Sure, Good SEO Gets You 90% There. The Other 10% Breaks Everything.
The common wisdom on LinkedIn right now is that optimizing for LLMs (whether you call it GEO, AEO, AISEO, of whatever) is all just best practices for SEO. For example, Lily Ray’s LinkedIn Pulse article makes the point that most LLM mentions are because big brands already had huge brand visibility and good SEO. (That…
Blog vs. Docs vs. Calculator: Picking the Forms AI Actually Uses
Good ideas die in the wrong container. You publish a thoughtful blog post; answer engines surface a competitor’s 200-word glossary entry and a crisp comparison table. Nothing’s “wrong” with your writing—the format just doesn’t match the job the reader (and the model) is trying to do. The fix for things like this used to be…
A Real-World Guide to AEO Pricing (and Why Almost Nobody Posts Their Rates)
Here’s the blunt truth: Answer/Generative Engine Optimization (AEO/GEO) pricing is all over the map. You’ll see one-off “optimize this page for AI answers” offers under $200, productized AEO packages in the low hundreds, mid-market retainers in the low thousands, and enterprise GEO programs in the high four to low five figures per month. That variability…
Why Generative AI Loves Reddit, and What Brands Can Learn from It
I was once tasked with making a negative Reddit post about a small business disappear from search results. At the time, several targeted Google searches for this company would surface a negative Reddit post as the number one result. It took me about five minutes of research to realize that my goal was out of…
The Top 6 AEO Firms in the Midwest
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or LLM Optimization (LLMO)—is the next frontier for digital visibility. As search engines evolve into answer engines, showing up in Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, or even ChatGPT-style responses requires more than keyword strategy. It demands structured data, content built for AI consumption, and the ability…
The Matthew Effect: Why AI Search Loves Big Brands (and What You Can Actually Do About It)
We’re used to it now: You type a question into Google, and instead of the familiar list of blue links, you’re met with an AI-generated answer at the very top. It names two or three companies. They’re not necessarily the most insightful. They’re usually the biggest. That’s the Matthew Effect at work — the idea…
How AI Models Actually Pick Their Sources (And Why Your Content Gets Ignored)
AI has been responsible for its share of anxiety in marketers these days. But here’s a new kind of question I’ve been hearing recently: Why did ChatGPT cite that competitor’s blog and not mine? Or worse: Why does Perplexity pull a random Reddit thread instead of my meticulously optimized white paper? The assumption is that…
How to Write Content That Works with Prompts
Talk about a moving target. SEO has always been fluid as technology and user behavior evolve, and it continues to do so today: With the rise of artificial intelligence, those tried-and-true optimizations for Google are no longer enough. So, what’s next for your content? Whether you call it AI SEO, or maybe AEO (AI Engine…
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