There's a whole industry built on panicking you about AI search. AEO, GEO, LLMO, a fresh acronym every quarter, everyone shouting that the rules changed and you're already behind. I've been building and fixing websites for thirty years, I read all of it, and I can tell you the honest version fits on one page. Here it is — the whole thing, short enough to read before your coffee's cold.
What actually changed, in one paragraph
Search stopped being about ranking and started being about getting mentioned. Google and the AI tools answer questions right there on the page now, so “be number one on a list” matters less, and “be the thing the answer is made of” matters more. The people who do still come through from an AI tend to show up already half-decided — the machine did the convincing. Your old SEO isn't dead; it's the floor this all stands on. That's the entire shift. Everything below is what to do about it.
The short list
1. Go look. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI box and ask it the question your best customer asks right before they hire someone like you. Not your name — the question. Did it name you? A competitor? Make something up? That's your starting line, and almost none of your competitors have bothered to check it.
2. Answer first on your best page. Rewrite the top two sentences of your most important page to lead with the actual answer instead of the windup. The AI weighs the start of a passage most heavily — and so does a human skimming on their phone. One page, two sentences.
3. Get named somewhere that isn't your site. The AI trusts what lots of independent sources agree on. Get onto one “best [your thing] in [your place]” list you're missing from, or answer one real question, genuinely, in a community where your customers actually hang out. Helpful, not spammy — the kind of answer you'd give a friend.
4. Check you're not hiding by accident. Ask your web person two things: “Are we blocking any AI crawlers?” and “Does our site work without JavaScript?” Some sites are switched, by default, to be invisible to AI. If they don't understand the question, that's its own answer.
5. Make the invisible traffic visible. Add “How did you hear about us?” to your contact or checkout form. AI traffic hides itself in your analytics, and this one free question is the only reliable way to catch it. Do this one even if you do nothing else.
The part to remember
You don't need to become an AEO expert. The acronym will change again — it always does. What doesn't change is needing someone who reads the noise so you don't have to, and tells you the short list. Do these five. That's the floor, and the floor is most of the game.
Now — there's one move I left out of the short version because it deserves more than a paragraph: actually going and watching the AI recommend your competitors, then tracing back the exact sources it trusts so you know precisely where to show up. It's the single most useful afternoon you can spend on this, and I walk through it step by step in the full guide.
The full version — with the why behind each move and the afternoon audit that turns all of this into a short, specific list with your name on it — is here: AEO Without the Hype. Pay what you want.