AEO is just good marketing

Been digging in on AEO again for my clients. Here are some of my observations, in no particular order:

• The arbitrage window is short. Things change weekly. What worked one week for one company is so easy to replicate with AI (e.g. comparison content) that the algorithms change super quickly.
• Your site has to be scannable or your chances are zero. That's the one big difference from SEO. In SEO, your site could be slow or not optimized and you'd still get some juice out of it because of the content. In AEO, LLMs can't read your site at all unless it's in a format they can scan. This is super easy to do with any AI coding tool.
• Hacks like trying to game Reddit will be short lived. Reddit and YouTube and others are important but best to invest in them authentically for longer term gains. Get AEO-rich quick schemes are as impactful as any such schemes (they're not).
• Most tools and agencies start from synthetic prompts. They all begin with a set of synthetically generated prompts that are not necessarily representative of real user behavior. Maybe only helpful in established industries where you can confidently know what language your customers use, but not helpful in AI dev tools or infra where the trending terms change weekly and there's not yet a consolidation of established categories.
• The only real, validated dataset for now is Google Search Console. And that only covers impressions. Traffic from AI Search that's reported in Hubspot, for example, is usually a vast understatement, because it also impacts Organic and Direct.

Which brings me to the last one, and the one that matters most: AEO is just good marketing. Knowing your customer, knowing yourself (what you stand for, your positioning, messaging), being consistent across channels, and making sure your customers and reputable publications and people are talking about you online are the hallmarks.