The change is already happening.
But I also don’t believe panic helps. Understanding helps. A clear task list helps. Doing the right things consistently helps.
This is why I teach GEO.
This is why I created GEO Academy with Paul Tirban, Irina Pogor and Cristina Coroiu.
And this is why I want to help 1,000,000 business owners cross into the new era of online visibility without losing everything they spent years building.
If something feels off in your marketing right now, you’re not imagining it.
Keep learning. Keep building. Keep evolving.
Florin Muresan
Founder and CEO of AISQ | Squirrly
