TMAI #470: 🏆 AI Age: Bye SEO, Hello AEO! -P3

The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect, by Avinash Kaushik

TMAI #470: Bye SEO, Hello AEO! -P3
[More Content. More Places. More Often.]

The essential paradigm behind this series on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO):

How humans seek is changing in foundational ways.

We typed keywords. We type resolution queries now.

We did the searching and clicking and reading and backing and forthing and questioning and deciding. AI does that for us now - and it is pretty good at it.

While this change is beyond fantastic for humans, it is anti-fantastic for businesses.

You stand to lose approx. 30% Organic traffic in the next 12 months (many have already lost 65%) and 15% Paid traffic (if I'm being insanely optimistic).

In TMAI #468, I’d shared the four problems we need to focus on:

1. Pre-Search. 2. Search Experience. 3. Pan-Search. 4. New Analytics.

Premium #469, shared 11 actions you should consider across Pre-Search (Research, Owned Experiences), and Search Experience (Winning Paid Answer Advertising).

Today, the newsletter is dedicated to the most important problem.

2b. Search Experience: Winning Organic Relevance in AEs.

As you rush your transition from an SEO-focus with blinders, to an AEO-focus and the long slog… Your salvation will be… Content.

Your mantra to win AEO: More content, in more places, more often!

Let’s look at actions you should already be activating for each.

More Content.

1. Focus on creating “AI resistant” content.

Answer engines are good at summarizing existing, duplicative content from 50,000 places, and offer just one or two real choices to their Users. To be one of those two choices, you now have a difficult challenge: Create content of genuine novelty and depth.

Ideas: Original research. Proprietary data. Unique insights. First-party created. Deeply business relevant. Sourced from your specific micro-slice of customers/users. More complex “how to” and, especially, “why” content.

In the short-term you do need some level of 3P quantity – because AI is learning about your business mostly from others. Longer-term success will come from 1P quality. Making it clear to the AE: You are an authoritative, irreplaceable source for it.

Let’s say your CMO has exceptional taste. Product. Styling. Creative. Zeitgeist. Taking those bits, converting them into multi-modal content at scale on your digital presence, equals value-rich “AI resistant”. Why? Your CMO’s unique. Her stories told via text, video, audio will be “AI resistant.” Your challenge: Overcome large company inertia, to deliver quality at scale.

Keep leveraging existing SEO skills: Follow the old technical Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) recommendations. Google PDF, Page 26 . They work broadly, additionally earn you “citation impressions” within AE replies – a very good thing.

WARNING: Last year, we thought this was a good idea: Buy an expensive “AI Tool,” it’ll automagically “build content” for our site, product pages, blog posts, emails! OMG! It’s the best. We have to do nothing, buy “AI Content Tool”!! Fly in the ointment: Everyone’s doing the same thing. AND, automagically spewed text is NOT genuinely novel and depth, which means it is not “AI resistant." 😬

2. Speak Human.

You remember how you did SEO in the early days? Keyword stuffing. That is all it took to trick a search engine into ranking you.

Humans are asking layered, nuanced, paragraph-long, resolution questions. As AEs they try to understand your Brand – from your site and 75 others places you don’t know of – you’ll gain an advantage if the Answer Engine understands you via your human speak.

Go to Pantene.com, Michaelkors.com, United.com, Pfizer.com, your favs, if there is text content, all of it is in brand speak (“editorial voice content”) or technical-speak or both.

Two problems: The AE has to do a lot more work understanding you. Increases the odds it will understand you incompletely or erroneously.

Speak human.

Don’t “dumb” things down. Audio, video, text. Be smart. Be clever. Be funny. Be direct. Be layered. Be nuanced. Be expressive. Do all that while speaking like a human. If you can’t do that, speak (audio, video, text) as your customers would.

If you are a fashion website and you speak like Anna Wintour… You might only get one visitor to your site: Anna Wintour.

3. Optimize existing content for conversational modes.

You remember FAQs?

