Since the dawn of the internet there were marketers who leveraged tips, and some tricks, to drive traffic to their websites. Some of the earliest advice was to stuff keywords in white text at the bottom of your pages to rank for terms where they wanted to show. And at the time, that actually worked!

SEO is now considerably more complicated, but people are still looking at what they can do to drive more people to their websites. But, is SEO dead?

Is SEO dead?

SEO is not dead, but it is evolving. In the past, if you were able to get to position one on a heavily searched term, you could bank on that traffic coming every month. But now, 68% of google searches end without a user clicking off to an external site. And that number doesn’t include the people who have moved their searches from Google to ChatGPT.

That phenomenon is driven by Google’s AI overviews and is now being called Zero-click search.

This is real and affects how you need to think about SEO, but it doesn’t mean SEO is dead.

It is evolving though.

What is AEO?

AEO is Answer Engine Optimization. This is the act of optimizing your content to be read and quoted by LLMs, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

This is the evolution of SEO, but while it is similar, there are some important differences to understand.

When you search Google for an answer to a topic, you are presented with the sites where you are most likely to find that answer. The experience from an LLM is drastically different. The result you get from an LLM is personalized to your context, they get an answer without ever going to your page, and the results of those queries are much harder to track.

Simply put, the goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your site and the goal of AEO is to get recommendations.

Do SEO principles still apply with AEO?

Yes, clean site architecture is still important. SEO and AEO both use site meta data to crawl your website and index the results. Common tags, like Title tags, H1s, urls, meta descriptions are still vital to do correctly.

In addition, LLMs also look at site authority, albeit, they rank it differently.

The currency of SEO was always backlinks, The more credible websites linking back to your site was a way for the search engines to know you are a trusted website. That still plays a role for AEO, but less so.

LLMs are not linking out to your site nearly as often, so they are optimized around factual awareness, so clarity of content and ease of reading moved to the forefront.

What should small marketing teams do to optimize for AEO

First, still knock all the basic SEO requirements out of the park. There is nothing from the old SEO playbook that you need to throw out. Make sure your tags are targeted correctly, find long tail keywords, get quality inbound links.

To optimize for AEO, look at the structure of your pages more. One page that tends to do really well in AEO is FAQ pages and there is a reason for that. Those pages are written in a way that it is really easy for an LLM to quote it. You can do this on other pages as well.

If you look at this post, all my headlines are questions with a one line answer afterwards. I did that for a reason.

You can’t write every page like that, but find the posts that make sense and reconsider your format and if you don’t have an FAQ page on your website with common questions for your brand and industry, drop what you’re doing and build that tomorrow.

This is one play. Twice a week you get the next one: what to change first on a small team, without hiring anyone.

P.S. Next: how other marketing channels are being rebuilt by AI.