AEO killed the metrics that hid poor SEO
Are you optimizing for soft goals alongside your hard goals?
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Nearly every SEO effort I have ever seen has had measurement issues. SEO has never been deemed important enough by search engines to reveal the full clickstream; therefore, every company has its own proprietary way of estimating the effectiveness of an SEO investment. While measuring and attributing SEO journeys is critical for a company, many people overlook a second, equally important goal: optics.
To effectively sequence and plan for an SEO success story, the first question is: what is your goal?
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Know your goal
SEO can accomplish two fundamentally different things for a company: soft and hard. They are both important for your success, and you need a plan to achieve all your goals.
Hard goals are obvious: drive traffic, create business impact, and produce revenue. These goals are quantifiable and easy to measure on a chart for the C-Suite and for leadership to share with boards and investors. This is the version of SEO that most teams should default to when they set goals, although, shockingly, I have met many teams with no actual goals. Assuming a team is goal-oriented, hard goals are important because it's what keeps SEO funded and appreciated.
The soft goal is the one that very few teams ever realize is important in its own right, not just a byproduct of a hard goal. A soft goal is visibility, presence, being in the room for conversations that produce no click, no session, and no conversion, but that shape how the company is perceived by people whose opinions matter more than any single user’s.
Soft goals are equally important
I once had a CEO who insisted that I report Bing rankings. Most SEO teams would push back hard on this extra work, but I realized that this is a soft goal and for my future career prospects, it was just as important as my hard goals. In this CEO's eyes, no matter how well I drove traffic from Google, I wasn't successful unless I met HIS expectations on Bing.
I recently had a consulting client whose CEO insisted that they be number one for some obscure search term. Again, instead of pushing back, I just made it happen. That’s what the CEO wanted, so ignoring it because I didn’t agree was not an option.
Soft goals are equally important to hard goals even if they don’t drive revenue. Rankings do not pay bills, but that visibility, even without the click, matters to someone. The executive who signs your checks sees your brand mentioned next to a competitor in a search result. A board member Googles your category before a quarterly review and forms an impression of the SEO team’s work in the first ninety seconds. None of these show up in an organic traffic report, and there is no revenue attribution, but there is still significant inherent value in achieving this goal.
Most SEO job descriptions only mention the hard goals, but don’t forget that you are really judged on the soft goals. Being right about the data is not going to save your job.
Strive for soft goals
When leaders complain about visibility, don’t school them; wow them. This applies a million times more to AEO. Many of you might think LLM visibility is a vanity metric because it can’t be tracked to revenue. Nonetheless, that visibility still matters, whether externally as a measure of your brand or internally as a benchmark for how well you are doing. Instead of pushing back, educate them on what visibility in an LLM means and then achieve what they want.
This obscure prompt illustrates my point 😁
Everyone in this industry has been there. The CMO fires off a personal text message to you after googling something on a weekend, something like “why aren’t we showing up here,” or the VP of marketing mentions almost in passing that a competitor “seems to be everywhere lately.” These are not moments to run away from; they are moments to shine.
Years ago, I had a consulting client with a board member obsessed with rankings who insisted our SEO work was failing because the SEO tool they used incorrectly showed our traffic. I used this as an opportunity not to disavow them of ranking reporting, which is my default position, but instead to impress on them how they should view our rankings and see our successes. It worked spectacularly, and this board member became an advocate.
You need balance
The mistake most SEO teams make is treating hard goals and soft goals as if they compete when in reality they answer two entirely different questions that only look related from the outside. A hard goal tells you whether the channel is working, while a soft goal tells the executive you matter for what they care about. Anyone who has spent their whole career optimizing for clicks has probably never even considered that those two outcomes could diverge, because the entire discipline trains you to believe that a search click is all that matters.
I have watched SEOs argue themselves out of jobs by refusing to achieve soft goals. When leadership hands them a request that seems irrational on paper, their first instinct is always to explain why it is technically wrong. To be transparent, the request is likely wrong in a technical sense. Likely, no one does a Google search or prompts for that obscure term, Bing’s market share doesn’t justify a huge investment, or there is no conversion potential from the page they want to create. None of this really matters because the requester is the one who signs your paycheck.
The good thing about being measured in the past on rankings is that the world turned slowly enough that you could out-report a bad feeling before it calcified into a bad opinion of you. Unfortunately, AEO doesn't give you that runway.
AEO and soft goals
AEO has taken this entire dynamic and put it under a spotlight. A CEO who spent fifteen years obsessing over rankings now asks an LLM about her own category and either sees the company mentioned or not. That immediate gut reaction becomes his entire mental model of your program’s performance, whether you like it or not, and no amount of dashboarding after the fact will fully dislodge the impression that single query left behind.
I watched this happen as a slow-moving train wreck on a Zoom call with a potential client last year. While the SEO manager waxed poetic about models, fanouts, and grounding, the CMO asked ChatGPT to name the top three tools in the category on the shared screen. The company didn't come up. None of the other leaders on that call cared that the prompt might have been flawed or that a re-run five minutes later might have surfaced the brand. The soft goal had failed. Unsurprisingly, that SEO manager is no longer at that company. That company cut the whole SEO team.
The instinct among SEOs in that moment is always to serve up deep-tech word salads instead of just finding a way to what leadership wants. The best move is the one that worked when I needed to get those Bing rankings all those years earlier.
In an AI-first world, impressions of your work happen fast; know your hard goals and soft goals and knock them both out of the park.
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Seems I have a weekend read!