Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big part of modern business. SEO refers to how an organization curates content and attracts audiences through search engines (such as Google).
Whether or not the organization likes it, this practice determines many ways content is written and formatted, and businesses are often at the mercy of search engine preferences. Many companies have an entire team dedicated to SEO, but they may have to create room for new roles.
Techradar Pro I attended Hubspot's Inbound Conference and spoke with Hubspot's Amanda Kopen, manager of AI Search and interactive experiences, to find out what different digital marketing will look like in the near future.
It will always evolve
“Well, in traditional SEO, there were only a handful of tactics,” explains Kopen.
Searches are changing and the way people access their information is evolving, so there is also the strategy that organizations use to sell their products and services. Instead of focusing solely on SEO, organizations should also utilize AEO (AI Engine Optimization or Response Engine Optimization, depending on who they ask).
“AEO borrows a lot of basic SEO tactics, but it also helps to educate people about how the AI engine is accessing its content. You want them to be visible; Chatgpt, Gemini, et Cetera.”
Consumers have not relied solely on Google, which has effectively dominated searches in recent years. This is a serious way of disrupting the landscape and threatening to rewrite everything the SEO team has relied on for years.
“With SEO, I really cared about rankings and wanted to build permissions through backlinks. I wanted to have high quality content that is crawlable and indexable. All of this is very important,” she explains.
“But we also need to take advantage of AEO best practices. Not only are the queries, but we also need to achieve hyper-specific personalization as queries have been fan-outed to a ton of questions.”
New content
To create successful content that suits both SEO and AEO, teams need to be aware of their own voice. Most organizations use AI to generate SEO and AEO weighted content, but companies need to train their models using their own models. My own Content to ensure style and tone are established.
“What you want to do with AEO is to really reinforce the story that interests you in your business,” says Kopen.
“That information comes, so it's important. [from] Somewhere. You can hallucinate based on Reddit, Quora and review sites. [or] It can come from you. So it's really, really important to repeat and talk about your business the way you want to know. ”
To help customers deal with this, HubSpot has developed an AEO grader. This is a free tool to evaluate your organization's entire company.
“Instead of looking at a business or website specifically, enter information, location, industry, business name and show emotions to multiple different AI engines, visibility, and competitors,” explains Kopen.
Tasks can be challenging, Kopen admits, but building on existing SEO knowledge is a great place to get started. “I think it's good to be constantly looking at resources, thought leaders, SEO spaces,” she says.
AI won't go anywhere anytime soon, so organizations employing AEO tactics will have a serious start when it comes to digital visibility – especially when using multiple platforms to push messages.
“It's really important to have high AI literacy because this is the path of the future,” she concludes. “You and your human experience are your superpowers, but you can speed up your efficiency through AI.”
