The magic of SEO / AEO compounding
Nothing about SEO moves at the speed of a single input.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Foundation Marketing and Semrush
Paid subscribers can download this calculator to chart compounding efforts
If you are an agency or tool interested in sponsoring this newsletter, please get in touch
Many businesses approach SEO as a direct-response marketing channel, expecting immediate returns and quick wins. This mindset is flawed. There's one exception to note, but for most sites it is not relevant: a site with a technical defect so severe it's suppressing visibility and where fixing it produces a fast, visible jump. Outside that one case, nothing about SEO moves at the speed of a single input.
{Sponsored by Semrush}
Explore changing behaviors in how people find, click, and buy
Our latest State of Search Q2 2026 report just landed. Built with Datos’ clickstream data, the largest of its kind, it tracks how search behavior continues to shift. AI adoption, changing click patterns, zero-click growth, and where Amazon, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube fit in. Utilizing real market-wide data, from across the US, UK, and EU.
While it sounds cliché, SEO is not a sprint; it’s a marathon, a strategic, long-term investment that builds exponential value over time, much like compound interest in finance. Growth in this channel is built on the growth that comes before it.
The same is now true of AEO, and anyone treating answer engine visibility as a campaign with a start and end date is about to learn this lesson the hard way. You can’t set it and forget it.
SEO is Not Transactional
Early in my career, I experienced, through my managers, the typical perception that SEO is transactional: invest money and generate instant traffic. In one of my earlier SEO roles, I had a sizeable budget just for links. I spent most of my week negotiating for new paid link sources. Links were viewed as the input, and traffic was expected as the output. In hindsight, I would guess at least 75% of that budget was a complete waste of money, going to a cesspool of banned sites that likely added no value.
In another role, when traffic dipped for purely seasonal reasons, the finance team doubled my budget on the theory that twice the spend would lead to twice the traffic. It doesn't work that way, of course. Another company offered me headcount to improve traffic quickly, as if adding more to the team would shorten the time it takes to hit my traffic plan.
If only it worked like that.
This view of transactional SEO misses the nuanced, cumulative nature of SEO efforts. Unlike paid search, influencer, or social media campaigns, which deliver immediate results (as measured by clicks), SEO operates on an accrual basis, where value compounds incrementally.
Ads can be transactional; SEO is not
Turn on an ad campaign in the morning, and you get clicks and learnings that same afternoon. For paid channels, every cent spent on ads buys exactly one click, and then that budget is gone. Stop spending and the traffic stops immediately. There's no residual, no account accruing interest while you sleep. SEO is the opposite of this in almost every respect.
Operating under this misconception can be fatal to an organic search effort because there’s little room for a transactional, accrual-based effort to live under the same roof. I have seen many businesses initiate an SEO strategy, then become frustrated by the lack of instant gratification and quit.
Search engines rarely reward overnight changes.
Search engines prioritize what users want, and those signals don’t appear instantly when a brand or content genre is new. While there are certainly stories of overnight brand successes, in most cases, it’s months and even years of hard work. These elements take time to develop and even more time to be recognized.
This is why an old, boring company with a stale-looking website routinely outranks a beautifully designed startup site with twice the SEO budget. The startup is starting from zero every single time. The old company is spending the search capital it banked years ago.
Accrual Basis of SEO: How Value Compounds
Every SEO input you invest is like adding a deposit to your search account. Initially, these individual inputs whether pages, products, or sites might attract minimal traffic and not drive user value, but over time, they will. Especially when you think of these efforts as building an immeasurable brand in search.
Some of my best-converting SEO products took months to generate traffic, and I never had high hopes for their performance. Over time, these metrics will change as the value accrues. The site will increase the topical authority within the business’s domain. Search engines and LLMs reward brands because users prefer brands.
While some pages may not address a high-traffic term, it will still provide another entry point for users and customers. These pages, even if they are low-traffic or of little interest, will also participate in the web of internal linking within a site as it accrues links or value within the search ecosystem.
Accrual of Links
Backlinks and now citations for AEO are perhaps the most evident examples of the compounding nature and of where most companies fall into transactional pitfalls. Some unscrupulous agencies attempt to sell link and citation efforts on an ongoing basis, threatening that if the campaign ends, the traffic will disappear.
This is false, of course. Each link or citation, if they are even valued by the algorithm, will provide value semi-permanently, regardless of whether more links are obtained.
Links signal credibility to the algorithms that use them, and I have seen SEO visibility remain even after the links have been removed. Additionally, citations don't compound the same way links do, and that difference is the whole reason AEO strategy can't just borrow the SEO playbook. A link gets crawled and indexed on a cycle you can roughly predict. A citation gets absorbed into a model whenever its next training run happens, and there is no calendar for that and no way to force a refresh.
Conversion metrics
While direct response channels focus solely on immediate transactions, SEO provides value that can’t always be quantified. Search or AI visibility builds brand visibility, which goes a long way toward the trust that leads to conversions.
SEO visibility will even drive more value on paid channels. Those channels benefit from retargeting users who came in as a first touch from SEO and increased conversions due to the visibility SEO provides.
You wouldn't judge a real estate investment by its cash flow in month two, and you shouldn't judge an AEO strategy by whether LLMs mention you today. The return shows up on a longer clock, and I am watching teams drop AEO efforts faster than they ever quit on SEO.
AEO compounds through a different mechanism, but it compounds nonetheless, and conflating it with SEO's link-and-crawl economy is the fastest way to misallocate a budget. AEO is downstream of brand efforts, not technical optimization.
Strategic approach
Consider your SEO efforts as capital expenditure. Each optimization, piece of content, and technical improvement is an investment with the potential for substantial future returns. Demanding a guaranteed return on every single page before you'll fund it is how a team talks itself out of ever shipping anything.
SEO and AEO require consistency for success, but because they accrue over time, you can still benefit even if you only have a budget for a one-off effort.
By understanding this concept of compounding, businesses can transform search from a transactional activity to a sustainable, value-generating investment.
Stop measuring SEO on the same scale you use for paid media. Time is the lever, not the budget.
[Sponsored by Foundation Marketing]
94% of B2B buyers now use AI when researching software. So who’s AI citing when they look for tools like yours?
Well, it’s usually not you. We analyzed 57 million citations across 50 brands: only 2.2% of citations on early-stage buyer queries pointed to brand-owned domains.
Your SEO, PR, and social don’t fix this on their own. And we’ve learnt over the last 12 months that getting cited by AI is its own discipline. The Hidden Selection Phase report shows where AI pulls its answers from, and what separates the brands it cites from the ones it skips.
Download the report
Getting itchy and instead want to see where your brand stands? Book a call for a free content audit with the leading AI visibility agency for B2B.