The SEO Shift (Part Two)

Drew McKenna  |  650 words  |  4 min read

In part one of this series, we established something that surprises a lot of businesses: ranking #1 on Google is no longer the whole game. The goal today is to be seen, cited, and trusted—across traditional search and the AI platforms your customers are increasingly turning to. So what does that actually look like? It starts with understanding AEO.

What Is AEO?

To us here at Propagate, AEO basically stands for Answer Engine Optimization. Where traditional search engines returned a list of links and left users to find their own answers, AI-powered platforms—Google's AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot—synthesize information and deliver a direct response, citing only a handful of trusted sources in the process—and that changes what your website needs to do.

Your goal is no longer just to rank for the right keywords. It's to be the source AI turns to when your potential customers ask questions in your area of expertise. To do that, your site needs to provide clear, direct, well-structured answers—content that AI can understand, trust, and cite with confidence.

Research consistently shows that the vast majority of URLs cited in AI responses also appear in top organic search results—meaning AEO doesn't replace SEO, it actually builds on top of it. And as we'll cover in our next post, both depend on something even more fundamental.

Why It Matters for Your Business Now

Being cited in AI Overviews has a measurable downstream effect: more organic clicks, more paid clicks, better traffic and conversions overall. And yet only 12.4% of websites use the basic structure necessary to show up in those results. That gap is an opportunity for the businesses willing to move first.

ChatGPT alone now serves 800 million users weekly. At that scale, your customers are almost certainly among them. The businesses that establish AI authority now will be significantly harder to displace later.

So What Can You Do?

Your content needs to be still written for humans, but also structured for machines.

In the early days of SEO, keyword stuffing—cramming pages with search terms at the expense of readability—backfired badly pretty quickly. Search engines grew sophisticated enough to penalize the tactic. AEO takes that lesson to its logical conclusion: write in a clear, conversational style that is genuinely useful. When it fits naturally, structure your headings as questions and answer them directly. AI can extract and cite a well-structured answer with confidence. The best strategy has always been to actually be the best answer, and AEO just makes that more true than ever.

If there's a topic you own—an area of expertise where you're genuinely the best resource, go deep. A thorough, authoritative piece on a subject you know better than anyone is exactly what AI is looking for. Thin content gets passed over, while comprehensive content gets cited.

And keep it fresh! The majority of URLs appearing in AI responses come from content published within the last two years. Regular updates signal to AI platforms that your content is current and trustworthy.

Not Sure Where to Start?

Knowing what to do and knowing where to start are two different things. Add the reality of finding time to act on something new—on top of an already full plate—and it's easy to see why this kind of work keeps getting pushed to next quarter.

Every site brings a different challenge to the table—some need better content structure, some need stronger topic authority, most need both. The right place to start isn't the same for everyone.

If you're not sure where to begin, reach out. We'd be glad to take a look and give you an honest read on where your site stands and where the opportunities are.

One more thing worth knowing: your content and AEO efforts are only as effective as the technical foundation they sit on. That foundation is what we're covering in Part 3.

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