Why AEO Is The Future of SEO
Key Takeaways
AEO & SEO. AEO is a superset of SEO. Everything that works for SEO also works for AEO, with a few differences (offsite authority + long-tail coverage). LLMs struggle with which sites should be the most authoritative — this mirrors Google's early years and is why offsite mentions now matter more. Search isn't declining; LLMs are additive, not a replacement. SEO remains stable while new channels create incremental demand. User questions are becoming more detailed, which expands the long tail and increases the value of comprehensive content.
Topics. In AEO, a topic corresponds to all the ways a user might ask a question with the same underlying intent. Good content answers all the questions the user has, including sub-themes and follow-ups.
Authority. Google built PageRank to determine domain authority. LLMs face the same need for ranking quality among thousands of relevant pages. Authority has two layers: onsite (backlinks, shares, branded search) and offsite (mentions across Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, YouTube, Instagram, affiliates, and blogs).
Technical infrastructure. Early SEO required heavy technical optimization because Google struggled to crawl pages. Now it is simpler: having a readable, crawlable, and logically structured page. What matters most: internal link architecture, clear structure with headers/bullets/images, and schema (structured data helps both Google and LLMs understand what the page is about).
AEO strategy. Select the questions you want to win from paid search and current organic rankings. Track those questions with answer tracking tools and identify page types and citation patterns. Structure pages based on answers (listicle, calculator, article) and make sure your technical infrastructure is set up properly. Answer the main questions and follow-ups from forums and UGC.
Summary
Ethan Smith — CEO of Graphite — joins Adrian Rosenkrantz for a 30-minute walkthrough of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): the discipline of getting recommended inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
The premise is that a new channel growing means an existing channel must go down because it's zero sum, the pie is fixed. But actually what we're seeing is the slice of the pie is the same size, but the pie is getting bigger.
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite
Ethan's core argument is that AEO is a superset of SEO, not a replacement for it. The same fundamentals that drive search performance, including topics, authority, technical infrastructure, and content quality, apply directly to answer engine optimization.
On strategy and execution, Ethan outlined a straightforward starting point: identify the questions you want to win using your existing paid search and organic rankings, track them with answer monitoring tools, and structure your pages accordingly.
