You’ve likely noticed the new buzzwords that have popped up in the world of digital marketing:
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Artificial intelligence optimization (AIO)
It’s left some marketers wondering: Does this mean SEO is dead?
The short answer: not even close.
At their core, all of these acronyms describe the same idea: helping people (and now AI tools) find and trust your business online through strong search engine visibility. Even though the digital landscape is shifting, the fundamentals still hold true.
Search (human or AI-powered) runs on relevance, authority and accessibility. That means your strategy, content, website and PR still need to work together. Let’s break it down.
Strategy: Where is Your Audience?
There’s one question we come back to time and again: Where is your audience?
Your SEO strategy (or AEO strategy) should be grounded in where your audience actually searches. If your buyers aren’t there, you don’t need to force it. Start with a discovery audit that looks at your visibility, gaps and conversion opportunities.
The impact: By mapping where your audience is actually searching—Google, Bing, ChatGPT, TikTok, YouTube or even industry forums—you avoid wasting budget on platforms that won’t move the needle. You also learn where competitors are pulling ahead, giving you the insights about to decide where your brand should fight for attention and where you can safely ignore the noise.
This is where strategy pays for itself, by focusing on what matters most to your customers.
Content: What Do Bots and Humans Want?
Bots are getting more sophisticated by the day and humans continue to expect information and a great experience. Good content serves both. It’s worth saying it again. Good content serves both.
- Bots look for structured data, FAQs, first-party data (like surveys, studies or test results) and credibility signals (author bylines and bios, cited sources and expert quotes)
- Humans want the same information, but they want it delivered in ways that feel natural, answer real questions and are visually easy to digest
- Think scannable charts, videos, explainers and real-life stories
The impact: By publishing content that blends technical optimization with human-centered messaging and UX design, you position your content marketing to show up in both traditional search results and AI summaries. That’s critical because AI often cites content that is credible and easily parsed. If your brand isn’t creating this type of material, you’ll be left out of the conversation altogether.
And when a potential customer is reading that AI Overview or scrolling results, it’s your content that shapes whether they believe you’re the most innovative or reliable solution.
Great marketing starts with great content. It’s the base layer that supports every other tactic.
Website: Why Technical SEO Is Key for Visibility
You’ve all been there—you click a button while visiting a website and it leads nowhere. Or worse, it sends you to a page that doesn’t make sense.
Those little slip-ups cost you conversions. That’s why quarterly technical health checks are critical. Metadata, page titles, load speed and broken links all impact the user experience, search performance and conversion rate. And you want to avoid subtle issues that can quietly drag down ROI.
The impact: Investing in technical SEO and UX quality assurance is like laying down tracks before running the train. You can’t get anywhere let alone build long- term growth without the rails in place. By making sure pages load quickly and every button works, you build trust. And trust equals higher conversion rates because a customer who has a seamless experience is far more likely to buy, subscribe, submit or pick up the phone.
Digital PR: What Are the Authority Signals Influencing AI and Search
It’s not enough to just publish content. Citations, backlinks and mentions shape how you show up in AI Overviews and search results. If your competitors are showing up in more third-party sources, they’ll keep owning visibility. Your job? (Or ours!) Close the gaps.
The impact: Think of digital PR as credibility insurance. When respected outlets, industry blogs or even local news sites are linking to your content or quoting your experts, it reinforces your authority in the eyes of both humans and machines. In an AI-driven world where LLMs (large language models) are pulling from trusted sources, this can make the difference between being the brand that gets cited or being invisible.
Monitor & Report: How to Tie SEO & AI Efforts to Real Outcomes
What do you want out of SEO (or GEO or AEO)? Be specific.
The impact: You can directly connect search optimization efforts to meaningful business outcomes. By tracking the customer journey from search to action—whether that’s a form fill, demo request, phone call or sale—you know exactly which tactics are generating returns. This changes the conversation with leadership. When someone asks about ROI, you’re not stuck justifying rankings or organic traffic that doesn’t convert. Instead, you can point to clear attribution paths showing how content and optimization led to measurable results, like increasing quote requests by 20%.
How SEO and AEO Work Together to Drive Real Business Results
Here’s how the core tactics fit together into a real strategy and the outcomes they create:
| Tactic | What It Does | Outcomes |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery & Audit | Identifies visibility gaps and CRO opportunities | Sets a clear roadmap; ensures budget goes where ROI is possible; reveals opportunities competitors may have missed |
| Content Optimization | Aligns content for both bots (content structure, authority) and humans (pain points, credibility) | Builds trust, improves rankings, drives qualified traffic; increases chance of being cited in AI overviews |
| Technical SEO | Fixes metadata, speed, broken links, implements structured data and addresses UX issues | Protects ROI, improves citations & conversions, avoids lost leads; strengthens brand trust through seamless experience |
| Digital PR & Citations | Expands brand presence through mentions and links | Boosts authority, visibility and AI overview placement; positions brand as industry leader |
| Monitoring & Reporting | Tracks keyword rankings, AI visibility and conversions | Proves ROI, guides future strategy; helps avoid wasted effort on tactics that don’t convert |
The Bottom Line
SEO is not a box to simply tick in your marketing plan. It should be the foundation of everything else you do.
The future isn’t about choosing SEO or AEO. It’s about packaging them together. It’s using SEO as the foundation that makes your brand visible and AEO as an amplifier that extends that visibility into new channels.
Real content. Relevant content. Distributed across formats and channels. That’s what builds visibility and reputation.
Not sure where to start? Let’s chat.
