Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the kind of term that moves through marketing feeds until everyone feels like they need a take on it, a framework for it, or a playbook that proves they understood it first. The conversation has been building for a while now, and with it, a familiar rush to claim the new strategy before the dust has settled.
But AEO isn't new. It's been part of good SEO practice for years. The language changed and the interfaces changed, but the underlying principle didn't: if your content is useful, clearly structured, grounded in genuine expertise, and aligned with what people are actually trying to understand, it gets found. It always has.
What shifted is where the finding happens.
What I Was Actually Doing in 2023
When I started experimenting with ChatGPT in early 2023, I wasn't thinking about optimization strategy. I was curious about the tool: what it could do, where it fell short, and where it might actually be useful. Over time, feeding context into these tools probably helped in some ways. But when I look back at what produced the most meaningful visibility, it wasn't anything engineered specifically for AI.
It was the SEO work we had already been doing for years.
Six years before AI search became a topic of conversation, I joined a bootstrapped tech startup as the first marketing hire. The company built software for internet service providers, a niche technical space with a long sales cycle and a small total addressable market. The team was under twenty people. No existing sales function. Limited budget. The company had made the unusual decision to invest in marketing before building out sales, which meant every dollar and every hour had to be deliberate.
We were lean and resourceful by necessity. Webinars. Lead magnets. A few trade shows. But one of the most consequential investments we made was in blog content: a low-cost, compounding way to explain how things worked, reach the specific audience we were trying to connect with, and take complex technical ideas and make them accessible to people who needed to understand them before they'd ever agree to a conversation.
That work built something more durable than traffic. It built authority.
And that authority is what I believe later translated into stronger search presence, and yes, into citations inside AI tools, not because we had engineered for it, but because we had spent years creating content worth referencing.
Why the Current Conversation Misses the Point
A lot of the AEO discourse right now is focused on tactics: how to get cited by ChatGPT, how to structure content for Perplexity, how to feed brand information into AI systems so they surface you favorably. Some of that is worth understanding. But it skips a more fundamental question.
Why would an AI tool cite you in the first place?
The answer is the same one that determined why Google ranked you: because your content was useful, credible, well-organized, and trusted by enough other sources over enough time to signal authority. Answer engines don't create new standards for what makes content worth surfacing. They apply the existing ones through a different interface.
The businesses chasing an AEO shortcut are largely chasing the same shortcut that SEO shortcuts produced: short-term noise, limited compounding value, and eventual irrelevance when the algorithm catches up. The businesses that will be found consistently are the ones that have been doing the unglamorous work of building genuine expertise in public, over time, in a format that's actually useful to the people looking for answers.
What Is Actually Changing
None of this means nothing is shifting. The way people search is changing. The way answers get surfaced, summarized, and cited is different from a list of blue links. The bar for what gets surfaced in an AI response is arguably higher than what got ranked on page one, because the model has to be confident enough in the source to stake the answer on it.
That raises the stakes for content quality, not lowers them.
The risk isn't that blog content becomes irrelevant. The risk is that the internet fills with AI-generated content that all says the same things in slightly different configurations, and the signal-to-noise ratio collapses. More publishing doesn't produce more authority. More AI-assisted writing doesn't produce more trust. In an environment saturated with generated content, the content that still gets found will be the content that was worth finding: specific, grounded, written by someone who actually understands the topic.
That's a higher bar than a lot of teams are currently clearing, and it's going to matter more as the volume keeps rising.
The Real Work Hasn't Changed
AEO, at its core, asks the same thing SEO has always asked: be genuinely useful to the people looking for answers in your space, earn trust over time, and structure your knowledge in ways that are accessible and clear. The format may evolve. The surface where discovery happens may shift. But usefulness, authority, and credibility are still the inputs that produce visibility: in search engines, in AI tools, and in whatever comes next.
The startup I joined didn't have a strategy for being cited by AI. We had a strategy for being useful to a specific audience consistently over time. Years later, that work was still compounding.
That's the playbook. It was never really replaced. It just got a new spotlight.
Want more practical approaches like this? Explore my curated library of AI tools, prompts, and workflows at resources.taneilcurrie.com