SEO and AEO is an effort in compounding growth
Nothing about SEO moves at the speed of a single input.
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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.
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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.
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ChatGPT cited Reddit in roughly 60% of its answers last August. Six weeks later that number was near 10%. Then it climbed back.
Nothing about the brands changed. The model did.
That’s the part most teams miss. AI visibility swings in weeks, not quarters, and the brands that hold steady through it are the ones with real presence inside the communities... not a burner account and a link drop.
We’ve been running Reddit for B2B since 2018 and publishing there since 2015. The State of Reddit Marketing is the playbook we use with clients: how to pick subreddits, how to show up, and how to survive the swings.
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The exception you park in the opening paragraph is the part I run into most at the small end of ecommerce.
Of 197 online stores I reviewed over the past few months, 52 had indexation as the single biggest problem on the site. Filter, facet and pagination URLs getting picked up instead of the product pages. That is roughly one in four, which is too common to sit in the exceptions bucket at that size.
It does not break your argument, it puts a step in front of it. Nothing compounds while the account is blocked, so the first job is unblocking it, and the deposits start counting after that.
Where would you draw the line for a business that has never had an SEO owner at all? Compounding assumes somebody has been making deposits.