Article
To win at AEO, you need to be more human
August 14, 2026
AI search is dominating the landscape. No matter which data you look at, you’ll see that more and more people are turning to their favorite AI chatbot to look for things, rather than their favorite search engine. Even the average Joe who just uses Google will see the top of their page filled with AI summaries, rather than links. This has led many in the field of SEO to start chasing a new Holy Grail: Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO for short.
Instead of chasing the ranking, the idea is to start chasing the citation. If the LLM isn’t citing your company when users are asking the agent questions related to your business, then that’s something that’s gotta be fixed. But how exactly do we do that?
There are a slew of recommendations online. How evergreen this advice is remains to be seen. But there is one data point that highlights a key distinction between traditional search and AI search. This distinction will, I believe, point us to a principle that works for SEO, AEO, and beyond.
According to SOCi , the average LLM search is 23 words. Contrast that with the average traditional search of 4 words. Additionally, Semrush found that between 65–85% of ChatGPT prompts couldn’t be matched to any traditional search keyword in their database. What does this mean? It means that the way we use AI to search is quite different from the olden days.
This data makes perfect sense once we reflect on how we use tools like ChatGPT to search for stuff. For example, recently I was looking to book a massage. Before AI, I would’ve just searched “best massage place near me.” Now, with ChatGPT, I ask it “what is the best massage place in Las Vegas that offers a lymphatic drainage massage and sauna for under $150. give me 3 options.”
Putting aside my diva-esque ask, notice how specific the search had gotten. Before AI, I would have had to do the legwork of looking through websites, calling folks, and figuring out which place was right for me. In many cases, I would’ve just settled for whatever seemed okay. But now that AI makes it faster than ever to look for exactly what I want, that’s what I go for. And that is how many people use search now.
So what does this mean for your business? It means being the one at the end of that highly specific search funnel. LLMs are built for predicting the next word in a sentence. Let’s say you’re a marketing firm, and someone searches “what is the best marketing firm for a company of under 50 people and a budget of less than $500k”. Is the next word in the conversation the name of your business? Why? Why not?
Maybe it’s because you’re legitimately not the one that’s right for them. That may not necessarily be a bad thing. Or maybe you are the one, and they don’t know it yet. Or maybe they are the one for you, and you don’t know it yet. Figuring out these questions will be the key to your success. And AI will not help you answer these.
Why not? At the end of the day, you need to know exactly what your company is and exactly who you are trying to serve. This requires vision and empathy, human qualities which LLMs will never have.
On the topic of vision — LLMs don’t have this, literally or figuratively. Their prediction models might give you a good picture of what your company is today, but they will do a poor job of what your company could be tomorrow. To know the map, you have to know the landscape. You must know your company’s essence, its raison d’etre. These are qualities that words are very good at pointing towards, but not embodying. For this you must need a human body, with eyes to see, and a heart to feel, a conscious force that seeks to imprint upon the world its own ideas of how it can serve others.
On the topic of empathy — again, a feature that an LLM will fail to obtain. This goes hand in hand with the vision of the company: who are you trying to serve? Why? How does it feel to be the one with the problems you are trying to fix? Note that the old adage “you can’t please everyone” is highly relevant here. Your audience, your userbase, your customers, whatever you wish to call them, should be a very particular set of people with particular issues. In this highly digitized and abstracted world, how pleasant a feeling it is to be seen. How great is it to find someone at the other end of the LLM search funnel, someone who has exactly what you need? You should strive to be that person, and to be that person, you must have the empathy to know who it is that’s looking for you.
This strategy, by the way, is no new thing. It’s how genuinely good products begin to rise, through word of mouth. With the advent of marketing, there are those who have used their capital to inflate their sense of worth, whether it be adspend on billboards, commercials, SEO. But then there are those companies who have plodded on slowly, creating highly specific products for very specific uses, garnering pleasant reputations in the process.
Take the General Pencil Company, for instance. A family owned company established in 1860, their most prominent product is, you guessed it, pencils. They primarily serve artists, and have excellent products, such as their brush cleaner and preserver. You can be sure that this product will appear at the end of an LLM search if you’re a miniature painting hobbyist looking for a cheap, high quality brush cleaner (I would know, because I am this person that uses that product). You likely would never have heard of this company or this product, unless you are the very specific person in need of such a thing.
Thanks to AI, these humble niche companies are easier than ever to find. And being the right company for the right person has the double benefit of being resilient to whatever comes next for how we find things. Will the cameras on our devices sense our facial features and body temperature to recommend us the perfect product to ease or complement our mood? Will quantum computing predict what we want before we know it after uttering only a few words to the speakers in our Jarvis-style smart-homes? As it becomes easier and easier to find exactly what someone needs, it will be more and more important to be exactly what a particular someone needs. But to do that, you need to know who you are, and who you’re trying to connect to. In other words, you need to be more human.
