Whether you want to call it SEO, AEO, AIO, GEO, or something else altogether, it’s clear that search is changing… or is it? Yes, customers are using AI answer engines much more often. Yes, Google and other “traditional” search engines are responding by adding more AI answers into their results.

The question, though, is how much you ought to change how you do what you do to answer your customers’ questions.

Is search as we know it completely different? Or do some fundamental truths remain that we still need to to keep in mind? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

The New SEO? (Episode 469) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links

• Parsing the $35M GEO Play: What’s Real and What’s Fundraising Theater
• ChatGPT is reportedly scraping Google Search data to answer your questions – here’s how
• OpenAI Is Challenging Google—While Using Its Search Data
• Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468)
• AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)
• Revisiting The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates
• The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466)
• Revisiting Google Closes the Gate (Thinks Out Loud)
• The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465)
• Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Thinks Out Loud)
• Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458)
• AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455)
• Should You Use AI to Create Your Content? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 454)
• AI, Content, and Revenue: Why Clicks Are Overrated (Thinks Out Loud Episode 450)
• How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448)
• Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449)
• What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447)
• AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443)
• Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440)
• Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 437)
• Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436)

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Transcript: The New SEO?

I’ve spent most of my career in search marketing. I think of myself as a strategic search expert versus, for instance, a hardcore technical SEO expert. I’ve led many search marketing teams. I’ve built search engines. And I surround myself with the smartest people I can when it comes to search.

One of those folks is Bill Hunt, who’s a friend and a colleague I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of times over the years. Bill had such a cool piece on his blog the other day about artificial intelligence company Profound receiving a $35 million Series B investment. And more importantly, about the “profound” (heh) changes that that investment signals for the SEO industry.

You should read every word of Bill’s piece. I will link to it in the show notes. I take issue with a couple of minor points, but generally you will never go wrong listening to Bill.

More broadly, there’s a lot of debate going on in the moment about what SEO even is or isn’t right now because of the emergence of artificial intelligence and large language models. You know, people call it GEO, AEO, SEO, AIO… oy!

You know, for what it’s worth, I prefer the term Search Experience Optimization — i.e., keep SEO — or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The name’s not the most important thing, I’ll respond just fine to whichever one you want to call it.

What’s important is how we use these tools. And the question I have is, have we entered an all new area of SEO, or is there a little more hype here than we’d like to admit? Most importantly, what do we do about the current reality when it comes to search?

This is episode 469 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

My assumption when we talk about search is that you work for a business that sells things. I’m not going to talk about the publishing industry. It’s not my core area of expertise. It’s got an entirely different economic model. And the realities of what’s happening because of search in that industry are very, very, very different than what people who sell things are dealing with. So we’re not going to talk about those today.

There are three big variables, though, around selling things. And they are:

• Customization. Whether you do very little customization or whether you do significant customization
• Pricing. Whether your price is fixed or variable
• Delivery. Whether your product is delivered instantly or is it delivered at some point in the future? Even if that point in the future is a little later today.

These are true for products or services. They all kind of map onto those variables. And there’s lots of examples:

• If we think of software as a service, there’s usually not too much customization. There’s some pricing variability. And usually quick, if not immediate delivery.
• If it’s a hotel or restaurant reservation, again, there’s usually not a lot of customization. There’s some pricing variability. And it’s almost always delivered later, even if “later” is, you know, tonight.
• If you’re selling hats or guitars or clothing or some other merchandise, not a lot of customization, not too much pricing variability, and later delivery.
• Real estate, could be customization, if it’s commercial real estate, there’s a fair bit of pricing variability, and there’s later delivery.
• If we think about things like insurance or financial services, lots of customization, lots of pricing variability, and you can get it pretty much instantly.
• Or if you think about big things like kitchen installations or data center equipment or bespoke tailoring and consulting, lots of customization, lots of pricing variability, later delivery.

Most businesses who are in these industries tend to want two things from their marketing:

• You want traffic. I’m thinking mostly online here, but phone calls and foot traffic usually are pretty good too.
• And the more important one, profitable revenue.

