Latest / The Search Signal / Is AEO Just SEO by Another Name?
Transcript
- Michael Transon: Hey, how's it going? I'm Michael Transon. I happen to be the founder and CEO of a search agency for about the last 14 years, but I'm also a professional skeptic in this industry that tends to sell a lot of certainty. So ⁓ podcast is called The Search Signal. We're to be spending time here talking about what is ⁓ changing the world of search marketing and what it also means for you and for the companies that you work at. So Before we get into today's actual episode, I'd like to spend some time rolling through what's happening in the world of search and some news from this week. So I've got four things that I'd like to talk you through from Google and also two studies that I want to walk through. So let's dive in. First, Google confirmed this week that there is a new toggle in Search Console that's going to let anybody opt out of showing up in either AI overviews or AI mode. And you'reable to do that without actually touching your organic search results. So this is starting to roll out in the UK first. I believe the date is June 17th. But before you do decide to even flip that on, it's probably important to know what AI Search is actually doing in terms of traffic for your business in your site. And most teams don't actually have a totally clear read on what's happening there yet. So, in light of that, at the same time, Google also added impression data for the first time inside of Search Console. For your pages that are actually showing up in AI generated responses. So, like I said, this is the first time we've actually had anything natively from Google on this. So, inside of GSC, if you have not pulled that yet, I would say before you turn that on, that switch, this is a really good place to start. Google also launched search profiles, and these are essentially dedicated pages inside of search for publishers and for creators who have built up a following. On at least one of the major social media or video platforms, Facebook, TikTok. They pull your content into one location and then let people follow you into the discover section of search. And then they tie all of that information into the knowledge panels. So a new profile can even trigger a panel for someone who like has not had one as an individual before. So if you are running any kind of visibility program for executives or people at your company and podcasts. I'd definitely check whether you have people that qualify for this feature. The other one is Ask Maps is rolling out on mobile, which changes how local search is handling complicated questions from users. So somebody can ask about hours and amenities in just one simple shot. And Google builds a single and they're pulling this from your Google business profile and also third-party sources at the same time. So if you've got physical. Locations. What I'd probably check if I was you is whether your profiles are actually complete enough to show up when someone's question is crossing a few different conditions all at the same time. On the research side, Rand Fishkin at SparkToro partnered with SimilarWeb to look at how US searchers are behaving on Google. And what found was in the first few months of just this year, 2026, almost two-thirds of searches ended without a click. a couple of years ago, that number was closer to six in ten ended without a click. And then a decade ago, it was under half. So ⁓ what they also found that when an AI overview shows up, which by our research is more than a fifth of searches right now. click-through drops by more than half on top of that number. So if I was you, if your whole mental model of search is it is only a traffic channel to the website, the data has just been moving away from that for really a while now. And it really starting to pick up speed this year, something to keep an eye on. And then the last one, Burson, which is a communications firm, they looked at about 50,000 AI generated responses across a couple dozen companies ⁓ on a few of the platforms. And well, what they ended up finding in their study is that getting mentioned in AI answers ⁓ surprise does not automatically buy you credibility. what I mean by that is the brands whose claims people ultimately believed. were the ones making concrete and very checkable statements, actual facts, like their product details or specifics about how the business actually operates, versus vague like positioning language, you know, got mentioned, but didn't actually move anybody to do anything with. So, which if you go read what most brand positioning documents and things say, this might be a bigger problem than the visibility one. All right, that's the news. Let's get into this week's topic. So today's topic are AEO and SEO the same thing? So if you have asked that question at all lately, you've probably gotten two very, very different answers. And the problem is that both of them probably sound pretty convincing. you probably have heard somebody pitch you that AEO is a completely different discipline and it's got its own budget. ⁓ you definitely need to go hire somebody else or hire another Agency to take care of that. And then you've also had somebody else probably tell you it's just like it's just SEO with like a wrapper and a new name on it. And whatever you're paying for or whatever team you're working with probably already has it covered and you don't need to think any more about it than that. personally don't think either of these is right. And