AI Is Reshaping Search and AEO Is the Future of SEO

October 31, 2025 • Written by Drew Tendero

People keep saying that SEO is dead because “everyone is now searching for everything in AI-powered apps like ChatGPT or Perplexity.” However, that narrative is simply not true — and honestly, it doesn’t make much sense when you consider the history of SEO. Let’s break it down.

Sure, people used to Google everything (well, many of us still do), and now they “ChatGPT” every random question that pops into their heads. But SEO is still very much alive. If it weren’t, how do you think certain websites show up while others don’t — whether you’re searching on Google or through AI-driven platforms? The truth is, SEO isn’t dying; the way we search online is simply evolving. Again.

SEO has always been a moving target, adapting as search engines get smarter. As users become more aware about what counts as high-quality information versus clickbait, platforms like Google update their algorithms accordingly. Today, with AI-powered apps dominating attention, Google is showcasing AI-generated summaries to help people find answers faster. This shift is often referred to as AEO or AIEO.

While this user-first approach makes searching easier, it also brings new challenges for developers and marketers who were used to get high click-through rates even when ranking in the middle of the first results page.

So, if you’re ready to start improving and future-proofing your AEO strategy, keep reading — we’re going to walk you through everything you need to know about this emerging trend.

What Does AEO stand for?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization which is also sometimes referred to as AIEO (AI Engine Optimization) or even AIE (AI Optimization). These acronyms refer to this emerging discipline whose main goal is to get your content to appear in AI apps like ChatGPT, Perplexity as well as Google Gemini snippets. This strategy is the new digital marketing trend that has appeared due to the new user behavior after the rise of AI-powered apps and has changed the way we make our sites and our content.

Even though this tendency is driving marketers and devs mad as for some all the work done for years has now no value, this shift is user-centric and ultimately aimed at improving the search experience. It prioritizes delivering accurate, relevant, and easily digestible answers over pages that mastered old SEO tricks but fail to quickly satisfy user intent. Instead of spending 10 minutes reading a blog post that’s meant to answer a simple question, you’ll get a quick, well-researched response — since AEO still requires writers to create reliable content backed by sources.

It must be said that for some sites (especially e-commerce), traditional SEO strategies are still working wonders, as users aren’t always just looking for answers. However, the tendency is that eventually all content will need to be optimized for AI-driven search and answer systems.

How to make an AI-driven strategy?

Before jumping on creating or editing your existing content based on what AI wants, you should make an AI-driven strategy to help you follow a clear path instead of just guessing what will work. An AI-driven strategy will help you identify opportunities, optimize content for both humans and AI systems, and maintain your rankings in an AI-dominated search landscape. To get started, simply follow these steps:

• Define Your Goal(s): Ask yourself why you want to make an AI-driven strategy. Is it to get more sales, leads, engagement, or efficiency? Clearly defining your goal will guide your AI implementation and help measure success. In order to do this, you will have to understand your audience and, therefore, analyze their behavior, preferences, and pain points. By doing so, you will be able to understand if the effort is worth it and what changes need to be done.

  For example, if you have an e-commerce site selling beauty products, it may be more difficult to generate AI content for certain pages, as some are focused on branded content and storytelling. However, you can still set other achievable goals, such as optimizing your FAQ section, adding FAQ to each product page, working on your blog, or improving customer support content. These goals can provide tangible value while aligning with your broader AI strategy.

• Audit Your Site: Sometimes, content that was created based on older SEO strategies is already optimized for AEO, as many white-hat SEO practices (which we will explain later) still apply to AEO. Understanding this is crucial because it means that instead of creating content entirely from scratch, you may already have pages that are ranking well and only need maintenance or minor updates. Conducting a thorough audit helps you identify which content can be repurposed, improved, or expanded, saving time and resources.

