fine. AEO might actually be a good idea.

Breaking news: not everything AI touches turns to chaos. Enter, AEO.

You’ve probably seen “AEO” floating around. It stands for Answer Engine Optimization, and basically, it’s how you write content that gets picked up by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s new SGE, and AI Overviews. Anywhere someone asks a question and gets an answer without clicking through to a website.

You’re optimizing to be the answer, not the link.

Marketers are scrambling, traffic is dropping, and everyone’s trying to figure out how to play nice with algorithms that don’t even send clicks anymore.

What is AEO?

It’s the next evolution of search. And while everyone’s panicking about it, the funny thing is… AEO rewards the kind of marketing we should have been doing all along.

Clear, useful, fast answers.
Content structured in a way that’s easy to scan.
Less fluff, more clarity.

It’s not about learning something new. It’s about unlearning the bad SEO habits we picked up trying to game algorithms.

(… in order to please new algorithms? Yeah, idk.)

Here’s the tradeoff: traffic will drop. People don’t need to click through to your site if they already got what they needed in the AI summary. But everyone’s figuring it out at the same time, which means there’s room to experiment.

is it okay to eat taco bell multiple times a week?

How to Adapt to AEO

1. Get Painfully Aligned With Your ICP
This is not the time to be vague or “for everyone.”

AI tools are trained to pull the clearest, most relevant answers. They can’t do that if your content is trying to talk to five personas at once. Know who you’re talking to. Understand what they’re Googling at 11 p.m.—and why. Then answer that quickly, clearly, and like a human.

2. Audit Your Best Content
Is it actually answering a specific question?
Would an AI tool be able to pull a clean summary from it?

3. Fix Your Formatting
Bullets, FAQs, subheadings, bolded key phrases.
Structure makes it easier to get picked up and easier to read.

4. Add Schema Markup Where You Can
Not glamorous, but it helps machines understand your content.
Tools like Google Tag Manager or Yoast can help.

5. Focus on What Your ICP Can’t Get From ChatGPT
Personal stories, real POVs, spicy opinions, lived expertise.
Anything that is uniquely you.

Why you don’t need to panic

AEO just means we finally have to write the way we always said we did — clearly, intentionally, and for humans.

Forget the traffic drop. Focus on being the answer people trust.

You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be understood.
You don’t need more AI tools. You need better taste using them.

That’s the real optimization.

So yeah. Less panic, more clarity.

Less bloat, more answers.

Less “we need to be everywhere,” more “we need to be understood.”

And most importantly?

Stop gaslighting yourself.

You don’t need to reinvent your entire strategy. You don’t need to become an AI prompt engineer. You just need to be clear, helpful, and worth quoting.

Learn from people smarter than me:
Ahrefs
HubSpot
r/SEO

Remember: the future of marketing isn’t reliant on who adopts the most tools. It’s all about who has the best taste using them.

And no, you still can’t automate that.