so I want to spend today walking through from perspective what the data says, you know, and also talk about where maybe some of this confusion is coming from. want to talk about how to even measure AI visibility in the first place. Then going to talk about what's happened to the relationship between organic search rankings in Google and AI rankings and citations over the last like 18 or so odd months. And then we'll wrap up by talking about what research says and kind of predicts what AI visibility is ⁓ and ⁓ we don't need to be doing to rank there. So everything that I referenced today is going to be linked in the show notes, all the studies and data. So if you want to dig in further yourself or you want to check them out yourself, the studies are going to be there. ⁓ and you can read them whenever you'd like So by the end of this, my hope is ⁓ first foremost that you simply have a clearer understanding ⁓ of what SEO what AEO are and how they are both, you know, very similar in some ways. But then they are also very, very different in others. So let's dive into this thing. So, why has AI search created so much just general confusion amongst marketers, search marketers, general marketers alike? I mean, part of it probably has to do with the fact that right now we're dealing with a bit of an acronym soup, right? Like every couple of months, there's a new label that gets attached to this new space of search work. You've got ⁓ GEO, AI SEO, LLM optimization, right? ⁓ You know, the second something has a name, somebody's probably going to start selling it to you as either a threat or an opportunity to take advantage of. And that whole system has really been going on for a couple of years now. And the negative impact of that, it's really made it hard take a genuinely important question and answer it. ⁓ it's way harder to answer it than it should be. And the question underneath all of it at the end of the day is, I think, pretty simple. It's does the same investment that has been historically building your organic visibility also build your AI visibility and your visibility and AI answers? Or are two just very different types of work? Because that answer changes how you are doing things like allocating your budget or whether the program for organic search and SEO you've been running for a long time actually covers this really new important part of the Buyer's journey that's happening in LLM platforms that's growing very, very quickly. the good news about where we're at right now is there's starting to be enough measurement data happening across enough websites and enough brands to ⁓ begin give us a bit of an answer. So, part of this is gonna probably look different in six months, given how fast this space is moving. But I think it's a a good grounding point. ⁓ And The data, in my opinion, beats a lot of those confident opinions you might be hearing or being pitched that have been the void as everybody has been trying to figure it out. So before we get into the data itself, I do want to just spend a minute ⁓ talking about what even measuring, because we don't use the language here. It can cause a lot of confusion, and you might be feeling that yourself ⁓ when we start going and talking about ⁓ implications to. budget and where your money should be going and what you should be tactically executing on. So people say like AI visibility, there's really only two specific signals ⁓ that ⁓ and they behave a little bit differently. So the first one that I want to define and talk about is something called mention rate. This is how often an AI platform actually names your brand in a response when someone asks a question. In your general category. And the second one I want to define is citation rate. What this means is how often a platform will actually link to content on your website or a URL on your website as a source it's building that answer. So those are two specific things. And it's important to know that a brand can be mentioned without being cited. And then it can also be cited without being mentioned. So these are Two, you know, different situations, being cited and not mentioned, mentioned and not cited. And two different problems that are behind them. And I'm gonna talk about those today. So if you're mentioned, but you're not getting cited, right? What that means is that the AI actually, knows who you are. It associates you or your business or your firm with the category you're in, but it's not treating the content on your website as what I'd say, like referenceable material that ultimately is gonna be worth linking to. But then if you're getting cited and not mentioned, it's kind of the inverse. So the AI is pulling content from your site to build some answers, but your name's not actually getting surfaced in the response itself. There's a category later in the episode today where that inversion also shows up in a pretty extreme way using some examples from research we have. And I'm excited to get into that with you. So ⁓ way that I would say I would want you to hold these two things in your head. Mention rate is whether AI systems recognize you. So who you are and what you do. And then citation rate is whether they actually trust your website and your content as a legitimate source. So you want a picture of both. And as we'll see, there's like a lot of variation that actually happens across different industries. Regardless of how well the businesses and brands in them are operating and doing good quality AEO work. So with the definitions