They were the conversational queries at the dawn of the internet. They are sexy now! ChatGPT, Claude, others are designed specifically to answer complex multi-part questions. Hence, it is incredibly impactful if the Product Descriptions, Reviews Summary, Competitive Strengths, Key Selling Points, Customer Value, etc. are structured to directly answer questions using clear, concise, and natural language that mimics human conversations. I.E. FAQs.

As nearly all your initial traffic losses are coming from “non-branded” keywords, it is especially critical to include long-tail, question-based words and structures that reflect how users verbally articulate their queries.

Keep leveraging existing SEO skills. Follow the old structured data (schema markup) recommendations to provide explicit signals to LLMs/Answer engines. Digestible chunks, clear headings, lists, tables, all still work great – your challenge is to be unique and value-rich. Also, a good old “entity database,” with products, collections, materials, celebrities, care instructions, etc. etc., will ensure LLMs learn consistent facts about your business.

4. Multi-modal, FTW!

I’m sure you’ve noted that Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Claude, others suck so much less than Siri and “OK Google” – both roll over and die at the tiniest complexity in the question.

In large part it is because AEs corpus is multi-modal: Massively more text, and images and audio and video – along with the superior ability to understand all that.

I asked an AI Agent to go watch a video for me and create a mind map. It was almost perfect!

If you are normal, it is likely your content strategy is primarily text.

As you elevate text awesomeness with recommendations 1, 2, and 3, above, turbocharge your AI Resistance with relevant custom images, videos, and audio.

Ex: The Loewe Puzzle Bag is a fav of mine. Visit the page and ask this question: Do we have custom images related to the product? Do we have videos beyond a model walking about with the bag? Do we have audio that summarizes the product reviews (or top product reviews as product), how about the designer speaking about the signature design in an audio clip or podcast, how about the models describing why they prefer the brand?

The answers: No, no, no.

Prioritize a comprehensive multi-modal audit for your digital presence. Immediately. Then, build a business case for your CFO Matt to help fund this critical work to reduce traffic/revenue losses (and, God willing, even upside).

Keep leveraging existing SEO skills: Follow the old technical SEO recommendations of alt-text, transcripts, and metadata. It also helps with discoverability re Answer engines.

5. Explore new tools for content ideas.

Webmaster tools does not cut it. 1P Analytics tools like GA and AA don’t cut it anymore.

Researching and optimizing for how people ask AEs questions requires new tools. Conversational query mapping is where it’s at!

Trakkr.ai has a free forever version. I’ve been playing with it for our Kate Spade business (buy our awesome handbags!). Great place for you to start to do prompt tracking, monitor your brand’s visibility, and activate sentiment tracking.

Evertune is enterprise grade. It provides an expansive and sophisticated set of options: Brand Monitoring, Site Audit, and Content Strategy. I particularly like the Consumer Preferences report, your CMO will like the AI Brand Index. (Disclosure: I have a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny angel investment in Evertune.)

These tools will focus you on the content you need to prioritize, based on resolution questions people are actually typing into AEs, and how AEs understand (and mis-understand) your brand, purpose, values, products, and relevance.

[Note: We will come back to Evertune and Trakkr next week in the new analytics section.]

6. Build your custom content portfolio strategy.

Once you’ve actioned the advice above, translate it into a “content portfolio strategy” for your brand. You’ll identify the type of content to create, guidance on what it’ll cover, and the frequency of publication.

Here's the one I made for our brand, Coach (for the US entity):

Now, your brand has focus and actionability – no running around like chickens.

More Content.

7. Content Distribution: Faaaaaar and Wide.

This is one of the most profound changes you’ll have to deal with re content.

In my assessment, in AEs the influence of your 1P site/app (owned existence) has dropped considerably. Your influence via 3P existence (earned, rented) has increased exponentially.

Try this: Go to Claude, type in any resolution question, and look at the citations and footnotes. You’ll see more variety/diversity in sites listed as sources. Now do the same on Google, far fewer.

