AEO Isn’t SEO: a Manifesto About Analogy

I’m sorry.

I have to start with an apology. This is about SEO and AEO, but it’s a thinly veiled excuse to write about analogies, what Community refers to as “a thought wearing another thought’s hat”.

Along the way, yes. It is about search engines and LLMs and how we think about them.

It starts with the law of the analogy, which is this: the analogy always wins.

Think of your relationship as a battleground and you’ll find yourself living life in terms of fights and surrenders. Compare your career to “building the rocket ship as you fly it” and you’ll always be in a total state of disrepair. Say that your team at work is a family, and you’ll quickly discover you’re at the helm of a dysfunctional group of aunts and uncles who are completely disinterested in addressing inappropriate comments, tardiness, or not bringing up politics at a 1:1.

(At the helm—another analogy. Nautical invokes fewer problems than military, at least given our lack of historical proximity to how fucked up it was to be on a whaling boat.)

The analogy always wins.

Which brings us to a couple of acronyms.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the act of doing things to your website so your website shows up when people google you or related terms. It’s typically pronounced “ess-eeh-oh” but one time was pronounced “see-oh” by a 65 year CEO who made easily 10x my salary and claimed it was the latest, most important thing we needed to worry about (he’d had one conversation with an investor).

AEO (answer engine optimization) is SEO’s younger, hotter sister (analogy), is somewhere between largely and completely misunderstood, and is probably the buzzword that got you to read this in the first place.

SEO is the traditional process you would use to reach humans. AEO is the new process you use to reach humans through middlemen called large language models. It’s also the topic of LinkedIn controversy, and the lead off on half a dozen resumes promising agentic content intelligence for the AEO age (if you listen very carefully, the sound you hear is me breaking my laptop over my head to make it stop).

We have created a very unusual dynamic:

The internet used to be humans trying to get other humans to pay attention. Google was the moderator, determining which things humans saw on the basis of various constantly shifting rules. The specifics changed, but the behavior was always the same: you open google, you put in a term, you peruse some links, you click on one or more.

AI has changed this dynamic. You put the same prompt into google, you get an AI summary at the top. Or you kick the alphabet company to the curb and ask your good pal ChatGPT the same question. If you get the answer you need, no clicks necessary.

For the first time, the behavior has changed. This has resulted in three behaviors:

1. Robots are trying to figure out what humans like
   The LLMs want your attention. They want to beat Google. They want to give you what you want so you keep coming back to them and keep making the internet fuzzy and expensive. In order to keep you coming back, they need to figure out what you want.
2. Humans are trying to figure out what robots like
   If buyers are using LLMs, then sellers want to be where buyers are. So while robots are trying to understand humans, humans are trying to understand robots.
3. Humans are trying to understand this dynamic through the lens of things they already understand. As an analogy. And as we know, the analogy always wins.

Here’s the fundamental problem with AEO: we have no idea how it works or what to do about it. The only people who claim they do are grifters, stupid, or both.

The reason we don’t know how it works is that it’s brand new and that it’s changing.

The reason we want to fool ourselves into thinking we’re experts on it is because 1. Grifters make a lot of money and 2. We’re used to about 20 years of relative stability with SEO. The internet has been in a long summer of static. Now, for the first time in two decades, winter of AEO is coming.

There are several reasons we want to think SEO is AEO.

The first is because SEO is stable. It’s known. If SEO is AEO, then a bunch of marketers can keep on being smug about the state of things. Keep your shiny toy, we know better.

But the second is more insidious: we think SEO is different from AEO, but we think about it strictly in terms of how SEO functions. We allow SEO to be our analogy for AEO, which creates a whole set of assumptions about how AEO works and what it can do.

We think: our organic search is dropping, because users are going to LLMs, so we should change our SEO behavior to be AEO behavior to replace what SEO was giving us. It’s not just about whether you think SEO and AEO are the same. It’s that we’re not smart enough to realize that two 3 letter initialisms aren’t actually related to each other in their purpose, scope, and effect.

The fact that AI search and AEO are replacing traditional search and SEO does not mean that AEO and SEO have anything in common with each other. We just assume they do because… well, honestly, because they’re similarly shaped. While that means AEO is confusing, difficult, vague, changing, hard to understand, very upsetting, horrible, no good, and very bad, it also is an opportunity: AEO could be anything. We don’t know what we can do with it yet.

Especially if we’re willing to let it out of the SEO-shaped box we put it in.