SEO, GEO, AEO & AIO
Is the tune “Old MacDonald” getting stuck in your head? (Is it just me?)
SEO & AEO
I have no doubt you know what SEO is. You probably also have a good idea about the latest and greatest 3-letter marketing acronym to flood LinkedIn and Reddit feeds: AEO. Not to be confused with GEO and AIO.
Whether or not you know exactly what all the confounded acronyms mean, a successful content strategy needs to account for them. Why? Because someone evaluating your category used to open a search engine, scan ten blue links, and click three of them. Now they open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, describe their problem in a paragraph, and get back a short list of recommended tools with reasons attached. They don’t even need to go to any of these resources. Google’s AI Overview is pretty much a default results framework on the popular search engine.
You are either cited in that answer, or you have been eliminated from consideration before anyone knows you exist. Answer Engine Optimization, et. al., is the discipline of being the source the model reaches for. And like every aspect of content marketing, it’s part art and part science.
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How your brand currently appears — or doesn't — when someone asks an LLM about your category, with a prioritized plan to change the answer.
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Content structured to be retrieved, quoted, and attributed. Entity clarity, source-worthiness, and the off-site presence that models actually read.
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Keyword and topical authority strategy, technical health, and content that earns its ranking instead of buying it with volume.
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Reddit, forums, and the places where genuine expertise gets indexed and repeated.
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LLM citation tracking, organic performance, and an attribution framework that connects content to pipeline. At HubSpot I ran measurement all the way through to SQL and ARR, because "engagement" is not a business outcome and your CFO knows it.