A lot of “expert” marketers and LinkedIn gurus are claiming that SEO is dead and it's been replaced by AEO or GEO. No, it hasn’t. This is a deliberately confusing tactic designed to make business owners panic and instill FOMO. The reality is that the tenets of online visibility and growth are still what work; all that’s needed is a little tweak.
Why "AI Search" Is Misleading and NOT a New Game
The Misconception: AI Search Isn't Actually a Separate Thing
The biggest misconception I hear in conversations about AI search (GEO/AEO) vs SEO is that AI Search is some new animal that plays by its own rules and will replace Googling. It isn't. Underneath it all is still SEO. The same fundamentals that got a page ranked three years ago are still what's doing the work now.
The confusion starts because many AI models don't browse the web using Google. ChatGPT, for example, uses Microsoft Bing and Anthropic’s Claude uses a lesser-known web browser called Brave Search. They're pulling from different indexes, with different crawlers, and from sources that are different from what Google would find. So when people see a chatbot give them an answer instead of a list of blue links, they assume something fundamentally different just happened. But it really comes down to a change in the delivery mechanism while the underlying logic remained.
Those LLM.txt Files You Keep Hearing About
I recently published a post about how models actually browse the web, and one thing that came up in the research is worth repeating directly: these models don't read LLM.txt files. I don't say that lightly. People have been sold on embedding these files like it's some secret handshake that gets your site recognized by AI systems. It’s a lie. It isn't. This is just a weird marketing ploy to get people to use other people's services and products. Somebody built a product around the idea, gave it a technical-sounding name, and now it's floating around as received wisdom. If you want to understand how AI search engines actually work, start from the fact that most of what's being marketed as an "AI SEO hack" right now doesn't touch the thing that determines whether you show up anywhere.
What AI Overviews Actually Pull From
What actually matters is this: AI Overviews cite their sources, and when you look at those sources, they're pulling from the same places a regular search was always pulling from. They're not digging up page ten of a search result and surfacing some obscure blog nobody's seen. They're still pulling from the first few pages, and that's the goal it's always been.
Ranking on page one is still the target. Realistically, if you're sitting in the top two or three pages, you're still in the game, because most people stop searching before they get much further than that. And if you can hit an AI Overview, that's genuinely the best outcome available right now, because a lot of the time people don't scroll past it. They read the summary, they get their answer, and they continue on. If they click a link, it’s one the AI overview has recommended or one in the first few SERPs. AI Overviews and SEO aren't two separate systems competing for attention. One is feeding directly off the other.
Expertise Is Still the Only Lever That Works
What SEO really comes down to, apart from trying to answer people's real questions, is sharing your knowledge and expertise. That's it. That's the whole game, dressed up in a lot of technical language that makes it sound more complicated than it is.
Valuable content that actually answers something a person is searching for is what gets picked up, by traditional search and by AI systems pulling from the same pool of results. This is where systems built around your actual expertise start to matter, because the bottleneck for most business owners isn't knowing their industry. It's finding a way to consistently get that knowledge out of their head and onto a page in a form that search engines and, therefore AI models, can both find and trust.
I keep coming back to this because it's the one thing that doesn't change no matter how the delivery mechanism shifts. AI search vs SEO isn't really a fight between two systems. It's the same fight it's always been: do you have something real to say, and are you saying it consistently.
The One Mistake That Actually Will Hurt You
There is one immediate risk in all of this, and it's not AI replacing your SEO: it's inadvertently blocking your site from search crawlers and AI search bots. If you block them, you won't surface anywhere—not in standard search results, and not in AI Overviews or answer engines.
Review your robots.txt file to ensure search bots (like Googlebot and Bingbot) and live-retrieval bots (like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot) have access to your key pages. You can still block offline AI training scrapers if you want to protect your content, but you must keep the door open for discovery and retrieval.
I bring this up because it's the real mistake worth worrying about, not the imaginary one. Business owners spend energy panicking about AI killing their rankings while, somewhere in their site settings, a crawler restriction is quietly making sure nothing they publish ever gets seen by anyone, human or machine. That's the fire worth putting out. Everything else is noise.
What to Actually Do If You're Worried About This
If you're a business owner worried about AI killing your SEO, you don't really have to worry about it. I know that sounds strange in a post about AI and search, but it's true. Does SEO still matter with AI in the picture? Yes, in almost the exact same form it always has.
The best thing to do is keep publishing content, formatted to answer real questions, and just keep putting it out there. That's not a clever strategy; it's just the actual answer. Consistency is king here.
One thing worth considering is diversifying where that content lives, spreading it across a few channels instead of putting everything in one basket but all linking back to one source of truth; your website.
Publishing Consistently Beats Chasing the Next AI Trick
I understand why the panic shows up. AI changes something visible almost every month, and when the interface changes, it feels like the rules underneath must have changed too. They haven't, not in the way that matters for a business owner trying to get found. Expertise surfaces. Tricks don't.
If the actual lever is publishing real, expertise-driven content consistently, the practical problem becomes finding the time to do it without it eating your week. That's exactly what a system built to keep that content flowing is for, turning what you already know into the kind of content that keeps showing up on page one, month after month, without you having to sit down and write it yourself.
If you're still not sure whether any of this applies to your situation, it's worth a conversation, and I'm happy to have it.
