AEO = SEO? Or is something more needed?

by | 19 Mar, 2026 | Structures & Models | 0 comments

The Conspiracy Theory MemeI’m seeing more and more people realise that “AEO” (Answer Engine Optimisation”) is just SEO in new clothes. But are GenAI outputs even something you can optimise for?

These systems don’t just read what you publish and serve up the most relevant parts – they synthesise it, blending multiple sources based on patterns they infer across a wider field of signals:

– everything you publish
– everything others publish about you
– everything they consider adjacent or comparable

They’re also not just looking at what’s being said now. They’re conflating and combining the accumulated traces of how your organisation expresses itself over time – across campaigns, content, product information and everything in between.

Repetition and consistency may help, but they won’t just pick up what you intend. They absorb whatever is most legible – including contradictions, gaps, and overlap with competitors.

If your positioning isn’t distinctive, you’ll get flattened into the category. If your communication isn’t coherent, the model will reconstruct a version of your brand from whatever patterns it can find. And when it comes to facts and details – where accuracy actually matters – these systems are still unreliable enough to pose a real risk.

This is where a focus on structured data starts to look like a promising way forward. That was my first assumption. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this isn’t going to be enough.

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The key is to remember that these systems don’t *understand* information. They generate outputs by following probabilistic sequences – patterns shaped by the data they’ve seen.

It’s a sophistiated form of word association. Structure helps, but only where it clarifies those patterns to nudge the model to follow the path you’d prefer.

Over time, what you’re really creating – deliberately or not – is a set of associations the LLM learns to treat as related. What we’d normally think of as a brand “narrative” sits inside that – not as something the model understands directly, but as a pattern of connections it learns to reproduce.

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This means “AEO” should be considered less about optimising individual outputs, and more about the long-term shape of the signals you generate – across teams, markets and years.

I’ve been doing some work on this recently, trying to make that problem more tangible and diagnosable in practice. Still early, but the direction of travel feels clearer.

The brands that show up well won’t just be the ones optimising for visibility. They’ll be the ones whose overall pattern of behaviour is coherent enough that even a probabilistic system can’t easily misread what they are.

Review: Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, by Debbie Millman

by | 8 Mar, 2026 | Narratives & Meanings | 0 comments

2/5 stars

Brand thinking? Groupthinking more like…

As this is a book of fairly straightforward, slightly gushing interviews with various people from the world of marketing, this would today have worked much better as a podcast. In this format it feels pretty repetitive as well as being dated (first published in 2011, with some of the focus on social media as if it’s new and Apple as if it’s a challenger brand feeling really rather quaint.

There probably were some actively thought-provoking points made somewhere in here, but everyone blurred into one in the end. so I have no idea who said what, and nothing really stood out – except the guy who was very vocal about his dislike of Daniel Kahneman and the idea of Behavioural Economics.

Of course, these “insights” may have seemed more radical 15 years ago. And for newcomers to marketing they still might.

But it’s notable how much of what’s said here sounds fine in theory but feels very hard to turn into tangible takeaways that people trying to build brands themselves could actually use. It mostly all ends up sounding like fluff and cod psychology. You can see how marketing and branding ended up getting a bit of a bad name if this is the best they had to offer.

Then again, maybe it’s because pretty much everyone featured here is American? As Mark Ritson – today’s leading marketing advocate – keeps saying, American marketing and advertising hasn’t been particularly sophisticated for decades.

In short, useful to read if in the profession, but there’s very little surprising, practical or inspiring here. It’s mostly pretty obvious platitudes.