SEO, AEO, GEO & LLMs

In 2008 I was running SEO for GO Outdoors in the UK, fighting for rankings the old-fashioned way: content, structure, and a lot of patience. By 2010, Hitwise had it as the most visited outdoor retail site in the country. That win didn't come from tricking Google. It came from being genuinely clear about what we sold and who it was for, in a way both the algorithm and the customer could understand.

The mechanics have changed since then, but the underlying job hasn't. Search used to mean ten blue links and a fight for position one. Now it increasingly means an AI reading your site and deciding, on your behalf, whether you're worth mentioning at all. That's what AEO and GEO really are. The same discipline, aimed at a reader that happens to be a model instead of a person.

Here's the part most businesses get wrong: they write for the algorithm and hope a human reads it anyway. It should be the other way round.