Most of your SEO work still matters. But the thing you are optimising for has changed shape, and some habits now actively work against you.
The honest version: most of your SEO work still counts. A fast, crawlable site with genuinely useful content helps in both worlds. Anyone telling you to throw it out is selling something.
But three things genuinely change, and one of them quietly inverts a habit that served you well for a decade.
In SEO you optimise a page for a query. In AEO the model is forming an impression of your company from everything it has absorbed, and then deciding whether to name you.
That means work that never touched your site can matter more than work that did. A comparison article someone else wrote, a directory listing, a thread where a customer explained what you do — these are inputs. Your own pages are one voice among them, and the model knows you are not a neutral one.
A rank is reasonably stable. An answer is not.
In our thirty-run test, the agencies named for the same question changed between two identical runs in four of five cases. So "are we mentioned?" is the wrong question. The right one is "in what share of runs are we mentioned?"
That turns measurement into something closer to polling: ask repeatedly, record every result, and watch a rate rather than a position.
| You used to track | Now track |
|---|---|
| Position for a keyword | Mentions per N runs of a question |
| Impressions and clicks | Whether you are cited, and alongside whom |
| One check per keyword | Repeated runs, because the output varies |
Here is the inversion.
The classic SEO article circles its keyword, defers the answer, and pads to length because length correlated with ranking. Every one of those habits makes a page harder to quote.
A model looking for something to cite wants a clear claim it can lift in one or two sentences. A page that takes four hundred words to reach its point offers nothing extractable. The same page may still rank. It just will not be quoted.
What to do instead: put the answer in the first two sentences under each heading. Make headings the questions people actually ask, in their words. Then expand. You lose nothing in SEO terms and you become quotable.
Keep doing the fundamentals. Change what you measure, change the shape of your pages so a machine can lift an answer out of them, and start caring about what the rest of the web says about you — because that is what the model is reading.
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