Also

Every other week there’s a new three-letter word on my LinkedIn feed.

AEO. GEO. AIO. LLMO. MFs. Someone probably coined a fifth one while I was typing this.

And in every one of the posts come panic, screaming that SEO is DEAD and if you don’t pay them $15k/month to “optimize for AI,” your business will doomed TOMORROW.

What’s actually going on?

First, what are these things even?

Same shit, different color. You ran rename it but the smell is the same.

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization. The OG. Helping your page rank in search results.

• AEO: Answer Engine Optimization. Getting your stuff into the “answer” like featured snippets, Google AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice search.

• GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Optimizing content so generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude cite or mention your brand/content in generated answers.

• AIO: AI Optimization. This a broader term. Basically the same as GEO with a different hat on. It means making your content easier for AI systems to understand, summarize, recommend, or show in AI search results.

None of that is new actually.

If you pay attention, you’ll see they are all variations of the same thing: be the thing the machine picks when someone asks a question.

The end goal is predominantly the SAME. SEO wants your page to rank. GEO wants your content cited or summarized inside an AI answer, which cares about extractable information over clickable links.

If the destination is the same, so why is everyone losing their mind?

What’s changed?

Search behavior, different definition of “winning.” And, the value. Or, the way we value.

So, in traditional search, someone searches → they sees your link → click to the link → lands on your site. In traditional search, the value is you get a visitor.

In AI search, someone searches → they sees your website as source, or mentioned. Here, the value is you get visibility.

Just because the AI sends you less traffic - less visitor (people don't click your website from SERP) doesn't mean SEO is dead and you should start writing your blog posts in MD format or aim for flesch reading ease score 75 so your copy can appear in AI overview. Yes, AI may send less traffic, but it creates another value - it mentions your website. it showed your website as source.

Search behavior, the way we find information is changed, but we should not change the strategy to get the value because the strategy to get that value signals the same - quality content, as I always say.

AI search increases the zero-click search. Does it mean you got no value? Just beacuse we cannot measure something doesnt mean we dont get value.

This looks like: if someone notices your vitrin passing the street but doesnt come in and buy your stuff - does it mean nothing just happened? nope. the value of creating that vitrin for your store paid itself off.

But the success rate is there. If you’re just measuring AI search by “how much traffic did it send me,” you're missing XXX.

How to optimize then? why or how some other guys get cited, not you?

When people talk about optimizing content for GEO, AEO, AIO, LLMO, or AI search, they often make it sound like you need a completely new way of writing.

But actually, the foundation is simple: write in a way that a human can clearly understand.

Think about this.

Imagine I ask you:

“Where did you put my phone?”

And you answer:

“It’s at home.”

Technically, that is an answer. But it is not useful.

Where at home? In the bedroom? On the kitchen counter? Inside my bag? Under the pillow? On the charger? I still have to search everywhere because the answer is too vague.

A clearer answer would be:

“Your phone is at home, on the small table next to the sofa in the living room. I put it there because it was charging, and the charger is still plugged in.”

This answer is better because it gives context. It tells me the exact place, the room, the object it is near, and why it was placed there. I do not have to guess.

Content works the same way.

A weak answer usually assumes the reader already knows the context. It uses vague words like “it,” “there,” “this,” “that,” or product names without explaining what they are. It may be short, but it is not clear.

A strong answer gives enough context for the reader to understand the topic without confusion. It explains what something is, where it is used, what the person needs to do, and what happens after they do it.

That is why good content for humans also works better for SEO, GEO, AEO, AIO, and LLMs.

It is not about writing robotic content for AI. It is about writing clear, complete, useful content that removes confusion.

If a human can understand your content easily, search engines and AI systems are much more likely to understand it too.

(that's why internal links is such a strong signal - you don't put them so engine can discover other pages on your site, well it's how crawl bots discover new pages, but you put the links for humans if you cannot give enough info in the current copy, or if you cited smth, so you don't make poeple go google ans search for themselves to see the source.)

For most of you, traffic was never the point anyway

If you run a B2B, SaaS, or service business, influence, credibility, and brand association matter way more than raw visit counts. Always have.

Think about how buying actually happens now. (check my another article: People who come from SEO, buy. Is that true?).

People first search “what even is this” questions inside, let's say ChatGPT. They don’t visit your site at the curiosity stage. They show up later.

If you know me, you know in every chance I get I say "content marketing is helping your audience getting from one stage to another in the user funnel - from awareness to interest, from interest to consideration, etc." And this funnel stages may slighly be different for ecommerce or XX. but the goal is the same.

So yeah, your overall traffic might decrease. But the traffic that DOES arrive is more decision-ready. They already made their mind up somewhere upstream. They’re in the decision stage when they hit your door.

Less traffic, hotter traffic. I’ll take that trade.

This isn’t even new theory, by the way audiences arriving from AI chatbots already show up more likely to convert and stick around longer on-site. Because they didn’t come to browse. They came because they’re close.

Now, the agencies promising “we’ll get you cited in AI”… eeehh!!!!

