What really changes when you’re moving away from traditional SEO to AEO? Or whatever you want to call it. In fact, the name should be the least of your concerns, as what each acronym covers is only slightly different from the others while keeping the same objective in mind: amplifying a company’s organic online visibility.

First, let’s start by answering the core question: not much, but it is more of a user behavior shift that leads to a KPI adjustment rather than something drastic like deleting all existing content and starting over.

Say the answer right away

It’s been many years since website content could get away with adding keywords without bringing any new information to the table. And if you’ve been doing SEO the right way, good content should already be in place and work as a basis for solid AI visibility.

There are some content changes worth making, though. AI crawlers — as I’ve told many of my clients, and they’ve gotten sick of hearing it this month — are like very lazy readers. They want the answer to their question as fast as possible. And this applies to every one of the most well-known engines out there, including Google, which has been pushing AI Overviews into more of its search results pages throughout 2025, with that expansion continuing around the time of the May core update.

Since AI crawlers want to see answers right away and work very quickly to deliver responses to their users, two elements seem to be getting their attention lately and have been working well across our clients:

• A question-based title that relates to what the user asked
• An intro that answers the question, followed by content that expands on it if the user wants a deeper explanation,  which AI will have to generate and put more effort into. 

If your content makes that easier and gives AI something it can trust, that’s where it will go.

The next change connects directly with this.

Conversation is the key

Do you remember when, back in 2015, we would type a few words into Google — many times without even using prepositions — just to find what we needed as fast as possible? That’s gone, at least for anyone who has been using AI for a while. 

AI is conversational, and because it handles hyper-specific queries fairly well, people are getting used to being both conversational and highly specific. This is especially true in B2B and manufacturing, where buyers are researching technical products, certifications, lead times, and custom capabilities long before they ever fill out a contact form.

To capture visibility on AI engines, your content needs to answer real user questions. Use the gaps in your favor: what are the most specific questions your potential customers ask you that they can’t easily find answers to online? For a manufacturer, that might be material tolerances, compliance standards, or the difference between two similar product lines. That’s where you should focus.

Human signals matter more than ever

Beyond that, Google is especially focused on distinguishing AI-generated slop from content with real human intervention. And as AI gets better at mimicking humans (despite still having verbal patterns a keener eye will catch after reading a few AI-generated pieces), crawlers increasingly rely on elements that showcase authority and genuine experience. That’s not entirely new — E-E-A-T, at least the acronym as we know it today, has been around since 2022. But more than ever, elements you could previously get away without in some markets, like author information and real authoritative sources, are showing especially strong signals of relevance in this new phase of proving authenticity.

This is actually an area where manufacturers have a natural advantage. Real engineers, product specialists, and technical experts make for far more credible authors than a generic content team and that kind of demonstrable expertise is exactly what both Google and AI engines are increasingly looking for. Author schema also helps signal that there’s a real person behind the content, but nothing beats having those signals on the page itself.

What about link building?

Traditional link building (backlinks placed on portals with a relevant authority score, low spam, and decent traffic) is only partially helpful now, particularly for non-Google AI engines. While backlinks continue to influence Google rankings, engines like ChatGPT Search and Gemini appear to weight brand mentions and real experiences surrounding a company more heavily than anchor-text-based link signals when making recommendations.

For manufacturers, this makes digital PR a natural extension of work that’s often already happening. Trade publication features, industry association mentions, case studies, and distributor relationships all generate the kind of brand signals that AI engines pay attention to. And as Google moves into a new era of generated summaries directly in search results, upgrading traditional link building with digital PR that still considers traditional factors has everything going for it.

No proof, but worth trying

As AI search becomes the norm, there has also been a race among SEO professionals to identify the technical elements that will give websites a strong footing in this new landscape. Theories are still being made and tested. One example is LLMs.txt — think of it as a robots.txt, but written for large language models instead of traditional crawlers. It’s still an emerging standard and not every AI engine reads it yet, but it signals that you’re taking AI accessibility seriously.

There are also classic schema markups. There is some evidence that well-structured, schema-marked content helps Google’s systems surface pages in AI Overviews, although Google pulled back on showing FAQ rich results for most sites in 2023, making this a less reliable strategy than it once was. For non-Google AI engines, there is no clear evidence of their impact on visibility.

Overall, both are worth implementing, as neither will have a negative effect. In the worst case, based on what we know today, they simply do nothing.

The biggest shift is in your KPIs

Other elements we know well from traditional SEO remain unchanged: creating individual pages for different products and services, maintaining a crawlable website with a well-organized hierarchy, good performance and mobile-friendliness, publishing relevant blog posts in your niche — all of that stays the same.

All these strategic shifts and changes in user behavior have also changed what having a website means. More than a session-driving tool, a website is now your key to making your brand present in AI responses. So no, it hasn’t become useless in this new phase of the internet, its content will just be consumed differently.

What must change from 2026 onwards are expectations. If users are seeing the information they need right on the results page, especially for top-of-funnel searches, it’s natural that your click-through rate will drop for those types of queries. And here’s the reframe worth internalizing: top-of-funnel content isn’t failing when it gets zero clicks, it’s succeeding if your brand is the one being cited.

For manufacturers in particular, where the sales cycle is long, and buyers do extensive research before ever making contact, being present in AI responses during that research phase is genuinely valuable, even if it never shows up as a session in Google Analytics. Traffic can no longer be the primary KPI. Elements like brand mentions and website citations should take the spotlight instead, especially when you have competitor data to use as a benchmark, as SEMrush enables today. And of course, never lose sight of the real goal: business success, whether that means new contracts, RFQ submissions, or distributor inquiries.