Algorithms change. Good marketing doesn’t. Build a company people know, remember, talk about, and ultimately seek out.
If you’re trying to make sense of SEO, AEO and GEO, join the club. We get asked some version of this almost every week: How does my company show up?
How do we rank higher on Google? Why aren’t we showing up in ChatGPT? What does Perplexity say about us? Do we need to optimize for AI now?
The acronyms aren’t helping. So here’s the simple version.
– SEO, Search Engine Optimization: Helping your company and content get found in traditional search.
– AEO, Answer Engine Optimization: Helping your content clearly answer the questions people are asking.
– GEO, Generative Engine Optimization: Helping your company and content get understood, referenced or surfaced in AI-generated answers.
Different acronyms. Lots of overlap.
Even Google says the fundamentals of SEO still apply to its generative AI experiences. Create useful, original content. Make your site accessible. Communicate clearly. Give people a good experience. Do the fundamentals well. Then zoom out.
Companies are now typing their industry’s questions into ChatGPT and treating the answer like a report card.
Why did our competitor show up and we didn’t?
Worth paying attention to? Yes. Worth obsessing over? Probably not.
Rand Fishkin and the team at SparkToro recently studied this very issue. They found that AI tools can produce remarkably different lists and ordering when asked the same recommendation question repeatedly. Their research suggests visibility across many prompts and runs can tell you something useful. A single “ranking” tells you considerably less.
Which brings us back to a marketing principle that’s more than 30 years old.
In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote about the Law of the Mind. The battle isn’t simply to be first in the marketplace. It’s to get into the customer’s mind.
They wrote that before Google. Before SEO. Before ChatGPT.
The goal of marketing isn’t to win an algorithm. It’s to make your company known. If you sell PCR reagents, of course you want to show up when someone searches “PCR reagents.”
But I’d rather have someone search ”[Your Company] PCR reagents.”
Now you’re not being discovered. You’re being sought out.
So how do you get there?
PR. Trade media. Conferences. Scientists speaking on stage. Publications. Partnerships. Webinars worth attending. Useful tools. Smart salespeople in the field. Customers talking to other customers. A point of view people remember. Seth Godin has long talked about being remarkable in the literal sense. Give people something worth making a remark about. And here’s the funny part. All of that can help your SEO, AEO and GEO too.
When publications mention you, experts cite you, customers talk about you and credible organizations link to you, you’re building evidence across the market that your company matters.
Machines may pick up those signals. More importantly, people do. So yes, understand SEO. Pay attention to AEO and GEO. Know whether you’re showing up. Fix the technical problems. Create useful content. Then move on.
Being discoverable is good. Being sought after is better.
Algorithms change. Good marketing doesn’t. Build a company people know, remember, talk about, and ultimately seek out.
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As the year comes to a close, we’re grateful for the work we’ve built together.