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For years, gray-hat SEO had little chance of affecting a company beyond its Google visibility. Overstep the limits of spam? Google levied a penalty, but it only affected visibility on Google, not any other channel. Get a backlink on an adult site? No one would ever see that unless they looked at a backlink tool, and no one outside of SEO does that.
AI changes everything
When marketers, agencies, and AEO tools put a marketing claim on any website today, those don’t just have the ability to influence an invisible algorithm; they are also fodder to be restated in an LLM output. The training pipeline doesn’t distinguish between The Wall Street Journal and a series of random blog posts that seem to support a consensus opinion, because it has no concept of domain authority. I have seen citations from sites that would never have mattered as a link in traditional SEO. Everything it finds goes into the model and can be pulled back out as citations when someone asks a related question.
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This whole input-output effect sounds abstract until you understand what it actually means for brands: those citations, wherever they came from, can come back out of the system as fact when someone asks about a company. Those searchers could just be users forming an opinion, but it could also be an analyst, journalist, investor, or the CEO of a potential acquirer. The LLM response presents these marketing claims with the weight of sources (the SEO planted citations), and it feels like the truth to the searcher.
The difference between aggressive marketing copy on a website in a pre-AI world and that same claim making it into an LLM is distribution. The website was only seen by those who visited the page, while the LLM reaches the whole world and presents it as sourced fact.
(statements like the one below sourced to Reddit could cause issues when these companies are public)
SEO slop has now entered the PR conversation
At most companies, PR and SEO never get in the same room to discuss strategy. I say most, even though in my experience it’s all, because I hope there are exceptions. PR and SEO have different budgets, mandates, and strategies. Usually they’re in different departments reporting to different mid-level executives, even if they are both in the marketing department. PR reports to comms. SEO reports to a director of marketing or growth. The incentive structure makes them competitors for budget and attention, not collaborators. PR cares about controlling the narrative while SEO cares about visibility.
Parallel goals don’t work anymore.
In today’s AI-first world, the content the SEO team creates may make claims that would give a PR team a heart attack. These claims might compare a company favorably to a competitor in a way that’s technically true but aggressive. “Best” is a fantastic keyword, but PR teams don’t like to use absolute terms like that without a qualifier. Other claims might describe a market position in defensible terms, but not how they’d be described to investors. “ Used by 99% of the Fortune 500" is great in social copy, but in an investor presentation you would qualify it by how many of those users are currently active or have ever paid for an account. Generally, SEO makes claims about technology or traction optimized for search intent or sales, not for a media deck.
From an SEO standpoint, none of this is intentional deception because SEO results have always rewarded claims that match what people are searching for, not claims that match a company narrative. In fact, if an SEO team had to take marching orders on SEO from PR, they would have limited SEO success. I once had a consulting client who couldn’t use their primary keyword in their homepage title tag because the PR team had invented a new word they insisted be used. Only that team ever used that word.
With only an SEO north star, the team might create content about why a product is the best because it matches a supposed high-volume search query, while a PR team would phrase it differently so it’s not perceived as fact. PR teams hedge and don’t speak in terms of absolutes. SEO teams never cared for that nuance.
AI merges PR and SEO
With the work SEO teams do to drive LLM visibility, a company now has citations in multiple places saying something mostly true, but not entirely. When the LLM cites these claims, industry bloggers can pick them up. A small inaccuracy spreads far and wide because an LLM trained on all of this learns the claim is real because it’s everywhere.
It doesn’t stop with just bloggers. When a market analyst searches for information about a company before an earnings call, the AI response surfaces this SEO-planted framing and could ask a related question during the call. Imagine that CEO being forced to answer a ridiculous question coming out of nowhere. The CEO will fire off an angry text to the CMO, who will point to the PR team, who will then blame the SEO team. Where SEO used to be an afterthought ignored by the executives, now it will be the center of attention, but not in a good way.
This isn't hypothetical; I have already seen and heard it happen. Companies are starting to realize that SEO teams (and likely their external agencies and teams) have been building citations for LLMs around claims that should never have survived a PR review.
Now the real nightmare begins because it can’t be undone.
You can remove some citations, but you can’t get them all. The ones under the SEO team's control might be deletable, but the ones that aren't are out in the wild. Even after you’ve deleted everything you can find, LLMs trained on historical data already learned the pattern. The next generation of models will have seen the claim repeated across so many sources that it becomes more credible, not less. Retraining an LLM is AEO in reverse, and as anyone who has tried their hand at AEO knows, there are no guarantees. As of yet, no playbook exists for AEO reputation management for big brands.
This will be especially problematic for public companies because they need to control their messaging or run afoul of regulators. Public companies have built an entire infrastructure to control their narrative, and aggressive SEO tactics will now undo it. Reddit spam can actually impact a company’s share price.
Companies already experiencing this need to start undoing it right away; it will not be fun work, but for others who haven't made this mistake yet, there is time to alter course.
The fix
Companies that keep running AEO as a standalone SEO motion will create problems. The SEO team will get AEO results, but they won't translate into business results. When everything hits the fan, the SEO team will take the fall. Companies will start pulling budgets from agencies and teams that create reputational risk, and they’ll start hiring teams that understand the cross-functional problem.
This isn't a 2028 problem. If the SEO team is building AEO strategies right now without PR input, those citations and future problems are already in training datasets even if you don’t see it yet. SEO and PR need to collaborate, not the old way where they just approve blog posts. PR needs to understand what the SEO team is doing, and the SEO team needs to understand the PR message. AEO has to be built around the company narratives, not the other way around.
AEO is a brand challenge as much as, if not more than, it is a search challenge. It might take a disaster for companies to finally realize it. The messages LLMs put out matter more than clicks and conversions; they shape how customers, partners, and investors view a brand.
This is the moment when SEO teams and PR teams either start working together or start working against each other. Companies that figure out how to bridge that gap first will have a massive competitive advantage as AI continues to grow. Those that don't will spend valuable time untangling an AEO mess while competitors do actual business.
Be the former.
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