of those two items, brand mention rate and citation rate out of the way, I want to start digging in and looking at what the trend data is showing us right here, right now. So the most direct way to test whether AI visibility and organic visibility are the same thing. Is just simply to measure how much they are overlapping. So what I mean by that is if ranking well organically is gonna reliably get you some in AI answers, you'd see those pages AI are citing lining up really tightly with those same pages you have at the top of organic search results for the same types of questions and queries. And you'd also see that continue over time. If I show up in AI search and I show up in organic search for the same pages for the same results, that overlap is high. And if it's high and stable, great. what that means is that your existing SEO spend is really doing double duty which is great news, right? But if it's low or if it's falling, that say you've got a coverage gap. And the traditional SEO work you might be doing is not going to continue to close that. It's gonna get worse. we when we look at the data, there was a study in late 2024. There was actually a couple analyses, and they found something like three quarters The AI overview citations, which are at the top of organic search, came from pages that were ranking in the top 10 organically for the same query, right? but then about a year later, ⁓ there was another study run by Bright Edge, and it went from a lot to a little over half. And then by earlier this year, there were two other analyses that it had it somewhere between a fifth ⁓ a third. ⁓ depending on what numbers and which studies you look at. So ⁓ this is not a slow drift. what the relationship is seeing is between what ranks and what gets cited, that relationship has changed a lot and in a really short window, ⁓ all the data is pointing, it's only going into one direction. So ⁓ and ⁓ all of those studies are gonna be in the show notes. So if you want to dig into ⁓ each of those studies are showing and how that has declined over time, please jump in there and check them out yourself. Now, with that said, the mechanism is the next question. Like, why is this happening? Because understanding what's causing this shift to change gives us an idea of what to do about it as marketing professionals and search professionals as we're trying to improve our presence in AI search while not saying no to SEO. So when a buyer is asking an AI something like, for example, like, what's the best enterprise data management platform for a healthcare company? The AI itself is not just running that one single search and it's not just matching it to one page. It decomposes it. It breaks that question apart into a bunch of little sub-questions. And then it goes out and it starts retrieving sources across all of those all at the same time. my example, it'd be things like what's enterprise data management, or who are the leading vendors? What the healthcare specific requirements? What do Customers say about Those are all different sub-questions. So the reason why I bring that up ⁓ is, know, a brand in that space that holds a really strong position on the primary keyword, but then has thinner coverage across all of those smaller subqueries and adjacent questions that AI is ⁓ asking actually rank really well. in search and still be missing from huge chunks of what the AI response is stitching together and ultimately not show up as either a citation or a brand mention. What this means is the question stops being how do you rank for a specific term? And it is evolving and it's starting to become like, do you have actual authoritative content across the full range of questions that someone in your category, a buyer, is going to actually have and ask? So topic coverage depth basically, instead of what has been historically just keyword targeting. So, if organic rankings don't actually reliably predict AI visibility, the question then just becomes like, well, what does, right? What does predict AI visibility? There are some studies out here that research this. So Ahrefs went looking at this. They looked at something like 75,000 different brands. It was a huge study, trying to find what correlates most strongly with specifically AI overviews. ⁓ A couple of things they found was number one, it wasn't something called domain authority, and it wasn't another thing called backlink counts, which are two very important metrics in SEO. ⁓ what it actually was is how often a brand just simply gets mentioned by name across the web. And in things like articles or in reviews or comparison pages or industry reports, right? The brands that were getting named in other people's content, those are the ones that were showing up in AI search at way higher rates than brands that Had really strong domain authority or really strong backlink profiles, but weren't. The top quartile, top 25% of brands by web mentions were earning more than 10 times the amount of AI overview mentions of next quartile down. So that is a huge compounding gap. And it suggests that the brands that are investing into third-party content and they're it early. And they're building are creating for themselves an advantage that's going to be, in my opinion, probably a lot harder to close later. So that signal I would call or define as branded web mentions. And let's be clear about what this is because it's not backlinks. when we're talking about how to deploy a program, that really doesn't matter when we're talking