SEO Is Dead. Long Live AEO
- Luca Bellavita
- Oct 20
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 23
For years, Search Engine Optimisation was the unchallenged currency of online visibility. You mastered keywords, intent, and backlinks. You played the slow game — and if you were good enough, you landed in those top three blue links on Google.
But those days are fading. Quietly, efficiently, and without fanfare.
Today, your biggest competitor isn’t another brand.
It’s Google’s own AI.
From SEO to AEO: The Algorithm Has Evolved
If you’ve searched for anything recently, you’ve seen it. A coloured box appears at the top of the page — giving you an instant answer before you even click.
That box is Google’s AI Overview, and it’s rewriting how discoverability works.
Where SEO was about ranking, AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is about being quoted. Google’s generative AI now reads, digests, and rewrites content from across the web into one synthesised response.
Your goal isn’t just to appear in the results anymore. It’s to become the source that the AI cites.
According to Backlinko (2025), AI Overviews now appear in 13% of all search results pages — and for over half of tracked keywords. Surfer SEO’s 2025 study adds that organic link clicks have dropped by almost 4% year-on-year, while zero-click searches rose by roughly 3% (surferseo.com).
The implication is simple: visibility now lives inside the answer, not below it.
The New Currency: Clarity
Traditional SEO rewarded persistence and process. You could climb the ladder through backlinks and technical hygiene.
AEO rewards something else entirely — clarity.
Google’s AI scans for concise, authoritative, and well-structured explanations. It looks for definitions, comparisons, and clear cause-and-effect language.
An empirical study from arXiv (2025) confirmed that pages with semantic HTML, rich metadata, and schema markup were significantly more likely to be cited in AI answers than unstructured text.
The takeaway: if your content is vague or stylistically inflated, it won’t be understood — by humans or machines.
How to Be Picked Up by Google’s AI Overview
Think of AEO as writing for a new kind of reader: one that summarises, not scrolls.
You increase your odds of being cited when your content directly answers the questions people are already typing (or voicing).
Start here:
What is [your topic]?
How does it work?
What are the steps involved?
What are the benefits or challenges?
What’s the difference between X and Y?
You can use ChatGPT or Gemini to expand your list — simply prompt:
“Give me 10 long-tail questions people might ask about [topic].”
Once you have them, structure your content around clean answers: short intros, step lists, and FAQ sections that anticipate the next question.
And before you publish, take a snapshot of the current SERP and ask ChatGPT:
“What phrasing and structure is Google’s AI Overview using for this keyword?”
You’ll often find that the winning content shares three traits:
Concise phrasing (under 100 words per section).
Clear subheadings and lists.
Credible formatting (schema markup, citations, and internal logic).
This isn’t about chasing the algorithm. It’s about teaching it to trust you.
Using AI to Win at AI
Ironically, AI is your best ally in this new landscape.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity can reverse-engineer how Google’s AI Overview constructs its answers. They can show you what style, tone, and data structures the engine prefers — effectively letting you study the “AI accent” of Google’s summaries.
Pair this insight with your SEO fundamentals: technical audits, backlinks, and intent analysis. You’ll have a hybrid strategy — part SEO foundation, part AEO translation layer.
As Amsive’s 2025 report notes:
“AEO doesn’t replace SEO; it builds upon it.”
In other words, you still need the foundation — but the future lies in translation: crafting content that both people and algorithms instantly trust.
What This Means for Brands
We’ve entered the answer economy.
Content that doesn’t clarify won’t be cited.
Content that doesn’t serve won’t surface.
Google’s AI rewards usefulness, not marketing fluff.
Your best-performing pages will read like mentorship, not advertising.
Brands that adapt will earn something deeper than traffic — they’ll gain trust.
And this is where AImpact leads. We don’t just optimise for search; we engineer communication systems that make brands intelligible to AI. Whether through structure, semantics, or strategy, we guide organisations through the AEO transition — from visibility to authority.
SEO Isn’t Dead — It’s Growing Up
“SEO is dead” is an exaggeration. The truth is: SEO as we knew it is evolving.
SEO gets you indexed.
AEO gets you invited into the conversation.
CXL (2025) defines it well:
“SEO ensures discoverability. AEO ensures interpretability.”
At AImpact, we’re pioneering this dual optimisation model — where traditional SEO grounds your site, and AEO gives it voice in the age of AI.
Appendix: References & Further Reading
Backlinko (2025) – Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) Guide
https://backlinko.com/answer-engine-optimization-aeo?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Surfer SEO (2025) – Answer Engine Optimisation: Data, Trends & AI Overview Impact
https://surferseo.com/blog/answer-engine-optimization/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
arXiv (2025) – AI Answer Engine Citation Behaviour: GEO16 Framework Analysis
Amsive (2025) – Evolving SEO Strategy in the Age of AI Search
CXL (2025) – Comprehensive Guide to AEO
Rely Digital (2025) – What Is AEO? How Answer Engine Optimisation Is Changing SEO
Ahrefs (2025) – AEO vs SEO: Why Both Matter
https://ahrefs.com/blog/answer-engine-optimization/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Ready to step into the era of Answer Engine Optimisation?
AiMPACT helps brands become AI-visible — aligning strategy, content, and structure to get you cited in Google’s new AI Overview.
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