AEO: What You Need To Know, Part I

For more than a decade, businesses and organizations around the world have received the same spammy form submissions:

Hey, I was looking at your website and you’ve done a great job positioning yourself as ____, but your website has some critical flaws in Search Engine Optimization. I’ve sent you a list of the issues and how you can pay me to help you fix them!

If you monitor lead submissions, you probably felt a chill reading it.

SEO is a critically important part of how businesses are discovered in a digital age. It started off small – put the right words on the right pages enough times, and you’ll ‘rank’ for that search. Then digital marketers got wise to “the system” and learned how to game it—so the rules changed… and changed again… and again. 

The SEO community at large and Google have been playing digital chess to the tune of billions of dollars spent… and now SEO is dying.

Wait, SEO is dying? That has to be an exaggeration.

It’s not. It may be a death of natural causes, but it’s still happening. We can specifically and directly trace the impact of AI models on the organic search traffic of every business and organization we handle. No exceptions.

Isn’t it isolated to just a few industries? Nope. It’s everyone.
It’s like a few percentage points, right? Nope. It’s more like 10-15%+ and accelerating.

There’s a concept I teach in the marketing department at Baylor called the “Wheel of Retailing” that functionally applies here—traditional organic search is a fully mature market that only has one direction to go: down. That hadn’t happened because a viable replacement wasn’t obvious yet. Sure, there are other search engines, but who are they emulating? Google.

AI is filling that viable replacement role. If you don’t buy that it’s an intentional replacement for a platform like Google, you should maybe compare homepages:

What if I’ve invested heavily in SEO previously?

You have my deepest sympathies—and my reassurance that all is not lost. To the former, I’ve spent much of the last decade of my life getting deeper and deeper into the SEO mix, and that information serves me about as well as learning C++ in high school and trying to understand what HTML is doing on a website twenty years later—I’ve got a fundamental basis to grow from, but enough of the language has changed that there’s still a lot of ground to cover.

To the latter point, there is hope and opportunity. Your investment is not a waste; it just hasn’t been rolled over. To borrow from a personal finance analogy, your investment in SEO is like paying into a 529 (college fund, basically)—it’s something that, at the time of your investment, had clear value. But you’re past that phase of life now, and you still have resources tied up in a 529. Your best move? Probably to roll them over into a Roth IRA. There might be some penalties and costs incurred, but ultimately, you’re shifting the final goal of your resources. Your SEO is the same—it’s an investment that’s primed to roll over into AEO.

Is AEO better than SEO?

This has both an objective and a subjective answer. 

We’ll start with the latter—in my opinion: yes, so far. 

I’ve told this story to anyone who will listen because it’s just too clean-cut an example to ignore:

As for the objective answer, the answer must be appropriately contextual: it depends. AI still hallucinates. Even in the story above, it took some back-and-forth questioning of assumptions to make sure I got a validated answer. AI is not a single company; it’s several companies with unique approaches to the same problem. AI can pivot an entire answer based on a single word of context, whereas a traditional Google search just pulls an altered query. 

They are similar but distinct tools.

Where do we go from here?

This blog is about understanding AEO from 30,000 feet—it is here, it is worth your attention and it can be a huge benefit to your business and your customers. 

In Part II, I talk about some of the specific technical differences between SEO and AEO.

In Part III, I talk about what AEO means for your marketing plan.

If you want to skip past those and just call or email us—that’s fine too!

Joseph “Joe” Gastler is the Chief Marketing Officer at Four Columns Marketing and an adjunct lecturer in marketing at Baylor University. He received his MBA from Baylor University with a concentration in marketing. He is certified in Google Search and has over ten years of experience managing SEO strategies, building websites and directing content mixes for hundreds of website projects.