Principles

Specification · 2026-09-19
  1. Trusted visibility over raw exposure. More mentions are not inherently better.
  2. Evidence before assertion. Important claims should be supportable by first-party evidence or credible independent sources.
  3. Optimize for humans and machines. Machine readability must not degrade user usefulness.
  4. Source diversity over manufactured consensus. Independent corroboration is stronger than duplicated content.
  5. Measure longitudinally. VGO is a growth discipline, not a one-time audit.
  6. Separate observation from causation. A visibility change does not prove a specific optimization caused it.
  7. Integrity is a growth constraint. Tactics that increase visibility while degrading truth, provenance or trust fail VGO.
  8. Open to new discovery surfaces. SEO and GEO are components, not the boundary of the framework.