Adobe's purchase of SEO giant SEMrush wasn't just about search. The core strategic rationale is to pivot SEMrush's massive existing customer base and market position towards the new frontier of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), ensuring companies appear favorably in LLM responses.
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Effective Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) isn't about traditional keywords. It requires creating hundreds of niche content variations to match conversational queries. Furthermore, it involves a targeted "citation" strategy, focusing on getting mentioned on platforms with direct data licensing deals with specific LLMs (e.g., Reddit for ChatGPT), as these are prioritized sources.
Businesses excelling at traditional SEO can still be invisible to AI-powered search engines. AI prioritizes structured data (schema) and directory signals differently than Google's algorithm. A separate strategy for "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO) is now required.
Following SEO, App Store Optimization, and social virality, the next major distribution channel is AI answer engines. Product teams must now strategize how to get their brand, features, and knowledge base indexed and surfaced in AI responses, making AEO a critical growth lever for the modern era.
Instead of treating Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) as an experimental project requiring new budget, leading brands are reallocating funds from underperforming paid ads and traditional SEO. This strategy allows them to act immediately and gain a first-mover advantage while competitors are delayed by internal budget approval processes.
Traditional SEO requires significant time to build domain authority, making it a mid-stage game. AEO bypasses this; a startup can get mentioned in citations like Reddit or YouTube and immediately start appearing in LLM answers, allowing them to compete with incumbents from day one.
With 80-90% of AI-powered searches resulting in no clicks, traditional SEO is dying. The new key metric is "share of voice"—how often your brand is cited in AI-generated answers. This requires a fundamental strategy shift to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), focusing on becoming an authoritative source for LLMs rather than just driving website traffic.
You.com CEO Richard Socher predicts a new marketing motion where companies market directly to LLMs. As AI agents increasingly make purchasing decisions and consume information, optimizing content for AI consumption will become as critical as traditional SEO.
Unlike traditional SEO where the top link wins, in LLMs, the answer is a summary of many sources. The brand mentioned most frequently across all citations is most likely to be recommended, even if it's not the top-ranked source. This changes the strategy from ranking to saturation.
The primary channel for discovery is shifting from search engines (SEO) to AI-powered "answer engines" like ChatGPT. Product Managers are now responsible for this new distribution channel, requiring a strategy to ensure their brands and products surface in AI-generated responses.
In the era of zero-click AI search, driving website traffic is less important than being cited as an authority within LLM responses. Marketers must now optimize content to appear in places like Reddit and G2, as these are the sources AI models use to formulate answers and build credibility.
