Goodbye SEO, Hello AEO — Agentic Engine Optimization

The better part of my career was spent on SEO – working to get clients “above the fold” on Google by gaming a system that kept changing the rules. Keywords were the gold nuggets of content marketing; “storytelling” became a euphemism for flooding the zone with mindless copy.

SEO today isn’t dead, but it’s dying. Fast.

People don’t want links; they want answers and ideas. They don’t want clicks, they want context.  Most of all they don’t want to search – they want to find. Even better if someone, or some technology, could find for them.

In discussing this with my PwC colleague and EmTech leader Larry Gioia, we realized that in a world of AI agents and platforms like OpenAI’s Operator, where agents are using web properties and services to fulfill a task, the rules of search have forever changed.

If you’re still optimizing your content for search – stuffing headlines and first paragraphs with keywords, backlinking and all the rest – then you’re doing it wrong. You need to optimize your content for agents.

Goodbye, SEO, hello AEO – Agentic Engine Optimization.

The fold is gone, replaced with a “results page for one” catered to your exact needs (the ad model can’t be far behind.) You don’t have to search when search is done for you in the blink of an AI.

With AEO you get answers as well as actions. We’ve known for a long while that LLMs were able to understand the meaning behind user queries and generate relevant content without relying on specific keywords – but now the technology and tools have caught up and created an entirely new modality for how we engage, seek information and solve problems.

SEO gave people work to do; AEO does work for people.

With AEO, content is structured around topics rather than just keyword density. Content needs to be authoritative and conversational so that AI can extract and summarize effectively. Engagement-friendly formats such as FAQs, summaries, and interactive/multimodal elements are now more crucial for optimization.

This is good news for real content creators and bad news for content marketing bottom feeders still panning for digital gold. AEO is both a paradigm shift and a paradox – an AI-driven strategy that works best when fed with authenticity and natural language.

SEO was search optimized for machines. AEO is search optimized for humans. In many ways, AEO is more real and human than SEO ever was.