about doing it in practice. So a backlink is just simply another site linking to yours. If you've done SEO, you know what this is. But a branded web mention is ⁓ you know, another site referencing you by name. And it doesn't matter whether or not there is a link attached. you could have an article on another site that just calls your company a leader in the category, or a review that names you, or ⁓ there's a comparison piece that includes you. your brand showing up the topics that are you know defining your category. that is what's actually important. And in content that you don't actually own, that's not on your website, that is on somebody else's website. there's very structural reasons behind why this works this way. So search engines themselves rank pages by evaluating things like links and relevant signals those links. And this is stuff the industry has been really working around and building programs around for SEO for a very long time. Since I started in 2013, right? AI systems are doing something a lot different underneath. So they are building associations ⁓ things, brands, products, capabilities, or your concepts. ⁓ And on how those things show up together in all of the text that they've processed. So when your name ⁓ keeps appearing, your brand keeps appearing next to topics that you know matter to your buyers, right? And they're doing it in. Credible third-party content, the system is starting to actually learn that there's an association between your brand and those topics. So when you've got a really strong link profile, but your name is just like barely showing up in we call it co-occurrence with the topics in your category, just out in the open web, right? That association is just not there for those AI systems to draw on. And it doesn't matter how strong your website is or how much link building that you've done in the past, those things don't matter. So the way I would it to humans, you imagine like trying to teach somebody who is all the time about your business but has never heard of your company or what you do or you know why you're credible in the space. So the way you would do that is getting your name to show up ⁓ all the over and over and over in all the stuff that they are reading. And you want to be associated next to the problems that you solve or the services that you offer or the products you offer. And that's basically what these systems, these AI systems are doing with the general text of the web. So that's the third party research. now let's talk about what Victorious, ⁓ company, has found in some of our own data and some of our own research that we've conducted over the last six to nine months. So we went out and we did our own test. We tested a couple hundred different brands across five different industry verticals, five major ones we work with. And we looked at over a hundred thousand prompt responses in AI, and then we cross-referenced. those responses against organic performance data. This is in our Q1 quarterly search report, which is linked in the show notes. I would highly, highly recommend you take some time to read that. There's a lot of good nuggets in that. But to talk about how it relates to this. So across the whole data set of the research, the correlation that we found between domain authority and citation rate in AI was essentially zero. And then against The mention rate, it was barely above zero. So aligning with a lot of the third party research that we were talking about earlier. What this means for search is that the metric the industry has really used for years, as what I would say is like the main proxy for whether you are authoritative in search, your website's authoritative, has really no meaningful, like predictive relationship with AI visibility. you know, domain authorities in almost every SEO report and in almost Every pitch. It's something we talk about with our clients, clients ask us about. It's been historically how progress gets measured and also how oftentimes people's marketing budgets get justified. So, what I would say for you, if you've been building domain authority as a thought to a route to AI visibility, the data says these are not correlated and they're very different things. So, I'm not saying that that work is not valuable. It's been, you know, historically done for really good organic search reasons, but when you're looking at AI visibility, Focusing on domain authority growth is absolutely not going to close the gap. This is what the data says. But organic traffic, right, which is the actual business outcome that domain authority was always trying to approximate, ⁓ that did show a pretty moderate real relationship with AI mentions. So not domain authority, but organic traffic. So what that means is the underlying result of good actual SEO work does transfer to AI visibility to a meaningful degree. But the proxy metric, domain authority does not. So there is a correlation between high quality, good SEO traffic and AI visibility. We also took it some time to break this down by vertical. And I think this is some really interesting information, especially if you are in one of these spaces. We're gonna start with healthcare. So in our study for healthcare, we saw that they had the businesses in this space had the strongest combined performance in the data set, which means they were being named often in AI and they were also being cited often in AI. And the reason for this is healthcare brands really come with very clear entity identifiers. They've got provider names, they have specialties they offer, locations they work at. A lot of them are have affiliations with networks. So what that means is the AI has a lot of really organized, helpful information to just kind of grab onto and bring into their corpus. ⁓ SAS did well on both, but it was for a bit of a different reason. So as you can imagine, the content ecosystem around software, due to content marketing, is super dense. There's a ton of reviews, lots of comparisons, a lot of SaaS providers get editorial coverage all over the place. And that is what we noticed AI systems are drawing from pretty consistently for that specific vertical. Then you have financial services. ⁓ I something was really interesting in this where Citations actually ran a little bit ahead of mentions. That category, financial services, carries a lot of editorial media coverage. And the AI platforms are seemingly treating these publications as pretty authoritative. So brands are getting pulled into citations that are being used from these publications, even when the brand itself isn't the focus of the answer. Be a third party piece of content on an editorial page that includes information about the brand but doesn't talk about them in a marketing way. And then there's legal. I talked about in an inversion earlier. Legal is that the brands in legal services got mentioned, the brand mention was like less than one percent of relevant responses, which was low. But then they got cited ⁓ in ⁓ than in responses. So that is a 10x differential. What that tells us is the platforms, AI platforms, are actively using a lot of legal content to build their answers. And the content on the sites for these legal firms are doing a lot of work, but the firm behind the content almost never gets named, which means the brand, you know, it's we're not getting credit for any of it. So ⁓ stepping from that, the way I'd read about that issue is it's more of like an entity recognition program. Not an issue with good quality content on the website. So the content's obviously clearly good enough because it's getting cited, right? But what's missing is that there's not enough signals around that content that connects it to a specific brand identity that is clear enough for the AI to surface the attribution. Right. And the way to solve that is not to just produce more content, which if you are in the space where you're getting cited a lot, but your brand name's not coming up, it's probably What a lot of people are telling you to do. The answer is more about third-party content and getting your brand to co-occur with these topics. E-commerce showed the widest gap in actually the opposite direction. They're getting mentioned in almost one of five responses, and then they get cited in like maybe one of 20 or so. ⁓ those brands are recognized because of their marketplace presence and consumer familiarity, right? The AI knows that they exist. But owned is not being treated as you know referencing material. So recognition ⁓ and authority are like pretty much running independently ⁓ of other there. ⁓ And you e-commerce also is a lot more focused on transactional or commercial-based purchases versus legal, might be more around informational. So, One other thing I'd point out is that almost 90% of the brands in our data set actually didn't have any AI mentions at all in the first quarter of this year. So ⁓ I what that means is like for most companies and most categories, the window to build a really good, meaningful AI presence before the space gets really contested and heavily invested in is still pretty open. I don't know how long that's going to be true. I don't know how that's gonna stay true, but what I would say is right now. It is true. And it is absolutely something that brands need to be considering as they're determining where they want to be putting their budgets, whether it is to be reappropriating SEO budget or putting more budget towards the AI search program and continuing to push forward in their organic search program itself. So let's come back to where we started, which was is AEO just, you know, SEO by another name, or is it different? So, what our research shows and what we talked about today's episode is that the brands with the strongest AI visibility didn't really build some separate AEO program. they're the brands who took SEO programs ⁓ and clarity of Building their entity and associations between their brand and what they do in third-party content, seriously from the very beginning. And they built presence in content they don't own. And they did that with depth across the various types of topics that their buyers care about. And AI systems are asking questions about. So what's reassuring is that none of these are new requirements that AI Search just suddenly invented by existing. There are parts of search authority that have always been there, but the shallow and like metrics-chasing programs ⁓ and strategies, always skipping them. So the difference is that organic rankings really never expose the skipping. You could really hold good rankings and search through just strong technical optimization and through link acquisition. And you could do that without ever really building. strong third-party brand presence that these AI systems are now starting to reward. So the rankings looked healthy while the underlying authority just wasn't there yet because it was focused on something else. AI search is the thing that finally has made that gap visible, which is, you know, uncomfortable if