When trends in how consumers find companies and products shift, we as marketers need to adjust our tactics accordingly to ensure our clients stay relevant and easily found. 

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The Times They Are a-Changing 

People are becoming increasingly reliant on AI for everything from helping them do their jobs more effectively to finding out why their car is making that noise. Much in the way we used to use “Google” as a verb to mean looking something up, people are now turning to AI or voice search to fill that role, asking specific questions rather than typing in keywords or short phrases. Traditional search engines like Google are integrating AI tools like search assistants, and it’s becoming more common for the top search result to be an AI-generated response as opposed to just a traditional SERP (search engine results page). With consumers shifting away from traditional search engines to a more AI-based approach, search engine optimization (or SEO) becomes less relevant, making answer engine optimization (or AEO) that much more important.

According to techjury, 68% of online experiences start with search, so if you’re not trying to capture your customers at this step, you’re missing out.

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Some Surprising Statistics

Per CXL,

• Nearly 65% of Google searches end without a click because the answer was available directly on the results page.
• Gartner predicts that by 2026, 25% of organic search traffic will shift away from search clicks to AI chatbots and virtual assistants.
• Google notes that 15% of daily searches each day are completely new queries – many of these are longer, conversational questions. Rather than sifting through multiple webpages, searchers prefer an immediate answer.
• Voice commerce is projected to reach around $80 billion in annual value, illustrating the significance of voice interactions for businesses. Voice searches typically use natural, question-like phrasing, requiring different optimization approaches.
• After ChatGPT became popular, NerdWallet saw 35% growth in revenue despite a 20% decrease in site traffic by ensuring its content reached consumers through snippets and other channels.

It’s clear that the brands that adapt most quickly to the changing ways in which people seek information will see the most success, and that means embracing and implementing AEO.

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What is AEO?

If you’re familiar with SEO, AEO is similar in that they are both optimizing your online content’s search visibility, but instead of improving your visibility among search engines, AEO is optimizing your visibility in AI-powered answer engines to better align with how current consumers are finding information. AEO goes a step further than SEO by positioning content as answers to specific questions rather than just providing links.

How Is It Different from SEO?
While the two are conceptually similar, there are some big differences, including:

• Targeting: While SEO aims to increase visibility through a website’s search rankings and clicks to the site, AEO aims to provide the best direct answer to a specific query (with or without clicks).
• Platforms: While SEO optimizes visibility among search engines (as per its name), AEO is optimizing visibility among answer engines or AI.
• Approach: AEO uses conversational questions while SEO uses keywords or phrases.
• Key Metrics: AEO’s metrics include mentions, citations, placements and referrals, while SEO measures domain authority, rankings, impressions and traffic.

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How Do LLMs Affect AEO?

Large language models (LLMs) are advanced AI models in natural language processing (NLP) development, designed to understand and generate language the way humans actually speak and write. These models are fed vast amounts of text data in order to recognize specific patterns, understand context and mimic human-like language. Some of the models at the forefront of this space include Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Galactica and Llama, OpenAI’s GPT series, and others like Falcon 40B and Phi-1.

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This technology plays a significant role in AEO by improving an answer engine’s comprehension of natural human language in order to produce more accurate and contextually relevant responses to users’ search queries by:

• Deciphering User Intent: They analyze and interpret the nuances of user-created search queries to provide more accurate results.
• Optimizing content: They can help inform the type of content necessary to best align with conversational search queries.
• Improving Interaction: They can enhance the efficiency of digital assistants and chatbots to provide a better interactive user experience.

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This can benefit brands by:

• Creating better visibility for your content through conversational searches. 
• Generating higher engagement rates through the quality and relevance of responses.
• Providing a competitive advantage among voice search queries.

As with most tools, not all LLMs are created equally. We always recommend doing your research and exploring multiple available options to better understand which one is best suited to your specific needs. 

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What Does It All Mean?

With AEO on the rise, filling your content with keywords is no longer enough to improve your search visibility. If you’re not working to provide direct answers to users’ search queries, you’re likely to fall behind. It’s crucial to be able to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of the digital world and stay on top of the latest available technologies in order to succeed. 

Stay tuned for our next blog to learn more about AEO and some easy opportunities to apply it to your content.

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