From the desk of David Utke
Subj: SEO is DEAD!
SEO, AEO, GEO, AIO. The acronyms keep coming day by day. Honestly, it can feel like the industry invents a new term to sell to clients every time a new AI tool launches, just to keep everyone confused and buying new courses or services.
Once you strip away the jargon, these concepts are pretty simple, and they’re not actually replacing SEO anytime soon.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini are changing how people find businesses, and understanding these three layers will tell you exactly where you’re winning, where you’re quietly losing revenue, and what to fix first.
Let’s break it down.
Why This Matters
For most of the last two decades, SEO worked like this: write good content, rank on Google, get clicks, convert those clicks into leads or sales. Simple.
That started to change:
- 2015 or so — Google began answering questions directly in featured snippets, so people stopped needing to click through for simple queries.
- 2022 — ChatGPT launched, and a meaningful chunk of search behavior moved off Google entirely.
- 2024 — Google rolled out AI Overviews, keeping even more people on Google’s own results page instead of sending them to your site.
- Today — a large majority of Google searches now end without a single click, because the answer is served directly. That number is even higher inside AI-native experiences.
The upshot: ranking #1 doesn’t guarantee anyone actually lands on your website anymore. AI tools are reading, synthesizing, and answering for the user and if your brand isn’t part of what they’re reading and citing, you’re invisible no matter where you rank.
The Four Layers, Defined
SEO — Search Engine Optimization
This is still the base layer everything else sits on. Classic, reliable, SEO.
At its core, SEO means figuring out what people are actually typing into search engines, making sure that language shows up naturally in your titles, headings, and content, and not breaking your site in the process (site speed, mobile-friendliness, no broken pages).
SEO breaks down into three practical sub-layers too:
- On-site SEO — Is your content actually useful? Does your site structure make sense? Is it built to convert, not just rank?
- Technical SEO — Schema markup, clean URL structure, no crawl errors or broken links.
- Off-site SEO — Backlinks, brand mentions, your presence on LinkedIn, YouTube, and elsewhere.
The vast majority of AI Overview citations pull from pages that already rank in the top 10 of traditional search results already.
So if your fundamentals aren’t in place, none of the other three layers will work either.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
AEO is about becoming the direct answer. Like if you’re asking “how do I shock a inground pool?” and getting the answer straight from the AI Overview box at the top of the page, with no need to click anywhere.
If your brand is the source cited in that box, that’s AEO working and t’s the modern evolution of optimizing for featured snippets and “People Also Ask” boxes.
The mechanics haven’t changed much, they’ve just gotten more important.
How to actually do it:
- Find the real questions. Use tools like AlsoAsked or AnswerThePublic, mine your competitors’ paid search data, or — even simpler — pay attention to what your customers actually ask on sales calls, support tickets, and social comments. If five people a week ask the same question, that’s a piece of content.
- Answer first, explain second. Structure your headings (H2s especially) as the literal question being asked, and answer it directly in the first 40–60 words — no throat-clearing, no story before the substance. Then expand with detail underneath.
- Use schema markup (like FAQ schema) so search engines and AI tools know exactly which block of text is the answer to which question.
- Repeat the answer everywhere. AI models don’t just trust your website — they weigh YouTube explainers, Reddit threads, forum answers, and review sites too. The more places your answer shows up consistently, the more an LLM trusts it as the correct one.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
GEO is all about getting recommended. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity something like “what’s the best free web host.” The AI doesn’t hand back one blue link.
It reads multiple sources, synthesizes an answer in its own words, pros and cons, who the host is for and cites three or four of them.
GEO is the work that gets you into that exact shortlist.
How to actually do it:
- Build comparison and decision content. If you run a gym, write the “gym membership vs. Peloton vs. working out at home” post. Structure it with clear pros/cons and “who this is right for” sections. AI can reference this sort of content
- Use specific, declarative facts. AI tools love quoting concrete numbers: “memberships start at $49/month” beats “affordable pricing” every time.
- Build topical authority. Don’t publish one post and call it done. You have to build a full cluster of content around a topic so the AI has multiple reinforcing signals that you’re a credible source on it.
- Keep it current. Updated pricing, fresh screenshots, and recent examples all signal to AI tools that your content is trustworthy right now, not from three years ago.
- Structure pages so they don’t compete with each other. If you offer multiple services, give each one its own dedicated page with genuinely differentiated content (different title tags, headings, opening copy, and schema) rather than lumping everything onto one page.
In short, would an AI “feel confident” recommending you the way a knowledgeable friend would?
That confidence comes from transparent pricing, real case studies, honest comparisons, and clear positioning people can trust.