• Make the Changes Your Site Needs to be AI-driven: We will dive in on how to do it in the following section, but after auditing your website, you just have to make the changes the site needs to be AI-driven. These changes will be both content- and technical-related, and some will be easy to apply while others might be a bit more complex…

• Measure and Adjust Continuously: And finally, but not less importantly, like every good strategy, you have to measure if you did well or not. By doing this, you’ll better understand whether the changes you made to your website were effective. As AI adds a UTM to the links to your site, you can easily know how many users came to your site from this apps or results. Both Google and HubSpot analytics show you this so you can track the traffic and know how are you doing regarding AEO.

  So, keep measuring and adjusting continuously, just like you did with SEO, because this aspect hasn’t changed at all… To rank, you have to work!!

How to appear on AI-driven results?

Having an AI-driven strategy is not enough if you don’t get to update your SEO-driven content to what AI wants. As you did with the algorithm when Google results with keyword-stuffed pages were what users wanted, you now need to adapt your content to satisfy AI-powered answer engines. It’s no longer just about ranking for a search term; it’s about being the source that AI systems consider authoritative, accurate, and ready to deliver directly to the user.

To win with AI-driven search, you need to play on two levels: create content that speaks AI’s language and get the technical setup right so it can pick your pages.

Content-wise

The main focus is to create content that AI likes and, specially, that AI knows how to read. To do so, your content has to be concise and accurate content-wise but structured regarding format too.

1. Your content has to be a direct answer to people’s questions.\ While SEO focused on making your website appear in Google rankings to get clicks by writing long articles packed with keywords, with AEO things get simpler. When searching, people want direct answers to their questions, so it’s better to have a 200-word article that explains something in an easy and direct way with backup references than a 600-word article that makes people get bored and finally use the search tool to find what they were looking for. Long articles that have more filler content than useful information are the main reason why people are using AI. Be clever and write articles that answer the questions — they can be long (like this one), but only by adding more related questions to answer, not by adding more words that have no value. As HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah mentioned in one of his worth-reading LinkedIn posts:

“What's ultimately helpful for the human may not be a 1200 word blog post about your industry. Maybe it's just clear, well structured information about your product or service and the answer to common questions.”

— HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah

2. AI don’t give a f*** about keywords.
   Before, we would pack our pages and articles with keywords (some even using black hat strategies) to get Google to pick us and show our site, but AI doesn’t care about how many times a word is repeated. For AI, user intent is key. Following an intent-based approach means understanding what people actually want to know and writing content that answers that clearly and directly. It’s not about tricking the algorithm anymore; it’s about being genuinely useful. Does this mean you don’t have to use keywords? No — but you don’t need to care as much as you did before. Try to add the keyword as a question, or look for long-tail keywords, or even direct question-based keywords, even if they have a low search volume.
3. Q&A-ish content wins in AI search.
   Think of it more like a Q&A structure — this makes content less narrative but more answer-focused and, therefore, AI loves it. As we’ve already mentioned, people want short answers to their questions instead of reading 10-minute-long articles. They want to find a direct answer quickly, and that’s exactly what AI is all about. Adapt your content by putting headlines that are questions and answering them directly. Hierarchical structure is still valued by AI-driven tools, as it makes it easier for both the AI and users to find answers quickly. And if the article is long, include a table of contents at the beginning so readers can jump directly to the question they’re looking for before scrolling through the page.
4. White hat strategies still applies in AI.
   Mostly all white hat SEO strategies we used to use like using internal links or referencing to other high-quality articles that back up your content still work as Dharmesh Shah in this interview. This is because ChatGPT as well as other AI apps use search engines to get their responses. What they do is get what the best ranked pages say and resume and rewrite it in a more concise way and add the links to those pages. Dharmesh mentions Bing in this interview but users found out that ChatGPT also uses Google search results. That’s why we mentioned in the previous section that it’s crucial to audit your content before getting to work — you probably already have good AI content on your site.

Technical stuff

While great content is key to attracting attention, adapting your website’s backend and technical setup to meet AI standards is just as important for ranking.

1. Enable AI crawlers

Some companies and users block apps from crawling their websites and only allow Google, Bing and other well-known search engines. You should check this first as if you didn’t enable chatbot crawlers to your site, you won’t obviously get to rank in AI apps nor Ai-driven results.

