By Alex Winchell
Over the past few months, more people have been asking about AEO. What does it mean? Is it separate from SEO? Should we be shifting our strategy? And most importantly, is there anything extra we should be doing to prepare for the future of AI-driven search?
I want to take a few minutes to share how I’m thinking about it. This isn’t a polished corporate memo. It’s simply the clearest way I can explain where I think the landscape is heading and how our work fits into it.
The short version is this: the same kind of work we do for SEO today applies directly to AEO. In a lot of ways, it’s the same thing dressed up in a new term. But the shift in user behavior will change the strategy over time, just like every major transition on the internet has.
Right now, the blogs and long-form content we produce are doing more heavy lifting than anything else. These aren’t just SEO assets anymore. They’re the material large language models read, digest, and use to form the answers people see when they ask AI systems questions. When we break an article into clear sections that answer specific questions, we’re not only helping Google rank it. We’re helping AI understand it. That matters more than most people realize.
I also believe that adding more FAQ-style content across a website will become increasingly important. If people are asking AI for the answers, and we answer those same questions on our sites in a clear, structured way, then we’re giving the models exactly what they need to bring our content into the conversation.
There’s another layer to this that we don’t talk about enough: AI reads what people say about a company in forums, Reddit threads, and niche communities. That’s harder to influence, but it’s part of the model’s “memory,” for lack of a better word. The more high-quality, real human conversation exists about a topic, the more likely it is to appear in AI answers. Community reputation, which used to be something separate from search, is now becoming part of search.
All of that is fairly standard thinking, but I want to add one idea I haven’t seen many people mention. I think AI will evolve the same way the internet evolved.
First it was text. Then images. Then video.
It wasn’t random. That’s simply the direction information moves when you ask people what they prefer. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth even more. The math and logic behind LLMs has been around for a long time. What changed is that the internet finally accumulated enough text to train them.
LLMs still “think” in text, even as they’re getting better at images and video. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the next major leap is when models begin to think in images, or even video. It may take years. It may happen faster than anyone expects. But when it arrives, video will be the most important type of content a business can create.
That’s not a prediction based on hype. It’s just following the same patterns we’ve already lived through once.
Circling back to the original question: right now, the work we do to optimize for Google is the work that optimizes for AI. The fundamentals haven’t changed. But the pace of change absolutely has. We’ll keep adapting our strategies as the landscape shifts, the same way we always have.
There’s also the business reality to acknowledge. AI companies are burning enormous amounts of money. They’re all racing for first-mover advantage. But unless they figure out how to provide these services at a fraction of the current cost, they’ll either need to raise prices dramatically or introduce some type of paid placement inside AI answers.
If prices go up, businesses will be the primary users of these tools. If paid placement becomes the norm, AI answers may eventually look like search ads. And we may find ourselves in a world where we can pay to appear inside the answer itself.
We don’t know which direction the industry will take yet. But I’m confident we’ll see major shifts, and we’ll be ready for them.
For now, our path is clear. Keep publishing high-quality content. Keep structuring it around the real questions people ask. Keep strengthening digital authority in all the places AI pays attention to. Keep experimenting with video. And stay curious as the landscape evolves.
This moment is one of the biggest turning points in the history of search. It’s going to be an exciting ride.
