SEO’s Hype-Fueled Move To The Center Of The Marketing Mix

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene three years ago, search engine optimization’s marketing problem has been solved. Rather than the redheaded stepchild of marketing, SEO is now critical to brands’ growth. Today’s buzziest acronyms — AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO, AIO, LLMO, etc. — trade on SEO’s currency, sell against SEO, and inadvertently energize SEO’s brand. Point solutions popularizing these acronyms — AthenaHQ, Bluefish, Goodie, Peec AI, Profound, Scrunch, and plenty of others — tend to exaggerate SEO and AEO’s differences to carve a startup-sized hole in marketers’ tech stacks. Similar capabilities from SEO-adjacent incumbents, including Adobe’s LLM Optimizer and Meltwater’s GenAI Lens, also persuade marketers to starkly contrast SEO and AEO.

SEO And AEO Are More Alike Than Different

AEO is significantly, but not fundamentally, different from SEO. The practices are aligned but have technical differences. Both condition consumers’ experiences on and off brands’ sites, span content and technical requirements, and are relatively hard to measure. Both demand deep, persistent customer understanding and extensive cross-functional buy-in. But AEO depends much more on Bing’s index, on which all engines other than Google rely. AEO is determined by less sophisticated bots than Googlebot and focuses on natural language, rather than keywords.

SEO Solutions Will Win AEO

SEO solutions have quickly grown into being capable of helping marketers strategize and implement AEO’s content, technical, and measurement best practices. Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush — the most consequential acquisition in the SEO market’s history — signals SEO solutions’ potential to encompass AEO, connect the discipline to martech, and become a cornerstone of marketers’ stacks. SEO solutions are best positioned to adapt decades of content, technical, local, and international SEO experience to answer engines’ particularities.

SEO Practitioners Must Become T-Shaped

SEO specialists used to be in the trenches of log file analysis, sitemap updates, and schema markups and had inconsistent, tangential relationships with content marketers and web developers who underappreciated SEO’s short- and long-term value. Now, SEO practitioners should seize their discipline’s momentum and C-suite attention to establish centers of excellence (CoEs) clarifying SEO and AEO’s differences, how consumers’ and business buyers’ search behaviors are actually changing, and how to adapt content, websites, and measurement accordingly. They should try to foresee the future of search and keep an eye on how answer engines will monetize commercial intent. They can evangelize the near- and long-term value of organic authority and routinely rub shoulders with content marketers, web developers, paid search practitioners, PR professionals, social media managers, brand marketers, and more. When they do, AEO becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Stay tuned for Forrester’s AEO role connections tool, which can act as a founding document for SEO practitioners’ CoEs and help marketers define who needs to be involved in AEO, understand how AEO’s stakeholders should connect, and identify skill and process gaps. And look out for the upcoming report, “Zero-Click Search Goes Shopping: What Commerce On Answer Engines Will Mean For Marketers,” to learn how answer engines will monetize rising commercial intent on their results pages. As always, feel free to request a guidance session.