AIO — AI Optimization
AI can’t recommend a business it doesn’t know exists or doesn’t trust. This isn’t about a single page or post.
It’s your entire footprint across the internet: your website, your reviews, your directory listings, your social presence, your PR mentions, even the arguments in your Yelp reviews.
How to actually do it:
- Structured brand data. Schema markup that spells out exactly what you are and what you do. A real “About” page with specifics (founded year, specialties, credentials) instead of generic claims like “best pizza in town.” Consistent business details (name, address, phone, hours) everywhere you’re listed.
- Build your authority ecosystem. News mentions, awards, reviews on Yelp/Google/industry-specific sites (these matter more than backlinks now), podcast appearances, directory listings, community Q&A participation. Every one of these is a breadcrumb that tells AI models other people vouch for you.
- Generate consensus, not just claims. AI trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. Mentions on social platforms, being included in “best of” roundups, people tagging or naming your brand — all of it builds the “is this a real, credible business” signal that determines whether AI is confident enough to talk about you at all.
The Simple Way to Remember It
- SEO gets you found by search engines.
- AEO gets your answer put in the box.
- GEO gets you recommended in the conversation.
- AIO gets your brand understood so AI is confident enough to mention you at all.
Where Businesses Quietly Lose
A few important things to note here.
You rank #1, but never get chosen
You own the featured snippet, but your pricing is vague, your reviews are thin, and your use cases aren’t clear. When someone asks an AI to actually recommend a solution, it picks your competitor instead.
You have the best product, but AI doesn’t understand your brand
If your information is inconsistent across directories, outdated on third-party sites, or contradicted by your own site, AI simply isn’t confident enough to talk about you, even if your product is genuinely better.
Your competitor gets recommended without ever outranking you.
They might have clearer positioning, stronger reviews, or more PR mentions, so when someone asks an AI to compare options, the AI says their name instead of yours even though you rank higher on Google.
My GEO/AEO/AIO Checklist
If you want a real edge, here are seven things that rarely get mentioned but genuinely move the needle:
✅ 1. Make sure AI bots can actually crawl your site
AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended are separate from Googlebot and need to be explicitly allowed in your robots.txt. Just as important: many of these bots don’t render JavaScript well.
If your site relies heavily on client-side rendering, your content might look fine to a human and to Googlebot while being effectively invisible to an AI crawler.
This is foundational AIO work that happens before any content strategy matters.
✅ 2. Consider an llms.txt file
This is an emerging (and still debated) convention. But consider a plain-text file at your root domain that summarizes what your site or business is and links to your most important pages, meant to help LLMs understand you faster.
Not essential yet, or perhaps ever but this is something that should be on your radar.
✅ 3. Actually measure whether you’re showing up
“Track this” everyone says, okay how exactly? In practice that means either using a dedicated AI-visibility tool (Profound, Otterly.ai, and Peec AI are a few worth researching) or manually running a consistent set of prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini on a regular schedule and logging whether and how your brand shows up.
✅ 4. Get your facts into Wikipedia and Wikidata
These sources feed a lot of the knowledge graphs that AI models were trained on or retrieve from. For an established brand, getting accurate, well-sourced information into Wikidata, even without a full Wikipedia page, is a distinct, high-leverage AIO tactic that’s separate from your own website’s content.
✅ 5. Publish original data
Referencing “your own data” is easy to skim past, but it’s one of the highest-leverage GEO plays available. AI tools love citing a specific number with a clear source.
A survey result, a benchmark, a proprietary stat pulled from your own customer base. It’s also much harder for a competitor to replicate than well-written content, which makes it a more durable advantage.
✅6. These platforms DON’T all work the same way
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews get lumped together, but they retrieve information differently.
Perplexity does live web retrieval on most queries.
AI Overviews leans heavily on Google’s existing index.
ChatGPT blends its training data with live browsing depending on the mode someone’s using.
✅ 7. Treat E-E-A-T as your trust checklist
Google’s Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trust framework overlaps heavily with everything described above as “consensus” and “brand trust,” but it’s worth naming directly because it’s actionable: real author bios with credentials, clear “who wrote this and why they’re qualified” signals, and visible expertise on the page.
It’s a concrete way to build the kind of trust signal AI models are ultimately trying to detect.
Executive Summary
Depending on who you ask, these four layers are either genuinely distinct disciplines worth tracking separately, or they’re really just SEO wearing new clothes.
Personally, I haven’t fundamentally changed how I do anything. I just focus on having a consistent footprint with verifiable, trustworthy content that people (not robots) find helpful.
Till next time. Your man,
-David
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