SEO can soon be a thing of the past!
With the advent of AI-powered search engines, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) going to get replaced by Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Rampant speculation among marketers has fueled fears that AI-powered search engines will produce more answers than links, delivering less traffic to millions of websites. The concern, while likely overblown, is worth acknowledging.
AI-powered search will depend on websites for responses. Hence it’s not an end to organic search traffic but rather a change in optimizing a site for it. That change could be “Answer Engine Optimization” or AEO. AEO aims to improve a website’s ranking on answer-focused search platforms, such as voice, virtual assistants, and now AI chat.
This form of SEO has existed for years. It is similar to what many businesses do already: Identify prospects’ questions and answer them in a way that AI-driven national language processors understand. For example, ChatGPT interacts with users conversationally. It is popular and exciting because it understands human queries, which (often) leads to better results. So websites optimizing for ChatGPT focus on natural language questions rather than keywords or even entities.
Thus AEO is not new but rather a change in emphasis and competition — the search results could contain limited links to external sites, and an answer might come from a single source.
Source: Practical Ecommerce