How to check if you enable AI crawlers?

To know if your site allows AI to crawl it, you should check your website log files. There are two ways to do this: manually or by using an analyzer.

To do it manually, you have to access your server log files by accessing your access to your website’s cpanel and search for requests from AI crawlers. These are usually identified by their user-agent names, such as OpenAI, ChatGPT, or other AI tools. By reviewing the logs, you can see if the crawlers are visiting your site or not.

If you are not very good at technical stuff, using an analyzer tool can simplify this process by automatically scanning your logs and highlighting AI crawler activity. You can use tools like Screaming Frog or even online free tools like Robots.txt Parser.

2. Structure (or restructure) your content as Q&A

As we have mentioned before, instead of focusing on writing long articles, AEO prefers other formats that are shorter but as well researched and high-quality. In that way, by making Q&A structure content, you produce more scannable and digestible content that AI systems love because they can quickly extract clear questions and concise answers to deliver to users. To do so, use semantic HTML, implement FAQ schema and don’t forget to make it responsive!!

3. Schema markup

We’ve already talked about the importance of schema markup on the Juicy Blog, but it’s never enough. Schema markup is key for SEO because it helps search engines understand your content — and AI works the same way. This type of microdata, added to your website’s HTML, tells AI what type of content it is. Without it, AI has a harder time — or might even struggle entirely — to identify and properly rank your content.

How do I implement schema markup for AEO

Implementing schema markup for AEO is easy, but it has some differences regarding SEO. While search engines like Google used JSON-LD format, AI uses inline microdata. As explained by our colleague and FreshJuice creator Alex Zappa in an Orange Marketing article as AI search engines read content differently, depending on the AI tool, schema markup is read differently. While Gemini and ChatGPT can parse JSON-LD and the content in the page body, Perplexity (and similar AI engines) currently ignore JSON-LD but reliably parse microdata inline in your HTML content.

You’re probably wondering how to implement schema markup for AEO. Alex recommends:

• Use inline microdata whenever possible, as “it remains the most reliable and crawl-friendly option for AI and search engines alike.”
• Use JSON-LD as an additional layer where applicable — for example, when ensuring compatibility with traditional search engines or AI platforms that can parse it.

Note: Make sure you don’t create duplicate schemas. For example, only one FAQ schema should be present — either in JSON-LD or microdata format, not both.

To do so:

• Add inline microdata tags directly in your HTML content around key elements like headings, product details, articles, and FAQs.
• Include JSON-LD in the page’s <head> only if needed — for instance, to support legacy search engines or specific AI crawlers that rely on it.
• Validate your markup using tools like Google’s Rich Results Test or Schema.org validators to ensure both AI and search engines can read it correctly.

How to Structure a Page for AEO

We used to strive to find an appealing headline that created that controversial clickbait effect, enticing users to click through just to get the best ranking spot on search engines. With AEO, the focus shifts: it’s no longer just about grabbing attention — it’s about organizing content so AI and users can find answers instantly.

To create a good structure for AEO we recommend:

• Keep Using a Hierarchical Structure: Just like you did when creating a SEO-driven content, maintaining a clear hierarchical structure helps AI better understand your content while crawling. Use titles and subheadings to organize your content logically, and make sure the structure makes sense from a reader’s perspective.

• Use questions as titles: Use questions as titles: As we mentioned earlier, AI loves Q&A content, so try to turn your headings into questions that readers might actually ask. This makes it easier for AI to understand the intent behind each section and for users to find answers quickly.

• Answer quickly to that questions: AI results are always concise, so a long, narrative introduction can hurt your content. Structure your content in a question-answer format that puts the main answers first to add less important details afterward. If possible, use titles that go from general questions to more specific ones to guide both AI and readers. Don’t get lost on the narrative!

• Cite and Add Your References: Add internal links throughout your content as well as citations following the hierarchical structure (don’t put them like a heading or subheading, tag everything correctly!). If you’ve used enough references, include a “References” section at the end of the article. This not only makes your content more reliable for users but also helps AI understand and value your content better.