2.3 Legal & Ethical Considerations

GEO operates in a legally gray and rapidly evolving environment.

Copyright & Fair Use

• The Conflict: AI models scrape content to train and to generate answers. Publishers argue this is copyright infringement. AI companies argue it is "Fair Use" (transformative).
• Current State: High-profile lawsuits (e.g., NYT vs. OpenAI) are ongoing.
• GEO Stance: Assume your public content will be read by AI. Focus on converting that usage into traffic (citations) rather than blocking it, unless you have a paywall strategy.

Opt-Out Mechanisms

If you do not want to be part of the AI ecosystem:

• robots.txt: You can block specific bots like GPTBot (OpenAI), CCBot (Common Crawl), or Google-Extended.
• Risk: Blocking these bots removes you from the "Retrieve" phase of RAG. You will disappear from AI answers.

Bias & Hallucination Liability

• Bias: AI models can reproduce biases found in training data.
• Brand Safety: If an AI hallucinates a harmful fact about your brand, it can be damaging.
• GEO Strategy: "Defensive GEO." Populate the web with accurate, positive information about your brand to dilute potential hallucinations. Monitor AI outputs for your brand terms.

Transparency

As a content creator, should you disclose if your content is AI-written?

• Best Practice: Yes. Focus on "Human in the Loop." Pure AI-generated content is becoming a commodity and is often devalued by search algorithms. High-value GEO content usually requires human insight.