you've been optimizing for ⁓ metric like domain authority or the total keyword you're ranking for instead of the thing that the metrics are supposed to represent. which is brand authority. So the honest, I would say, to today's episode, you know, has two halves. So AI search and SEO, they're not the same thing. in the sense that, you know, the same metrics cover both, or that, you know, organic rankings and the keywords that you rank for are going to tell you anything, you know, reliable about your AI visibility. They just don't. And you know, we just walked through a lot of that. But I would also say they're not two separate disciplines that need, two very different programs or two separate budgets. It's the same essentially underlying project, which is ⁓ this authority for your brand around the topics your buyers care about. ⁓ And just simply going to be measured across two different surfaces. And then when we look at brands with AI visibility gaps. It's almost always the same underlying issues. So you've got things like thin signals and a weak presence in third-party content. Usually these brands have shallow topic coverage on their site. Underneath that, they don't talk about all of the various areas that they should be. They're not publishing enough content. Those are SEO problems that really existed before AI search did. AI search is just, in my opinion, a new diagnostic that finally caught them. And now, because buyers are moving to those platforms, we have to do something about that. So if you're sitting there wondering whether you need a new budget or a new plan for AEO, probably not, right? What I would do instead is just get an honest audit of whether the existing program and SEO strategy that you're executing on is building the things that it actually claims to be building. ⁓ which should be around building brand authority. And start measuring your AI separately from your rankings because your rankings are going to tell you almost nothing about what's actually happening on the AI surfaces. So, as we wrap up today's episode, here's what I'd probably take into next day-to-day, your marketing meetings, as you're planning your budgets, as executives are asking you what we're going to do about AI search. first, I'd stop using ⁓ old SEO like domain authority or backlink counts as a proxy for doing work to gain more AI visibility. So the correlation that we talked about is essentially zero. So If your SEO reporting or your strategy is really leading with growing domain authority, it's just measuring something that has no predictive relationship to what's actually happening on the AI search surfaces. So I say definitely keep doing SEO. It is a very profitable platform still and will continue to be. We just need to stop using that number to judge whether the program is building AI visibility itself. And the second thing I would focus on. I would be tracking brand mention rate and I would be tracking AI citation rate. And I would also be tracking them separately from each other because they're different indicators for what we're doing well and what we're not doing well. So again, cited but not mentioned means that AI is using the content on your site, but doesn't know it's yours or can't associate you with other relevant sites that have content that talk about you. Mentioned but not cited means that it knows you exist, it can see third-party content, but it doesn't trust. your content itself on the site as a reference, which is a content authority and content depth problem. And then third, I'd go and audit your third party presence. I'd just be figuring out like how often are we showing up? Like, how often is our name showing up next to category topics and content that we do not own? Do we have review sites? Are we getting editorial coverage? Are there comparison pieces that are mentioning us? Are there industry reports? Are there people talking about us? Right. That is the strongest predictor in all of the research that we covered today. And There are a lot of programs that are not tracking it at all. I would say if you have not executed on a third-party content strategy that's not necessarily related to just link building, you need to get on that. And the reason is because this fourth point, the window is really open right now. like we said earlier, nine out of ten brands in our research didn't have any presence in AI. What that extrapolates into is like most categories, there's still a lot of room to get there. And if you can get there early, you're in a good position. the window is really open right now. like we said earlier, nine out of ten brands in our research didn't have any presence in AI. What that extrapolates into is like most categories, there's still a lot of room to there. And if you can get there early, you're in a good position. There's a lot of compounding patterns in the AI ⁓ in the HREF study that we talked about that says early movers are building a gap. And that gap is going to get a lot harder to close the longer that you wait. So if it were me and I was responsible for running a marketing program at a company, I would be trying to get something in motion in the next 90 days, not wait until the end of the year or not wait until next year. If you got something out of today's episode and if it was interesting to you, go ahead and follow the show so the next one ends up finding you as we publish more. That's it for this week's episode of The Search Signal. It's great to see you and we will see you again next week.