Now, historically, over the last 20 years or so of digital, those tend to have gone hand in hand. I’d argue that they still probably do, despite all the conversations we’ve had about zero-click marketing lately. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in depth in a moment.

For many businesses over the last decade, and certainly until this recent emergence of AI search, SEO was the way to get traffic and revenue. Most companies put a lot of effort into getting into the first page of search engines… which in practice meant the first page of Google.

And that traffic converted. It generated enormous amounts of revenue. For many businesses I’ve worked with, 50%, 60% or more of the revenue was coming through search.

For the first time in a long time, though, people are starting to question whether that’s a good thing, whether being so dependent on search is actually beneficial. They’re also starting to ask whether it’s enough.

I genuinely believe that this is a super healthy question to ask. In fact, it might be the most important question that needs asking every single day. We don’t want to depend on any one channel or company for our traffic or our revenues.

This is such an important point that I wrote an entire book about how to think and act beyond Big Tech companies like Google or Facebook for driving your traffic and revenue. I’ve also made the case for some time on the podcast, on the blog, on social media, about the risks that emerge when you’re too dependent on Google or any other channel for too much of that traffic and revenue.

And yet, for many businesses, Google still contributes either a plurality or an outright majority of your traffic. You still see a lot from Google, even now, even in this changing environment. If you’re one of those businesses, and Google loses — if Profound is right — and Google loses in the marketplace, you lose too.

So that’s what makes this post that Bill wrote so interesting and so important. Because he talks about a VC that’s putting enormous amounts of money behind companies that are designed to upend the traditional SEO industry. As he wrote in his post, “capital of this size and caliber doesn’t just validate a company. It signals to the market that GEO has moved from niche theory to enterprise scale priority.”

Bill also shares quotes from the company’s pitch for their services. And these include some fairly provocative lines, such as, “In five years, $1 trillion of commerce will shift from Google to chat GPT.” They also say, “If your company generates greater than $1 million from SEO, you’re facing an existential threat. Ranking number one on Google will soon be as relevant as ranking number one in the Yellow Pages.”

Ouch.

I’ll come back to this in a minute. But as you might imagine, I have thoughts here.

We want to start by talking about Bill’s insightful summary of what he calls, “the two workstreams you can’t ignore.” In Bill’s words they are, “Workstream one. Solid structured content on your own properties.” He defines this by saying, “This is where you say it. Publish authoritative structured machine readable content that positions you as a source of truth.”

Bravo, couldn’t agree more.

He also lists “workstream two.” And this is, “Inclusion in the reference set. This is where others say it. Trusted third party citations, industry hubs, and forum mentions that cement your authority in AI’s consensus layer.”

Again, I completely agree with this view.

I’ve talked and written about following a hub and spoke strategy for years. Bill’s workstreams are another way of stating that.

Critically, Bill points out that AI increases the importance of workstream two — or the spokes. And I think that’s true, at least for now. And I promise I’m getting to this, but I’m gonna come back to that in a big way in a moment.

Getting back to Profound’s bold claims about a trillion dollars shifting to ChatGPT or page one of Google being like the yellow pages, though, well… here’s what I think. And I want to say this as clearly as I can: Bullshit.

I just think that that’s, you know, way, way, way overstating the case. And I’m going to admit I have come 180 degrees on this.

But Google is as well positioned as anybody to win as we go forward. I’m not totally convinced that they will win. In fact, I’d put the odds at maybe 40%, you know, maybe 2.5:1. But they’re still in such a better position than anybody else.

Why is that? Well, they offer great utility. They have great distribution. They can get in front of any customer pretty easily. And, this is key at the moment, they have great monetization. They know how to pay for this right now.

There’s even some evidence that ChatGPT secretly relies on Google search results to answer some questions. And I will link in the show notes to the article in The Information that uncovered that. More than a few SEOs also have done studies that seem to support that finding.

So yeah, Google is as likely or likelier to win as anybody else in the marketplace. And I don’t see all that much shifting away from them in the immediate term. I could be wrong, but it’s a tough bet for me to make.