This is where I get itchy.

People are out here selling “guaranteed AI citations” like it’s a keyword you can just go rank for. And I’m not fully buying it. Why? Because it’s unpredictable, and it’s unpredictable in a way regular search never was.

A Google SERP is a (relatively) closed box. Query in → results out. You can study it.

An AI answer is a conversation. Whatever the model recommends depends HEAVILY on what the user typed. The input. And the next input. And the follow-up after that.

Let me give you the dumbest possible example to make the point.

Say I type: “I want a cat t-shirt that says ‘I wanna kill my hooman’ on it.”

Now what? If your store doesn’t carry that, you’re out — instantly, no matter how “GEO-optimized” you are. And the user might keep going: “actually make it pastel”… “actually under $20”… “actually that ships to Baku.” Every added word reshuffles the deck.

It’s not a closed SERP where you can plant a flag and own a spot. It’s a sliding, branching window where the user keeps moving the goalposts mid-sentence.

So anyone promising you a fixed “rank” inside that? Be skeptical. Citation tracking is real and useful — but understand what you’re competing for. You’re competing for influence, not a numbered slot.

What you CAN actually do: reputation, everywhere

Here’s the part that’s genuinely a shift in mindset.

Traditional SEO is keyword-tunnel-vision — you optimize a page for a query. AI search pulls across a whole spread of phrasings and, more importantly, across a whole spread of sources that got scraped into the model.

So the game becomes reputation management. Where does your brand show up across the internet? How is it talked about on the platforms the LLMs eat?

I realized this recently in the most ordinary way. Say you run an appliance repair service. For an LLM to recommend you, you kind of need to exist on the places it trusts for that category — Thumbtack, Trustpilot, the directories, the review platforms. If you’re invisible there, you’re invisible to the model. It can’t recommend a name it never saw.

So it’s less “stuff my page with keywords” and more “make sure my brand is a known, well-regarded entity in the right corners of the web.” That’s the work.

And please, stop saying “chunk optimization”

Real quick rant.

There’s a crowd throwing around “chunk optimization” like it’s some new growth hack. It’s not. They’ve borrowed a technical term from AI engineering and dressed it up as a tactic they can sell you.

Ahrefs has a good piece on this (genuinely worth a read). The short version:

• Chunk optimization ≠ a rankings hack. Most people using the term just mean good content structure — short paragraphs, clear subheads, scannable sections. Which is just… writing well.

• LLMs don’t read your page the way you think. They don’t “read” — they vectorize your text token by token. Tokens can be whole words or fragments of words.

• You can’t control how anyone chunks your content. Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity — their pipelines shift based on cost, model, and context. Chasing it is a dead end.

• Do this instead: write atomic content. Self-contained sections that answer one thing clearly and can stand on their own. Works for humans, works for machines, no gimmick required.

Which, funnily enough, is the exact same thing I was telling clients back in 2009. New letters, same advice.

The reality check nobody’s selling, because it doesn’t scare you

Now let me show you the data, because vibes aren’t a strategy.

Is something changing? Yes. Just not the thing the panic merchants are selling.

Google itself is the single largest AI search tool by a mile. Around 16% of its results already show AI Overviews. So the real story isn’t “Google vs. AI.” It’s that Google is becoming more AI-influenced — a much less dramatic, much less postable narrative than “SEO IS DEAD 💀.”

And the share-of-search numbers (SparkToro / Datos, Q4 2025, US desktop) absolutely deflate the hype:

[drop in Chart 1 here — “Q4 2025 Share of Search Across 41 Major Sites”: Google ~73%, Bing 4.31%, ChatGPT 2.86%, DuckDuckGo 1.26%, eBay 1.06%…]

[drop in Chart 2 here — “Q4 2025 Share of Searches by Platform Type”: Traditional Search Engines 80.76%, Commerce Platforms 9.76%, Social Networks 5.37%, AI Tools 3.19%, Other Verticals 0.91%]

Google is responsible for nearly three-quarters of all desktop web searches. AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, all of them combined — make up about 3.2%.

Three. Point. Two.

That’s not “the end of search.” That’s a small, fast-growing slice that deserves attention, not a funeral.

So what do you actually do?

Same thing I’ve been saying in every post. The letters changed, the answer didn’t.

Create quality content. Content built for an actual human that answers what they came to find, fully, clearly, in language they get.

That’s what ranks. That’s what gets summarized accurately by an LLM. That’s what makes you the brand the machine and the human both remember.

→ Want to be cited by AI? Be a credible, well-covered brand with genuinely useful content across the platforms that matter. → Want to “rank” in answers? Write atomic, self-contained, actually-helpful sections. → Want decision-ready traffic? Build a reputation people (and models) trust before they ever land on your site.

Don’t optimize for the acronym of the month. Optimize for being the brand worth recommending. The machines are downstream of that — always have been.

AEO, AIO, GEO, SEO, bla bla bla.

Write good stuff. Be known for it. The rest sorts itself out.

Cheers.

——-

what you value.

like in personal life, what you value defines everythings.