Is AI optimization a channel you should care about?
Many are making a critical mistake by thinking AEO is just SEO 2.0.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Semrush Enterprise
Paid subscribers can download the proprietary content audit checklist and my SEO+AEO playbook
While it is natural to want to pivot digital marketing efforts to account for new search realities driven by AI, many are making a critical mistake by thinking AEO is just SEO 2.0. They think they need to swap out their old tactics for new ones without stopping to ask a more basic question: Does being cited by an LLM actually matter for my business?
[Sponsored by Semrush Enterprise]
Be first everywhere customers search
Visibility means more than rankings for global brands, and Semrush Enterprise empowers them to own every layer of search.
By unifying SEO and AI search into one platform, you get comprehensive performance tracking, live content optimization.
Swap busywork for impactful strategy with advanced automations that are backed by the market’s leading search database.
It’s how search leaders stay dominant.
Book a demo for your brand audit
The answer depends entirely on where in your user journey AI intercepts customers, and for many companies, that AI interception point doesn’t matter nearly as much as they think.
Over the past year, we’ve seen an explosion of AEO consultants, optimization tools, and panicked budget reallocations as companies drop SEO completely to scramble to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. The fear of being left out of AI answers has created a FOMO mentality, with marketing teams restructuring entire content strategies based on the assumption that LLM visibility equals revenue. This premise deserves more scrutiny at the user journey level.
Ecommerce
In e-commerce, there’s this belief floating around that if someone asks an LLM “what’s the best mattress,” and your product doesn’t show up, you just lost a sale. In reality, that’s not how people actually shop for anything beyond impulse purchases. For a USB phone charger from Amazon, this might be true, but no one buys a mattress they want to keep for the next ten years like this.
The ecommerce user journey has always had two distinct phases: a long research phase where people gather information, read reviews, and build a shortlist, and then a much shorter conversion phase where they’ve decided what they want, and they’re just finding the best price or checking final reviews. Think about the last time you bought a mattress or a new couch. What was your journey like, and how long did it take from idea to checkout?
LLMs are absolutely disrupting that top-of-funnel research phase. Someone who previously would have clicked through ten different blog posts reviewing mattresses might now just ask Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT a few questions and walk away with three brand names to consider. If you were the blogs they clicked on and potentially got an affiliate sale from a 30-day cookie, your business has been disrupted by real traffic loss from AI.
This isn’t the case for the mattress retailer. That traffic was never high-intent anyway. because many of those users weren’t ready to buy. They were information-gathering, and while a tiny percentage might have clicked add to checkout or remembered your brand, most would have bounced without converting because they weren’t there to buy yet.
Bottom-of-funnel searches are mostly immune to LLM disruption. When someone types “Eight Sleep Pod 5” into Google, they’re not asking an LLM for advice. They know what they want, and they’re looking for a retailer to get it for them. They’re going to click product pages, compare prices, check shipping, and buy. LLMs don’t interrupt this because there’s no question left to answer. And, LLMs don’t sell mattresses, yet.
There are exceptions worth noting. For supplement companies, the research phase often IS the conversion phase. Someone asks an LLM "what helps with sleep quality," gets told about magnesium glycinate, and buys it within the hour. The entire journey from problem to purchase happens in minutes, not weeks.
Similarly, for B2B software tools, LLMs are rapidly becoming the primary discovery mechanism. When a developer asks, "What's the best AEO tool?" and your product doesn't appear in that answer, you've genuinely lost a high-intent prospect who might have signed up for a trial that same day. The difference is that these products have short consideration cycles, in which the research and purchase decision collapse into a single session.
In these instances, AEO is clearly relevant, but the levers you would pull to improve that visibility will still be the same for the long-cycle products. In ecommerce companies, AEO should be viewed as a branding play rather than a direct-response channel.
If your mattress or supplement gets mentioned in LLM responses about insomnia, that’s valuable in the same way getting mentioned in a New York Times gift guide is valuable. This builds awareness, which will become downstream dark attribution sales. The AEO efforts are valuable, but you shouldn’t be restructuring your entire content strategy to chase LLM citations if what actually drives revenue is paid search, product feeds, and transactional SEO.
The smarter play for ecommerce is targeted AEO for key consideration queries where being in the answer set matters for brand building, while continuing to invest in channels that actually capture purchase intent. It is more important to spend money on creating buying guides that LLMs reference. Certainly, some effort should be deployed on structured product data that’s easy for AI to parse, but don’t rebuild the entire website just for LLMs.
Media publishers
General content publishers face a completely different problem. Even for publishers doing original reporting, like Wirecutter or CNN’s buyer guides, LLMs are citing their work and potentially sending referral traffic through source links rather than to the affiliate links those sites need to monetize. That’s a mixed bag because the LLM has already extracted the key insights, so users have less reason to click, but at least there’s some value exchange. If I am buying an expensive product, I might prefer to read the Wirecutter buyer’s guide rather than just the aggregated review.
