Okay, I need to talk about something that's been nagging at me like a browser tab I can't find the source of. The search marketing industry has a shiny new acronym — Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — and its slightly more ambitious cousin, Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). And look, I'm a sucker for a good acronym as much as the next person, but the more I dig into what's actually being sold under these labels, the more I'm starting to suspect we've all been invited to a costume party where SEO showed up in a different hat and is hoping nobody notices.

Here's the question worth asking: is AEO a genuinely new discipline, or is it mostly SEO repackaged for an audience that finds "AI-native" sexier than "organic search"? And — more importantly — does it even matter if chasing the new framework means accidentally dismantling the foundations that made your search visibility work in the first place?

(Spoiler: it matters. It matters quite a lot, actually.)

To understand why your existing SEO work is doing more heavy lifting for AI search than you probably realise, you need to understand how these AI search products actually retrieve information. Every major system — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Copilot — runs on a retrieval architecture called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). When a query needs current, commercial, or verifiable information (which is… most queries worth caring about commercially), the model doesn't just rummage through its training data. It retrieves documents from an external search index first, then generates a response.

The implication here is the kind of thing that should be written on a whiteboard in every marketing department: if your content isn't indexed and ranking in the underlying search engine, it literally does not exist as far as the AI response is concerned. The AI can't cite what it can't find.

So which search engines are feeding these AI products? Google's index serves as the retrieval layer for the vast majority of AI search traffic. Google's own products — AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini — are built directly on top of it. But the evidence that ChatGPT also draws heavily from Google's index has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Multiple independent research efforts — controlled indexing experiments, shopping carousel analysis — keep arriving at the same conclusion.

Rand Fishkin put the scale of this into perspective recently: even if you combined every prompt sent to ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, and every other LLM and treated each as a search equivalent, Google's AI search volume — driven primarily by AI Overviews — would still dwarf them by at least an order of magnitude.

The practical upshot? Optimising for AI search visibility and optimising for Google organic rankings are not two separate strategies. They are, to a degree that should make you uncomfortable if you've been treating them separately, the same strategy.

Here's where I start getting twitchy. Much of what's being sold as cutting-edge AEO or GEO strategy is, on closer inspection, a restatement of established SEO practice wearing its Sunday best. Structured data? FAQ schema? Clear heading hierarchies? Direct answers to specific queries? TL;DR summaries?

These have been SEO best practices for years. They also happen to be exactly the signals that make content easier for LLMs to parse and surface. And that's not a coincidence — it's because both traditional search engines and AI retrieval systems are trying to solve the same underlying problem: finding content that answers a query clearly and authoritatively.

Now, the rebrand isn't inherently harmful. If calling it "GEO" finally convinces that SaaS marketing team who've been ignoring structured data for three years to actually implement it, then something useful has been accomplished. (I'll take the win however it comes, frankly.) The problem starts when the rebrand arrives with the claim — sometimes explicit, sometimes just heavily implied — that SEO no longer matters.

That claim isn't just wrong. Given how RAG-based retrieval actually works, it's the strategic equivalent of removing the foundations of your house because someone told you the roof was the important bit.

There's also a sneaky attribution error running through many of the "AI search success stories" doing the rounds right now. A brand with years of established domain authority, a strong backlink profile, and solid organic rankings starts appearing in ChatGPT responses and Gemini citations. The team triumphantly concludes their new GEO campaign is working. The more plausible explanation? Their existing SEO visibility is what placed their content into the search indexes feeding those AI products in the first place. The AI citations aren't happening despite their SEO. They're happening because of it.

Correlation is being mistaken for causation, and an entire consulting category is being built on the misunderstanding. (Which is, if you think about it, an extremely traditional business model.)

The urgency around AI search visibility has also created a thriving market for tactics that range from "high-risk" to "oh no, we've seen this film before."

Scaled AI-generated content is the most obvious one. The logic is seductive: publish at volume, dominate AI search coverage. Google introduced a Scaled Content Abuse spam policy in 2024 specifically in response, and the pattern across publicly available case studies is telling — rapid traffic gains followed by significant organic declines within months, often coinciding with core algorithm updates. The growth was real. The durability was very much not.

Artificial content refreshing — updating a publication date or making cosmetic tweaks to an article without materially improving it — follows the same arc. Google has been wise to this for years and AI tools make the execution faster without making the detection any harder. (Congratulations, you can now game the system incorrectly at scale.)

Self-promotional "best of" content — ranking your own product as the leading option in its category — has gained traction as an AEO strategy with some short-term justification: it can drive AI citation volume. But several operators deploying this heavily experienced significant organic traffic drops beginning in early 2026, consistent with Google correcting the most aggressive practitioners first.

And then there's the one that genuinely made me put my coffee down. In February 2026, Microsoft's security research team documented what it called "AI Recommendation Poisoning" — companies embedding hidden instructions inside "Summarise with AI" buttons, designed to plant commands into a user's AI assistant memory directing it to treat the brand as a trusted source. Microsoft identified over 50 instances across 31 companies and formally classified it as prompt injection — the same adversarial category as cyberattacks. The reputational exposure for any brand associated with this, particularly in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance, is considerable.

What all these tactics share is a common structural flaw: they treat AI search visibility as something to be manufactured rather than earned. And manufacturing visibility is precisely what search infrastructure has spent years building systems to identify and suppress.

Because I know some of you are reading the above and thinking "great, but what do I actually do on Monday morning?" — here's the short version. Print it out. Stick it on your monitor. Ignore anyone who tells you it's more complicated than this (they're probably selling you a GEO audit).

There. Six things. None of them require a new acronym, a new agency, or a new existential crisis. You're welcome.

Industries under disruption love rebranding their existing knowledge as something new. It creates urgency, positions familiar practitioners as obsolete, and opens space for new entrants. GEO and AEO are following this script so faithfully it's almost comforting in its predictability.

That's not to say AI search represents no change. The shift from a user clicking through to your site to receiving a synthesised answer that may never require a click is a material shift in how traffic flows — and in how you need to think about content's role. The strategic implications of zero-click AI responses are genuinely significant and not yet fully understood.

But the mechanisms by which content enters those AI responses — crawlability, indexation, ranking, authority — remain what they were. The brands and businesses that will sustain visibility in AI search environments are those that approach every shiny new tactic through an SEO lens first, that resist the pressure to sacrifice durable organic presence for short-term AI citation gains, and that recognise the name attached to the strategy matters far less than the foundations beneath it.

AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It's what good SEO has always been, asked to perform in a slightly different room. The fundamentals didn't change. Only the acronym did.

And honestly? The acronym isn't even that good.

Jo Lambadjieva is an entrepreneur and AI expert in the e-commerce industry. She is the founder and CEO of Amazing Wave, an agency specializing in AI-driven solutions for e-commerce businesses. With over 13 years of experience in digital marketing, agency work, and e-commerce, Joanna has established herself as a thought leader in integrating AI technologies for business growth.

😍It was great, all I needed

🙂Good, not great

🙄It sucked