AEO isn't just glorified SEO

I was recently shopping for accounting software for my new business, so I asked Claude. It came back with a handful of newer tools. Shockingly, the big incumbent, the one with years of market share and a plan designed for solopreneurs, never came up. I had to name it by name before Claude acknowledged it existed.

I had heard all the "AEO is killing our web traffic" complaints, but hadn't seen it in places I'd been working. AEO seemed additive. This was the first time I was seeing the shift firsthand.

My working hypothesis prior to this was that AEO was just glorified SEO: some small tactical changes (FAQ-type, longer form blog posts, some schema changes), but most of the approaches were shared. Write valuable content for your audience, get cited by high domain authority sites, and you'll be fine.

But now I want to qualify that. AI recommendations are more opinionated than pure search results. That's a blessing as a consumer (goodbye, analysis paralysis!) and a potential curse as a legacy brand (though an exciting opportunity for newer brands). In traditional search, big ad spenders dominated the SERP. Sure, someone searching could go 10 pages deep if they didn't see what they wanted, but most people did not. Bigger brands had the upper hand, both in terms of budgets for search ads, and in resources to build content engines that ranked organically. It took months, if not years, to build up SEO ranking and even if you did, you were pushed down the page by all the sponsored placements.

In AEO right now, that's not the case. Traditional content is faster than ever to generate, so community-driven content holds more sway. There aren't any ad placements yet (at least not GA). And as a brand, you're at the mercy of whatever the LLM thinks is important this week.

As in this case, even with decades of brand equity, you may not show up at all. The field and tech is still evolving daily. But there's an arbitrage opportunity for newer brands who invest consistently across community channels, because recency seems to matter a lot more than I expected, too. It's not enough to have had historical success. Brands have to stay consistently present in conversations, in content, in coverage, on social to stay in the mix. You have to keep showing up to keep showing up.

The converse to this is that I did, in fact, name the incumbent by name. After prodding Claude to give me a fairer assessment, it turned out that it was a better fit for what I was looking for than the products it had recommended. Why I thought of it? The aforementioned decades of brand equity. What made me ultimately decide to purchase it? The recommendation of my CPA. Brand and word-of-mouth were the deciding factors. Taking that into account, my ultimate conclusion (for now) is that AEO is just one channel in the mix (though an increasingly consequential one) for consumers evaluating potential purchases, but if ignored, it can erode the effectiveness of other marketing spend.