The publishers getting destroyed are the ones who built their business on commoditized SEO content. These are sites pumping out hundreds of articles about “how to remove red wine stains,” “what is blockchain,” and “What is a 1099.”
This content was never particularly original; it was written only to rank for keywords and capture Google traffic, often by aggregating information from other sources and repackaging it slightly. These sites made money because they were good at SEO, not because they created anything irreplaceable. Without having a great product, they were able to manipulate their way into visibility.
LLMs are existentially threatening to this model because they do exactly what these publishers were doing, just better. The LLMs don’t need content from these publishers because it was never original to begin with. An LLM can aggregate, synthesize, and customize information for the user using the exact same sources that those websites used. There is no compelling reason for those websites to exist in a world where a user gets the exact same content from the LLM.
The instinct for these publishers is to pivot to AEO, to optimize their content for LLM citations and recover lost traffic. They were great at SEO, why not apply the same creativity to AEO? This is a really bad idea because it is doomed to fail unless it follows some best practices.
Don’t create new commodity content
If your content is commoditized and your value is just ranking first for certain keywords, you don’t have a defensible position against AI. Optimizing for citations won’t save you because the user journey has fundamentally changed. People aren’t clicking through when the LLM has already given them what they need.
Some publishers are trying to block AI crawlers or demand payment. That might work for premium publishers with original content that AI companies need. Reddit loses traffic to AI, but it monetizes it by selling data to LLMs. Commodity content sites don’t have this option. Blocking crawlers just ensures you won’t even get cited, while other similar publishers will.
To understand this point, compare Healthline's value to CancerCommons, a site that helps cancer patients share treatment options. Healthline has commoditized health information that can be replaced by an LLM, whereas CancerCommons has unique, up-to-date information on Cancer research. Or, compare Drugs.com to GoodRx. Drugs.com is a generic glossary of drugs pulled from public websites, while GoodRX has information on pricing that they have negotiated with pharmacies.
LLM proof your content
The framework emerging is the same one I have always advocated with Product-Led SEO. Move away from just keyword-driven content into proprietary data that LLMs can't access elsewhere (like GoodRx's negotiated pharmacy prices), real-time information that changes too fast for training data (current inventory), community knowledge that exists in forums or comment sections rather than articles , unique methodology or testing (Wirecutter's actual product testing, not just spec comparisons), and credentialed expert analysis that carries authority LLMs can't replicate (not fake EEAT badges).
If your content doesn't have at least one of these qualities, you're probably creating something an LLM can reproduce or replace. Run your top content through this filter honestly. If it fails on all counts, optimization won't save you.
The reality is that commodity content publishers probably need to fundamentally rethink their business model rather than optimize for a new channel. That might mean creating truly original content that can’t be replicated by AI. For them, the era of SEO content farms might be over forever.
(Paid users can download this audit checklist to make individual determinations on content)
AEO is not a cure-all
The key insight is that AEO value isn’t universal because it depends on your business model, user journey, and whether your content or products have differentiated value that survives processing by an LLM. In ecommerce, LLMs mostly disrupt low-value, top-of-funnel traffic while leaving high-value, bottom-of-funnel traffic relatively untouched, so AEO should be a targeted branding tactic. For commodity content publishers, LLMs are genuinely existential, and optimization won’t fix a business model built on capturing search traffic for generic queries.
Before jumping in with both feet to reallocate resources to AEO, be honest about what role LLMs actually play in their user journey rather than following the hype.
Understand where in the customer journey people use AI search, what they’re looking for, and whether being visible in AI answers actually influences conversion. For some companies, AEO will be crucial. For others, it’s a nice-to-have branding channel. And for some, particularly those whose business was built on information arbitrage rather than genuine value creation, optimization isn’t the solution at all.
The real question isn't whether your content gets cited by LLMs via deliberate AEO efforts. What matters is whether you've built something valuable enough that LLMs have no choice but to reference you. The companies that will win in five years won't be the ones who gamed AEO the best just for visibility. Those companies will be the ones who become so genuinely useful and uniquely valuable that being left out of AI answers would make those answers obviously incomplete. Just as in traditional SEO, if the leading brand isn't highly visible in Google, users might think Google is broken, not that the website neglected SEO. The same will be true for LLMs.
If you're not there yet, that's where your effort should go: build that product and content experience, don't chase AEO to check a box.
[Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]
What happens when you combine best-in-class SEO with conversion optimization?
BigRentz’s traffic increased by 186% (85k), added 1950 conversions in 12 months.
Self Financial’s traffic increased by 50k/month, and added 685 new customers.
Lastly, Secure Data added 1968 phone calls.
North Star Inbound’s SEO strategies earn leads, conversions, and revenue..
Book a call for a free content audit and 10% off any engagement.
Intrigued? [Learn more here]