SEO and AEO: Jobs to Be Done
Keyword searches were never THE job because a search term is just a proxy for what someone is looking for.
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When someone opens up a search engine or LLM, they aren’t looking for results for a keyword or prompt; that’s not the goal. Their objective is an answer to a burning need. It might be a plumber who can fix a leak right now. A place to eat dinner tomorrow. Or an answer to something they were curious about.
Jobs to Be Done
Professor and consultant Clayton Christensen figured this out decades ago with a milkshake chain that couldn’t understand why sales wouldn’t budge no matter how many flavors it added. They didn’t unlock growth until someone finally watched who was buying the milkshakes and came to the realization that it wasn’t what - the milkshake - but the why - they were buying milkshakes to make a boring drive less boring and to fill them up until lunch.
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Christensen’s approach to asking the “why” is called jobs-to-be-done. Instead of focusing on the product, jobs-to-be-done segments users based on what the product is trying to accomplish. Every product you purchase today has a job-to-be-done, whether it’s something you eat, wear, or use. The same product could serve different jobs-to-be-done for different people. To illustrate this, for some, a car is just a means to go from point to point, while for others it’s a status symbol. Within the utilitarian group, there are also a myriad of uses for the car, which help drive the decision about what car to actually buy. Knowing the customer's job-to-be-done is how you sell the car.
SEO needs JTBD (Jobs-to-be-done)
SEO strategists rarely run the same exercise as the milkshake store. Instead, SEO has grown into an entire industry built around ranking for search terms rather than asking what job the searcher was actually trying to get done. With my clients, I try to get them to answer this question by approaching this challenge with Product-Led SEO, but for the most part, the industry is still keyword-obsessed. Now that AI has rewired how people search, SEO as a whole might finally be forced to confront a question it should have always asked.
Keyword searches were never THE job because a search term is just a proxy for what someone is looking for. So much SEO content reads like it was written for a robot instead of a human with a need because ranking on a search term was seen as the goal rather than the medium. This is why AI Overviews are so popular: they get a person to the required level of satisfaction faster, which is Google’s JTBD.
When a person searches for “best laptop,” they don’t have the time to read a two-thousand-word article on the topic; they want to buy a laptop. An AI Overview or AI response that understands the user, plus all the research on the topic, and suggests just three possibilities out of hundreds is exactly what the user needs to make a purchase right away.
JTBD still has a search journey
There will still be organic searches after that AI response, but far fewer than if they started with a list of 50 possibilities. One important callout for all the noise about declining organic search and value is that this person will most certainly visit fewer websites in their buyer’s journey now that they have AI options to help them, but they are still only going to purchase one laptop. The buyer’s journey has been simplified and condensed, but the overall demand has not changed.
Trying to shoehorn more content to retain lost traffic misses the point of what AI is doing. When that person searches, their jobs-to-be-done have not changed; the right approach is still to focus on that job. Rather than focus on the wrapper or content, focus on what’s inside: the need to buy a laptop.
Despite AI’s influence, everything about SEO is still relevant. There is still a need for helpful content, programmatic results, and, of course, well-optimized websites. The only change worth paying attention to is whether the value of the search results can be delivered in an AI result. If you are selling an offline service or product, you are likely in the clear; however, if your value is solely in showcasing content, that business model will continue to shrink.
AI doesn’t make SEO obsolete
A number of years ago, I consulted for Faire, a marketplace for wholesale goods. Their traffic has been affected by AI results, but the jobs-to-be-done have not changed; only the journey has. Users searching for the types of products that Faire offers still need to use Faire to connect with the wholesaler.
Compare that to someone searching "can I mix beer and wine?" or “how much is the Euro worth in dollars today.” That job ends the moment they get a trustworthy answer, with no follow-up visit required and no purchase waiting at the end. When the job finishes inside the answer, that traffic is gone permanently. When the job requires a transaction, a service, or a physical task, the traffic simply relocates to a later point in the journey.
Alternatively, if someone searches “is this skin mole concerning” or “why does my toaster oven spark”, there is absolutely a follow-up that will happen in search results. In the first example, with the mole, the user will seek out a dermatologist who meets their needs. In the second example, the user will likely want to purchase a new toaster oven, and there will be a journey of discovery and narrowing down to make that purchase.
You can’t hack JTBD in AEO
AEO makes the job framing even more unavoidable, and this is the part most companies buying AEO as a service get wrong. An LLM isn’t ranking a page. It’s hiring a source to help it finish a job on behalf of the user in the middle of a conversation, and the bar for getting hired is completely different from the bar for ranking in search results. LLMs don’t count or weight algorithm ranking factors. LLMs synthesize the most trustworthy answers to finish a job for a specific person. If AEO efforts are built to satisfy a checklist rather than actually finish someone’s job, the model will eventually ignore that site and pull from whoever did the work of solving the real problem.
For example, companies are producing FAQ sections engineered to be citation bait, structured for extraction, and stripped of any actual point of view because someone told them LLMs reward that format. LLMs are grading format and don’t really care that it checked an FAQ box. FAQs appear to drive LLM results because the content actually resolves the job the user brought into the conversation; the presence of FAQ content in LLM results is confirmation bias of the tactic, when in reality they work because that’s what the user wanted.
If the FAQs are just formatted to look extractable while leaving the substance thin, this is the AEO equivalent of keyword stuffing, a trick that worked for about six months before the system caught up.
Success is solving the JTBD
To succeed in AEO, the answer is the same as in SEO. It’s not another content audit or technical SEO effort. Audit your users’ jobs-to-be-done and optimize for them in an AI-centric way. Don’t focus on the means to an end, the tactic, but focus on the end itself: The job.
Win in AEO by going back to first principles and asking, for every tactic, what job is actually being hired here, and whether I'd trust this to finish it for someone I cared about. Put yourself in your users’ shoes before you trust something you read online or recommended by a tool or software.
Build for the user, and you are aligned with the future, whatever that might be.
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