SEO-to-AEO

Everything mid-market brands need to know about the next paradigm of digital marketing

There’s no shortage of tech bloggers writing about the doom of SEO in the age of AI. And it’s not all hyperbole—brands and publishers are going to face significant challenges as platforms like Google and ChatGPT consume a greater share of the user’s time online. The Atlantic is expecting and planning for a future of zero organic traffic. Even before Gemini, Google has been shifting the search engine experience through zero-click tactics like featured snippets. The independent websites that trained the LLMs are beginning to see their share of visibility get cannibalized. As digital knowledge becomes more centralized, how can mid-market brands stay visible?

AEO vs SEO: What’s the Difference?

In the simplest terms Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seek to accomplish the same goal—optimize a website for findability. And in many ways, the approaches are similar. Like SEO, successful AEO strategies are centered around clear, helpful, authoritative, and relevant content.

R.I.P. to the Worst Practices of SEO

Ever since the first plumber named themselves “ABC Plumbing” to be shown at the top of the Yellow Pages, search optimization has been a game of cat-and-mouse. SEO teams find ways to manipulate the search engine’s algorithm, and in turn the search engine tweaks the algorithm to optimize for better results. Rinse and repeat. I should caveat by saying this isn’t all SEOs. Most prioritize good, honest brand positioning over short term gains. Sadly, the nature of traditional search has forced SEOs to tip-toe into the gray areas to avoid getting completely buried.

My bold prediction: AEO will render the bad parts of SEO ineffective. Compared to traditional search algorithms, AI will do a much better job of understanding contextual relevance.

Drake Cooper’s Approach to AEO

Like all things Findability™, we believe in a holistic approach. By considering ways in which brands are findable online broadly speaking, we can craft and determine the best strategy for the situation. AEO fits into this model in five key ways.

1. Be the Relevant, Helpful Authority

The large language models (LLMs) that power AI tools like Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT are like a new audience to message to. Each one is going to have nuanced differences in how it evaluates information. Unlike humans—LLMs aren’t as likely to be moved through an emotional message. Instead, appeal to LLMs with a rational message, rooted in clarity and authority.

Here are a few easy tactics to consider:

• Emphasize question/answer formatting in content. FAQs have always been SEO gold, and it’s even more the case with AEO.
• Speak confidently, and be the authority. You know your business and your product is best-in-class. Brands must balance the soft-sell (letting them come to you) with boldness and confidence (which can be rational but off-putting).
• Provide emotionally engaging experiences at the top of your UX, increasing rationality and density as you go deeper. A human doesn’t want to read a 2,000 word description on the main product page, but an LLM wants all the detail it can get.

2. Shift Keywords to Key Concepts

Keyword strategy has always been the basis for search engine optimization. Understanding the key words and phrases people use when searching helps a brand understand how they should talk about their product and sometimes even market opportunities they may be able to take advantage of. With AI-driven search, the concept of keywords becomes a lot more cloudy. Verbatim phrasing gives way to dynamic and contextual meaning. The response an LLM might give could be based on what it understands about its user’s preferences. The LLM could help the user try to solve a problem or fill in gaps in knowledge before a 3rd party brand or website even factors in.

Keyword

“running shoes with good arch support”

Key Concept

“Our footwear is engineered from the ground up to enhance the body’s natural biomechanics. We design every pair of shoes to actively support the structural integrity of the foot, focusing on long-term joint alignment, muscle balance, and injury prevention. By integrating orthopedic research with modern performance design, we create products that don’t just have arch support, they promote overall foot health.”

Successful brands will focus more on the core concepts of their product or offering. They’ll talk about the problems their product can solve, or the types of customers that might find value in what the brand offers. 

We call this “Key Concept Strategy.” What “concepts” should a brand focus on to be relevant, and what types of prompts could we reverse out of those concepts to optimize and test against?

3. Balance Human-Centered UX and Training-Rich Information

A brand’s website is its most ownable and authentic digital property. It’s unencumbered by the templates and norms of social media platforms or the messaging limitations of 3rd-party e-tail. It’s an opportunity to really connect and engage with your audience. Craft your message, build things that are helpful, and give people a reason to seek you out. At the same time, brands need to find creative and non-burdensome ways to provide more written content. Your vitals, history, brand purpose, and comprehensive product details will help LLMs understand what you have to offer.

4. Own Your Digital Footprint

While it’s still at the center, a brand’s website alone is no longer enough. Both humans and LLMs frequently seek out information from 3rd parties, and the more places you show up the more authoritative you’ll be perceived. This is similar to link-building to gain domain authority in SEO, but the actual links are less relevant. Trusted media outlets, Wikipedia, Reddit, and review aggregators discussing your brand will help build trust.

5. Give People a Reason to Engage

At the end of the day, people will seek things that are interesting to them. SEO, AEO, and whatever other KPI aside, your website is an opportunity to inform, engage, surprise, and delight your customer. If your brand is fun, do fun things. If you’re steadfast and reliable, give them a place to go when all else fails. Stop thinking about your website as a brochure and start thinking about the toys and tools you could build to enhance your product experience. Yes—the website as a platform for free organic awareness advertising might not be as effective as it was in the past, but it’s still the lowest friction, most versatile way to directly connect with your customers.

Ok, but how do we measure it?

The short answer: it’s really really hard. Compared to the search, engagement, and traffic metrics we’re used to, the dynamic nature of LLMs makes it very difficult to understand and evaluate how brands are regarded in AI. The current industry consensus? Ask ChatGPT about a brand and see what it says. While this may provide an ad hoc understanding of what’s going on, it’s rife with bias (yes, your ChatGPT account knows what you want to hear).

At Drake Cooper, we’re developing a measurement methodology that combines quantitative analytics signals with qualitative LLM sampling to get a full picture of brands’ presence in AI. We expect to start rolling this out to clients in late summer 2025.

Next Steps and Parting Thoughts

Everything is moving really quickly. As digital marketers, our job is to do our best to follow, respond, see the opportunities, and innovate in this ever changing landscape. Brands that do this successfully tend to follow a few key strategies:

1. Don’t be the first, don’t be the last. As exciting as it sounds, selling-out at the first glimpse of the “next big thing” risks getting caught up in a hype bubble. At the same time, brands that aren’t paying attention might get left behind—or at the very least will be in a state of perpetual catch-up.
2. Listen to your audience. Are they looking for utility or seeking a connection? Are they proud? Hesitant? Fearful? Much of the organic digital marketing of the past was based on manipulating a brand’s way into the conversation. The modern consumer is digitally fatigued and rightfully skeptical of the messages they see and hear. Meet them wherever they are, with authenticity.
3. Test less, try more, learn what you can, and keep going. Testing what we can easily test is great, but it’s not everything. Don’t fall into the trap of test-ability bias. Just because something is easy to test doesn’t mean it’s important, and vice versa. Use your gut, trust your team, and try things that are true to your brand.