Second, and highly relatedly, all of the evidence seems to suggest that the things that help you rank in traditional SEO also mostly help you show up in large language models, in ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude. Bill says this himself in his brilliant post noting that this is, “the same fundamentals, new battlefield.” He continues, “If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s built on SEO’s oldest truth: On-site content, what you say; off-site validation, what others say.”

Yes, there’s more emphasis now on what others say than what we’ve seen. But that may be a little bit of a smokescreen. You know, the spokes play a bigger role than they have up till now. But again, we’re talking about the same fundamentals. SEO, GEO, AEO, AIO, whatever you want to call it, just aren’t that dramatically different from what SEO work has always done. Keep reminding yourself again and again “same fundamentals.”

Third, I’m not sure that current best practices for showing up in LLMs will last very long. Google’s traditional search works the way it does because they’ve spent a couple of decades fighting black hat SEO techniques to spam the search engine results pages. They’ve released countless algorithm changes over the years to ensure quality results. The LLMs are really only just starting that process.

And we’re seeing so many people sharing either well-intentioned or maybe less well-intentioned tactics that are a little snake oily that are designed to show up in LLMs quickly:

• “Post on Reddit,” they’ll say. “You’ll show up immediately.”
• “Post on LinkedIn, you’ll show up immediately.”
• “Make sure the terms your customers search for appear on the page a whole lot… not just a little, but a lot.”
• “Stick additional content in JSON inside your HTML to give even more visibility to your text for ChatGPT and other LLMs.”
• Nobody’s talking a lot about link building. But they’re all saying that you’ve got to show up all over the social web. Again, you know, the off-site stuff.

I’m not saying that some of those may not work. Hell, even I tell you to do the last one all the time about making sure you show up in other places. Instead, I’m asking the question, how long do you expect they’ll continue to work?

ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude and Copilot only have a chance of unseating Google as king of the hill if they consistently provide a better experience. And that’s not going to happen if their results are filled with folks who’ve learned to game the system, who’ve learned to game their algorithm. They’re going to learn how to beat spam just like Google did — they’re going to have to — or customers aren’t going to use them. They’re not going to trust them.

The truth is that at least up until Google introduced AI Overviews and AI Mode, the best way to rank organically was mostly, “create great content that answers your customers’ core questions.”

I don’t mean to diss other tactics, and I don’t mean to diss Profound. They may have an amazing product. At the same time, some of their benefits only matter until LLMs come around to where Google ended up. And I suspect that they will do that.

Finally, and much more importantly for those of you who sell things, customers still have to come to your website to buy them. And when they do that, they’re usually asking for you by name. That’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Customers may discover you on an LLM. They may discover you on social. Then they go to a traditional search engine and ask for you. Yeah, they might type in the URL, but far more often, they’re typing your name into Google and clicking on the organic result.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest do a terrible job of driving traffic right now for that reason. What they’re doing is creating awareness. Customers learn your name, and then they go looking for you.

That could absolutely change. It might change. But then they’ll either click the link to your site or as the technology matures, use their agent to make sure that they make the purchase from you.

You’ll almost certainly need to invest in a model context protocol (MCP) solution for your inventory and e-commerce systems sooner rather than later. Though let’s be fair, that’s way out of scope of this episode.

There’s also a huge risk to your business if you sell through intermediaries that customers never seek you out and instead choose to buy through higher cost third parties. That would be a big problem too. That’s also a topic for another day or you could just read my book.

In any case, the question you need to ask is if this is where we are and this is where we’re likely headed, what do you do about it?

Well…

• You follow a hub and spoke strategy.
• You make sure you appear in any of the places where customers can find you, both on-site and off-site.
• You have great content on your website that answers your customers’ questions.
• You look towards technology solutions like MCP for commerce applications.
• You look for ways to compete at scale, maybe even using tools like Profound’s — regardless of whether their bold claims come true or not, they might still be useful to you.

Most importantly though, you build a company and a brand that’s worth asking for by name that customers will seek out by name. Then you’re not dependent on any one intermediary. You’re not dependent on any one gatekeeper.

No matter whether chat GPT or Google wins, you definitely will.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 469, as well as an archive of all our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest