The New SEO: How Customers Find You in the Age of AI | Leave a comment
Most organisations or businesses have a website. Essentially a place for customers to find you and with any luck buy from you.
How do you attract customers to your website?
The challenge in business has always been, how do YOU, ATTRACT, customers to YOUR website and then when they are there how do you get them to buy?
For many years now, marketers and business owners the world over, have been utilising a plethora of marketing tactics, helping to keep their brand top of mind.
How do you keep your brand top of mind?
Essential to keeping your brand top of mind, is in fact understanding how your customers find you in the first place? Do they find you on the high street? Therefore you need decent footfall to make a living. If you are online, how do people find you? And again, marketing tactics help drive traffic towards YOUR website with a view to buying your goods or services. Here is an article I previously wrote on the 7P’s of Marketing
What drives traffic to your website?
Social media, is a huge driver of traffic to a website, so is Google My Business and of course you have the no. 1 search engine in the world, Google itself. The question for your business is? Is your business on the first page of Google search when customers look for you? And if you are not, they literally will not find you to buy from you.
Why is SEO important?
With this in mind, for a long time now, companies and businesses have used SEO, that is to say search engine optimisation, to help rank their business as high as possible on Google Search, therefore guaranteeing customers and more profit. This I might add is only one aspect of the marketing mix, but an important one and for the purposes of this article, it is important, because in November, 2022, we had the advent of ChatGPT, AI and so the world tilted and changed towards AI search.
So again, do you know HOW your customers find you? And in fact, WILL your customers find you?
The truth is without marketing, you are potentially the same as a website or a shop sitting in a field with no road leading to it and no way for people to find you and to buy from you.
As you know, SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, has done much of the heavy lifting by helping your website rank on Google and in doing so helping people to find your business.
How many searches are there on Google per day?
The scale of the opportunity to be found on Google is enormous. Google processes approximately 13.6 to 13.7 billion searches per day. Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/google-searches-per-day Source: https://sqmagazine.co.uk/google-search-statistics/
But something fundamental has shifted.
Search is no longer just about finding links. It is now also about getting answers.
That is where AEO and GEO come in.
What is AEO? What is GEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It means optimising your content so your brand is included in AI generated answers on platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI reviews, Gemini and Perplexity.
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. It is the broader evolution of this work, making sure your brand shows up across generative AI platforms and answer engines as people increasingly ask questions in natural language rather than typing in short search terms.
In simple terms, SEO helps you get found. AEO and GEO help you get chosen.
And this matters commercially.
How much traffic does AI search send to a website?
Webflow has reported that AI driven traffic converts at approximately 6x the rate of non branded organic traffic. Source: https://gtmnow.com/gtm-166-seo-to-aeo-answer-engine-optimization-guy-yalif/
Adobe has also reported that AI referred visitors are more engaged, viewing more pages and showing lower bounce rates than traditional traffic sources. Source: https://business.adobe.com/resources/sdk/.2026-q2-ai-traffic-report/q2-2026-adi-ai-sourced-traffic-insights.pdf Source: https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-explosive-rise-of-generative-ai-referral-traffic
This is high intent, decision stage traffic. The kind every business, charity and organisation should care about.
What has changed is this.
Google used to index pages and rank them.
Explain how AI Search or AEO works?
Now AI systems extract information, assess credibility and synthesise answers.
And within those answers, they decide which brands are worth mentioning.
That means you are no longer just competing for position on a page.
You are competing to be included in the answer itself.
If your content is unclear, weak, outdated or poorly structured, AI may not cite you at all. Worse still, it may cite your competitor instead.
So yes, SEO still matters. Very much so.
But SEO alone is no longer enough.
AEO and GEO are now of equal and emerging importance for any organisation that wants to be visible, credible and commercially relevant in this next phase of digital discovery.
If you are not sure what to do, and don’t want to miss out on potential customers, send me a message, I have two spots available to help organisations with their AEO. In any case, I hope you enjoyed the article.
Have a great week.
Emma D
