Why I told marketers to embrace AEO, and what the pushback taught me

The post argued that digital marketing was moving from search-based discovery to recommendation-based discovery. I defined AEO as crafting your pages and content to be directly recommended by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini, by anticipating the questions users ask and giving the AI relevant answers to deliver. I wrote it as "Ask Engine Optimization". Most of the industry says Answer Engine Optimization. The idea is the same.

It made three points. AI recommendations are powerful. Content is shifting from ranking to relevance, so appearing on page one is no longer enough and content has to be worthy of a recommendation. And adapting early protects your reach as AI keeps changing how people use digital content.

The part that got attention was a number. I wrote that over the past month alone I had received over 50 client enquiries because of AI-powered recommendations on platforms like ChatGPT and Copilot.

Read that number for what it is. It is my own count, stated in a post in November 2024. It is not an audited figure, and it does not predict what AI recommendations will bring your business. What it showed me, and what I wanted other marketers to test, was that AI recommendation was already a source of real enquiries and not only a topic for conferences.

In the Business of Marketing group on LinkedIn the post had 3,308 reactions, 195 comments and 432 reposts when I checked on 20 October 2026. In a second digital marketing group the same post had 825 reactions, 64 comments and 97 reposts.

The comments fell into three groups. Some agreed that the shift from ranking to recommendation is real. Some, mostly SEO practitioners, argued that SEO remains essential, because it is what makes content discoverable and well structured for both search engines and AI systems, and that off-page and technical SEO still hold ground. A few asked which content types work best for AEO.

They were right that SEO is the foundation. Google says its AI features rely on the same foundations as Search: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search, and no special optimization is needed beyond normal good practice. Technical health and off-page signals still decide whether you are found and trusted. A headline that said "say goodbye to SEO" invited the objection.

That is why my current advice is not to drop SEO. Does SEO still matter? sets out where I would keep investing and where I would change what I ask SEO to deliver.

The direction held. People ask assistants for recommendations instead of scanning a list of links, and assistants name a handful of businesses. Since then I have put it more precisely: in AI answers the entity becomes the unit of competition, and the question the system asks is whether it has enough evidence to include you. I wrote that up in AI visibility is not a ranking problem, the argument I shared at PitchXPO Launchpad 2026.

The labels overlap and the work is one job. AI SEO, GEO, AEO and LLMO: what is the difference? explains why I sell it as one service.

• AEO, in my November 2024 post: write pages that answer the questions buyers ask, directly and in a structure an AI system can use.
• GEO: the same goal across generative assistants, including how a brand is described and cited. The term comes from a 2023 research paper.
• Evidence, in my September 2026 article: whether the wider web supports how you position yourself, because an assistant needs a reason to choose you and not only a page it can read.

My 50-enquiry claim is only useful if you can run the same count for your own business. A simple method:

• Add "How did you hear about us?" to every enquiry form, with "ChatGPT or another AI assistant" as an option.
• Ask the same question on calls and WhatsApp, and write the answer down.
• Create an AI assistants channel in analytics from referrers such as chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai.
• Compare the totals month by month, and treat self-reported answers as a minimum, because many people forget where they first heard of you.

The detail behind that count is in how to track traffic and leads from ChatGPT and Perplexity. For the underlying idea, start with what GEO is and how it differs from SEO.