From SEO to AEO: A Playbook for the AI Era

For decades now, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been an industry standard approach for trying to increase the organic discovery of your business to end-users. You sprinkle in the right keywords, optimise your website for crawling and performance, add backlinks to high domain-authority websites, and hope that the Google gods bless you.

The goal is to climb the results ladder, with your site ideally landing on page one, because nobody goes to page two. Seriously, the clickthrough rate for the second page of Google results is incredibly low with only around 0.63% of users ever venturing beyond page one. To make things worse, many users don't even scroll down. Meaning that if your site isn't returned in the first few results, it may as well not exist. I'm reminded of the old joke here: "The best place to hide a body is in the second page of Google search results."

SEO has been refined to a fine art over the years, with an entire industry spawned and driven by the purpose of helping organisations struggling with online engagement. This industry isn't a small one either, with the SEO software market being valued at around $84.9 billion in 2025 and projected to triple that by 2034. That's a lot of people heavily invested in a model that is being actively disrupted.

Stop Searching, Start Asking

Here's the thing: most people aren't searching anymore, they're asking. The rise of AI assistants has shifted user behaviour entirely. Instead of firing off a list of fragmented keywords like "docker desktop local install mac", users now ask their AI best-friend, "How do I install Docker on my mac?"

It's a change in intent. Search is now conversational, contextual and more crucially, designed for systems that have been built to understand natural language.

Enter AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation. Unlike classic SEO, which is about helping humans find your content on a page of results, AEO is about helping AI models choose to include your content in its answer. So rather than your business being discovered by a person searching the internet; it’s being discovered by AI searching the internet, which then decides whether to include you in its answer back to an end-user. Therefore; AEO is the science of optimising for being the answer to questions your target-audience might ask.

For the machines, by the machines

AEO isn’t something you switch on - it’s how you rewrite for a world where your first reader is an algorithm. The businesses getting this right are quietly reshaping their content so models can understand, quote, and trust it.

Start with the answer. The pages that surface in ChatGPT nearly always open with a crisp, self-contained sentence that resolves the question before expanding - because that’s the line the model lifts.
Write like a human, format for a machine. Numbered steps, bullet lists, and FAQ blocks win because they’re predictable to parse. Think “how-to cards,” not blog essays.
Make data explicit. Prices, dimensions, dates, definitions - anything that removes ambiguity helps models cite you as fact.
Keep it current.Models prefer recent, versioned content; “Updated April 2025” is a relevance signal now.
Be the best answer, not the longest one. Google’s AI Overview rewards pages that close the intent gap - even tiny retailers like Train Oasis are outranking Amazon by answering niche questions directly on product pages.

What This Looks Like in Different Businesses

E-commerce: Add a customer Q&A block to every product page. When users ask “What’s the difference between product A and B?”, answer it right there - that’s what Google’s AI Overviews are already quoting.
SaaS & B2B: Rewrite your how-to and onboarding guides in question-and-answer format. The best-performers lead with one-line solutions, then step-by-step instructions that Copilot can lift cleanly.
Publishers & Media: Open each article with a tight factual summary - the same way TechCrunch or FT are doing so AI systems can cite them as trusted sources.
Professional Services: Turn your FAQs and case studies into “mini explainers” - short paragraphs that answer real client questions in plain language. That’s the material models use when people ask for definitions or best practices.
Manufacturers or Product Brands: Make your specs machine-readable - structured tables, clear units, version numbers. LLMs prefer structured facts over marketing copy.
Support & Documentation: Every solved ticket or common question is an SEO asset now. Publish it. Atlassian’s public help articles are already being quoted by Bing Chat because they’re formatted as clean problem → cause → fix sequences.

Auctioning Attention: The Inevitable Corruption of AEO

Every discovery system follows the same arc: openness → optimisation → monetisation → decay. SEO was once about writing good content and earning authority; now it’s mostly about who can pay for the slot above the rest. The first three results on Google are usually sponsored, the next few are listicles written to please the algorithm, and the answer you actually wanted is buried somewhere underneath. Search has become pay to win.

Right now, AEO feels meritocratic - smart content gets surfaced because models reward clarity and structure. But give it time, those answer boxes will fill with sponsored citations and “preferred data partners.” It's not a paid advertisement, it's commercially sourced truth.

We’re in the phase where authenticity and craft still win, where a well-structured help article or a detailed product comparison can outrank big brands. Commercial forces will eventually shape AEO, but that doesn’t mean the game’s over. In the short term, there’s more white space than ever. The brands that thrive will be the ones that learn how these models read, cite, and rank information before the platforms start charging for it.

SEO & AEO Together

Think of SEO and AEO as two layers of the same system: one optimises for how humans browse, the other for how machines interpret. Strong businesses will master both - content that’s structured, factual, and semantically rich enough for an AI to grasp, but still warm, persuasive, and convincingly human.

Write the content that AIswantto quote, and use the clarity that machines demand to become the source they can’t ignore. Because even if the first reader of your work is an algorithm, the final one - and the one that still decides to buy, subscribe, or believe - is human (for now).