Negative GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) Techniques

   Negative Search Engine Optimisation is the name in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry for when someone makes an attempt to lower a website's rankings / prominence in search engines by various means, which can be legal and / or illegal. In competitive SERPs it makes sense (as long as your own practices are "clean" i.e. not against search engine guidelines) to try and knock down the competition in every possible (legal) way. 

   As we move into 2026 we also need to think about the following as LLMs are integrated into search engines and may be considered "answer engines" in their own right: "negative GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)" work in 2026 may also include the following in relation to GOOG and Bing:

1. reporting competitors' "low quality content" https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content (e.g. “self serving” so-called review "listicles" e.g. a digital marketing agency listing themselves as first on a list of the "top digital marketing agencies in London" on an article on their own website) - you can report issues like this Google via via their Search Quality User report. See https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a - this can potentially also affect their organic search visibility on Google . Self-serving listicles may be considered a 'spammy' tactic currently being used to try to manipulate LLM responses; see https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/write-high-quality-reviews .

  Similarly, we can also report competitors' paid links to (spam) citations used in Google & Bing's AI Overviews as well as in the Google Knowledge Graph (Google Knowledge Graph is part of the tech used by Google Gemini / Overviews)

3. parasite hosted spam citations "from sources around the web" created by competitors (or their SEO agency) used in some Google Knowledge Graph list results e.g. on weblog hosts such as medium .com .

4. reporting of Google Partner status misrepresentation to GOOG – this according to my research may influence some LLM responses for related prompts .

5. reporting paid links to websites used in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in LLMs (e.g. those websites used to generate AI Overviews which you can see in the citations) to Google / Bing. It has been reported that Chatgpt uses Google and Bing for RAG.

  You can also use LLM visibility checker tools to assist with prioritisation of your reporting of competitions' violations of GOOG & Bing guidelines (which may in theory at least affect their visibility in RAG using Bing & Google / AI Overviews in the medium term): see below for a LLM competitor analysis: