AEO & SEO on brand terms needs brand efforts
Ranking for brand comparison and best-of keywords is not a technical SEO challenge.
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There is an SEO conversation that I have way too frequently with potential consulting opportunities. It goes something like this: a leader (CEO/CMO/Director) believes their website should be number one for “best CMS,” “WordPress vs Contently,” “top email tool,” or “SurveyMonkey alternative,” and they are reaching out to consultants to find out what’s broken and when they will achieve this “ranking” goal.
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They request audits, backlink research, page speed analysis, and McKinsey-level assessments. In many cases, their current agency already audited their site and recommended fixes, but nothing happened. It is the agency’s fault, of course.
Newsflash, it’s not a technical issue
Ranking for brand comparison and best-of keywords is not a technical SEO challenge. The pages that rank at the top of those queries are not there because someone nailed their URL structure and schema. (I have seen agencies recommend speed as the fix, and that’s even more atrociously ridiculous than schema.) The top-ranking URLs are there because the underlying facts about their product are well-known, widely cited, and repeatedly validated by other sites. You can have the best product on the internet and still get destroyed on “best AI detector” by a competitor whose product is just talked about more, not just linked more.
This is a conversation that most internal SEO teams and agencies need to have when these requests come in. I find that too often in the SEO industry, agencies or in-house teams oblige leaders’ requests without pushing back. One notable example right now is how many SEO managers are signing on to AEO tools they don’t believe in because leadership insists they need one yesterday.
Brand matters more than technical
For these types of queries, which are really brand-type queries, the most important factor is the "fit” of the brand. This comes from reputation, which requires building something worth talking about and then making sure the right people talk about it, and those two things happen in different departments with different budgets and different timelines. (See my posts on the differences between SEO and AEO)
The mechanics of why this is true matter. When someone searches “monday.com vs Asana,” Google is not trying to show a page whose title tag includes both brand names. Instead, they want to be as helpful as possible for the person making a real software decision, who would find the answers most trustworthy and useful.
The ranking signals that determine trustworthiness are almost entirely downstream of reputation: who links to you, how often you get mentioned in editorial contexts, what comparison sites and review platforms say about you, and what real journalists write when they cover your category. None of these signals is impacted in the slightest by technical SEO.
These pages still matter even as AI Overviews expand, because a buyer genuinely deciding between two products is not going to trust a summary from a search engine. They want the full picture, and they WILL click through to find it.
Use PR
Instead, what does work for these kinds of queries is a general PR-type effort. Not the press release version of PR, where you announce a funding round and hope a tech journalist writes it up. What is needed is actual strategic communications work, where you actively seed the facts about your product in the places that matter for your category. That means getting your real differentiators into third-party reviews and having customers talk about you on social media. All social media counts, not just Reddit. Don’t forget that YouTube is a feeder for Google. (Reply for personalized recommendations on how to do this.)
The frustrating part is that most companies treat brand awareness efforts as parallel but separate tracks. The SEO team is promoting technical ideas while the PR team is pitching stories. They need to work together, not just on AEO, where I think the brand team should own it, but on SEO too.
But there is one more thing before we even get to PR.
Analyze your keywords and gaps with this worksheet for paid subscribers.
Someone has to write the content.
This sounds obvious, but shockingly, I see it missed all the time. A company recently asked me why they aren’t ranking on “best [abc] AI tool,” and I showed them that when I did a site search for the words they wanted, they had never used them on their website. This same company wanted to know why their page didn’t show up on Google when searching for them, unlike the competitor's page. This was an easy answer, too. They had never created that page.
Even when the page is written, it has to be created in a specific way that most companies don’t bother to do. They are writing marketing copy pretending to be an editorial comparison. As in the listicle strategy, which many are gaming for AEO, they are writing “X vs Y” pages that exist to declare themselves the winner in every category, with no acknowledgment that their product has any tradeoffs at all. Sophisticated buyers see through this immediately, so naturally, AI that imitates human thought will do the same.
Pages that should consistently rank for these queries share an honest approach that is uncomfortable for most marketing teams to execute. They outline scenarios in which a competitor is actually the better choice, with specific, concrete reasons why someone would pick one product over another, grounded in actual product behavior rather than positioning language.
Think about what that actually requires internally, and you can see why it would give marketers some angst. It needs a product marketing team willing to document its own weaknesses, and a content team with enough autonomy to publish something that doesn't read like a sales deck. Most companies cannot clear all those bars, which is exactly why supposedly non-biased media sites own these results in most categories. Users trust them because they have no stake in the outcome, and search engines have learned to mirror that trust.
Pages need to be updated to maintain their visibility
There is a genuine problem for SEO teams tasked with winning these queries: The team can build the page, but can’t win that query if they don’t deserve it.
This will be true even when you optimize it technically and even EARN (not buy) some links to it. The truth is that building a winning page is a product problem, not a keyword problem.
These pages, when they win, also need to be consistently updated. You cannot build a comparison page today, spend six months earning the brand mentions and review site citations, and then go back and update the content. By the time your reputation signals are strong enough to compete, the content has gone stale. The content and the off-page work have to move in parallel, which means someone has to be coordinating them, which means this needs to be someone’s actual job and not a side project for SEO.
If you want to rank as the best at whatever or have an honest comparison, you first need to write the content. And then you need to actually earn it.
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