u/_HayKen_

Would like to know what people are using rn because honestly this whole AI search/AEO/GEO thing feels messy as hell Some people saying its just normal SEO with better structure. other people acting like traditional SEO is dead completely.

I run a small agency and couple clients started asking specifically about “AI visibility” after seeing their traffic drop from AI overviews and chatgpt/perplexity answers. Been researching agencies for this but hard to tell who actually knows what they’re doing vs who just changed “SEO” to “GEO” on their homepage last week lol

Names i keep seeing around: Omnius, Minuttia, Rubicly, Amsive, First Page Sage, GetCito

Not even looking for “guaranteed rankings” or any magic fix honestly. more kneen to know who is actually helping brands show up consistently in AI answers/citations/conversations.

Also wondering what people are prioritising more now: technical SEO, reddit/community mentions, digital PR, entity stuff, structured content?

One AI guru i talked to kept saying AI search is mostly about “brand association” now and not just rankings. didn't fully get it at first but after testing some prompts myself... kinda starting to make sense.

Would love some real opinions from people actually testing this stuff and not linkedin theorists 😅

Been doing SEO for a while now and honestly 2026 feels different from previous years.

The things that used to work just doesn't anymore. And some boring fundamentals I ignored for years are suddenly the highest leverage things I can do.

Here's what actually changed for me:

Stopped publishing new stuff. Started fixing what already exists.

This was the biggest shift. I had pages sitting on page 2 with decent impressions but terrible click rates. Instead of writing new posts I spent a month just fixing those. Better titles, clearer answers, updated information, proper internal links.

Traffic went up more from that one month than from six months of publishing new content.

If you're not in Search Console regularly looking at pages with impressions but low clicks you're leaving a lot on the table.

Topical authority over random posts:

Scattered content across random topics does almost nothing now. What works is going deep on one area. Cover it from every angle. Build clusters of pages that all connect to each other. Google rewards sites that clearly own a topic over sites that dabble in ten things.

I basically deleted a bunch of old posts that had nothing to do with my core topic. That alone improved how the rest of the site performed.

AEO is real and most people are sleeping on it

This one surprised me. Answer Engine Optimization basically making sure AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your content.

The tactics aren't complicated but they're different from traditional SEO:

• Put your actual answer in the first paragraph. Not a preamble. The answer itself.
• Use FAQ sections. AI models love pulling from these.
• Make sure your structured data is clean. Schema markup that matches your content gets cited. Identical content without schema often doesn't.
• Keep your brand information consistent across the web. Entity clarity matters more than it used to.

One of my pages went from zero AI Overview appearances to showing up regularly just from restructuring the content to lead with a direct answer and adding proper FAQ schema.

Backlinks still matter but quality gap has widened

One relevant backlink from a site in your space does more than 50 random directory links. That's always been true but the gap is bigger now.

Guest posts on relevant sites, being quoted as a source, getting mentioned in community discussions these compound over time in a way that bulk link building just doesn't anymore.

On agencies and tools

A few people have asked me about outsourcing SEO content and link building. Honest answer is it depends heavily on who you work with.

Names I've come across that have a decent reputation specifically for Backlinks and content led SEO: SERPsGrowth, Grow and Convert, Animalz, Siege Media. All take different approaches and sit at different price points. I have tried a couple of them and results were nice for us.

For DIY keyword research Ahrefs and Semrush are the obvious ones. Semrush has a free tier with about 10 searches a day which is enough to check what competitors are ranking for before spending anything.

Would love to know what's actually working for others right now. Especially interested if anyone has seen real results from AEO specifically still feels early but the signals are there.