Is AI visibility just SEO with a fancy name?

In this episode

• Why SEO and AI visibility aren’t the same thing — but SEO isn’t dead
• Running SEO and AEO/GEO in parallel, and merging the two systems
• The AI-visibility practices you overlay: definition blocks, way more FAQs, restructured product and category pages
• The big lift — third-party citations and activating your PR arm (Reddit, reviews, industry publications)
• The technical plumbing nobody saw coming: schema and llms.txt

Transcript

Recorded as a voice note — lightly cleaned for readability.

They’re not the same thing. But, like, SEO isn’t dead — like you see some people post. It’s now run in parallel with AEO and GEO.

So the AI visibility — for example, we’re still implementing SEO best practices into my clients’ work. We’re still monitoring keyword rankings and optimizing blog posts and things like that. But we’re overlaying the best practices and principles of AI visibility on top.

So that means we’re adding in the definition blocks I’ve talked about in my blogs before. We’re adding in more FAQs than any content marketer thought was normal before. And then revisiting how we have different pages structured — like your product pages or your category pages.

And then the big part — the big piece that I think is kind of the “how am I gonna find time to do all of this?” — is implementing more of the third-party citations. Or, like, owning those in a way, even though you can’t really own them. Because AI platforms love to use sites like Reddit, or product reviews, or industry publications and things like that.

So really activating your PR arm if you have one in your company — or just kind of putting that cap on and starting to think: how can we be included in these publications? How can we enter the conversation and share about our product and service there? That’s a big part of AEO/GEO that you’re not going to bring your SEO into.

So I kind of rambled there for a bit, but — TL;DR — they are not the same thing. However, you’re not just throwing your SEO out the window. What I do is run them in parallel and merge the two systems in all of the content planning, and when I do AI visibility blueprints for new sites. So it’s really run in parallel — which marketers probably don’t like to hear, because that means, “oh, I have to run an entirely different system in parallel with what I already do.”

So yeah, I hope that helps. I feel like this is opening a different can of worms, or it’s an entirely different question — but there’s also a list of things I personally never thought I’d be doing as a marketer that I would’ve handed a developer a few years ago. That’s optimizing your schema, your llms.txt, and things like that — the more technical “plumbing” stuff that helps AI platforms read what you have and understand it so they can cite it accurately. So that’s further away from your question about SEO, but it’s a very important piece of AI visibility.