Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a huge part of modern business. SEO refers to the ways in which organizations curate their content to engage audiences through search engines (like Google).
Whether organizations like it or not, the practice dictates a lot of the ways in which content is written and formatted, and firms are often at the mercy of search engine preferences. Many companies have entire teams dedicated to their SEO, but they might have to make room for some new roles.
TechRadar Pro attended Hubspot’s Inbound conference, and we spoke to Hubspot’s Amanda Kopen, manager of AI search and interactive experiences to find out just how different digital marketing might look in the near future.
Always evolving
“Well, in traditional SEO, there were a handful of tactics,” explains Kopen, “but what you're seeing now -like on Google if you search something, you'll see an AI overview. There's citations, you can expand it, there's AI mode, there'll be ads, featured snippets, and then the organic results. So, we want to help people transition into going from SEO only to AEO.”
Search is changing, and the way people access their information is evolving, and so must the strategies organizations use to market their products and services. Instead of solely focusing on SEO, organizations should also utilize AEO (AI engine optimization or answer engine optimization, depending on who you ask).
“AEO borrows a lot of the basic SEO tactics, but it also helps educate people on how AI engines are accessing that content. You want to be visible in those; ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera.”
Consumers no longer rely solely on Google, who have had an effective monopoly on search in recent years. This disrupts the landscape in a serious way, and threatens to rewrite everything SEO teams have relied upon for years.
“With SEO, you really cared about ranking, you wanted to build authority through backlinks, you wanted to have high quality content that was crawlable, indexable, etc. All of that is still really important,” she explains.
“But you need to utilize the AEO best practices as well. You need to get hyper-specific, really personalized, because search now happens not just with the query, but the query fanned out into a ton of different questions.”
New content
To create successful content that suits both SEO and AEO, teams need to be mindful of their voice. Most organizations will be using AI to generate SEO and AEO weighted content, but businesses should be sure to train their models using their own content so that their style and tone is established.
“What you want to do with AEO is really reinforce the narrative that you care about for your business,” Kopen tells us.
“That is important because that information will come [from] somewhere. It can either get hallucinated based on Reddit, Quora, review sites, [or] it can come from you. So having repetition and talking about your business in the way you want to be known for is truly, truly important.”
To help their customers address this, Hubspot has developed an AEO grader. This is a free tool which assesses your organization’s company as a whole;
“Instead of looking at your business or your website specifically, you put in your information, your location, your industry, your business name, and it will show you sentiment across multiple different AI engines, visibility, and what competitors you have,” Kopen explains.
The task can be daunting, Kopen admits, but building in your existing SEO knowledge is a great place to start. “I would say it's good to always be looking at resources, thought leaders, the SEO space,” she says "and also building upon the foundations of SEO for what they're using now.”
AI isn’t going anywhere soon, so the organizations that embrace AEO tactics are going to have a serious head start when it comes to digital visibility - especially if they utilize multiple platforms to push their message.
“It's really important to have high AI literacy because this is the way of the future,” she concludes. “You and your human experiences are your superpower, but you can speed up your efficiency through AI.”
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