Remember the much-discredited “big deal” backlinking?

Another cheap trick you could play on Google (which became more and more ineffective over time). Backlinking was all about “anchor text” from links in many places.

Backlinking is ineffective, but the essence of it is: We have to have content about us in many, many, many, many more websites. It does not have to link to us necessarily. It has to be as multi-modal as possible.

LLMs seem to learn about you via exponentially numerous sources. High 3P influence.

3P influence is the reason every so called “AI Expert” is telling you to post lots on Reddit. And, for now, as LLMs scramble for increasingly “authoritative data” Reddit does play an important role.

Ex: Here’s a lovely post about the Juliet bag from our brand Coach. It is not difficult to see why this would be helpful to an LLM and power 3P influence.

But, Reddit is not enough. Not even close.

For Coach, here’s my customized AEO 3P Influence Priority Matrix

And, that’s just a start.

Build your own 3P Influence Priority Matrix. Pay particular attention to Audience Relevance.

8. More Places Principles.

For AEs, in seeking to prioritize which 3P locations, these are my initial set of principles (and they will change as AEs are rapidly evolving):

A: Diversity > Depth: 50 credible domains lightly referencing you will often beat 5 that go very deep.

B: Go where you find modal variety first: Text + video + audio + imagery + structured data. AEs are particularly bright because they fuse all this together.

C: Be where you can control entity fidelity: Keep factual “atoms” (names, SKUs, prices, materials, founders, dates, store hours) consistent everywhere. Like you and me,😀, AEs dislike contradictions.

D: Pay more for answer-first packaging: Publish in formats that answer questions (how to style, sizing, care, comparisons, provenance), not just promote. Can you believe AI can smell blatant pimping? It can!

E: Avoid thin syndication (copy-paste press blurbs). AEs prefer varied signals and formats, be smart with “PR”.

More Often.

9. Content Creation: NO, Spike & Silence. YES, Spike and Sustain.

This was essential for old Google. It is existential for Answer Engines (AEs).

Content creation is often considered a “burst activity,” tied to a content, campaign, or product launch. There’s an existing long and complicated multi-team process that follows a content roadmap (which also took plenty of resources and time to create), to source, write, check, corporatize content. That gets published. See you next year!

That’s the now a really bad spike & silence content strategy.

My assessment is that in an AE world your influence on 1P site/app has dropped considerably, 3P influence has increased dramatically - and that content is published massively frequently. Your multi-modal content creation has to be spike & sustain to retain relevance (and organic traffic!).

You’ll have to run 2-week sprints, every 4 weeks, tied to emerging themes from LLM research, seasonality, category-specific themes, product launches and refreshes, social winds and whims, etc.

Each company will have its nuance. Scroll back up and see the last column for the more often specificity for Coach.

Algorithmic updates old Google used to be seismic annual events. Today, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude have material updates every few weeks, and transformational updates every few months when a new foundational model arrives.

More often for your content strategy is life-altering important.

Bonus:

10. Talent Spark.

New realities are best embraced by creating new alignments & incentives.

I recommend merging your SEO and Content teams into a single “Answers Quality” team.

And, complement the past experienced team members with AI natives. Both are important. (90% of the replies from my daughter to my text messages: Memes and Emojis! Incredibly that works with LLMs, they get her. I struggle!)

Next Week.

The exciting conclusion of our AEO series.

I’ll unpack the AEO implications as Agentic AI takes over seeking (robots search, read ads for robots, find the right thing, buy it, get it delivered to my home).

And, we’ll do new analytics for the AEO age.

Bottom line.

We are going through a period of rapid change.

The implication is that what works for Organic and Paid will also evolve more frequently than our organization/team/agency might be built for.

Agility and speed across think, ink, and execution will become a competitive advantage.

If you haven’t started on serious AEO efforts, you are six months behind. Soon, every month you’ll fall behind two months.

Carpe diem.

Avinash.

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