Short excerpt from a YouTube conversation (Matt Wolfe + another speaker) arguing that core SEO principles — e.g., producing quality content that keeps users on the page — remain relevant for AI-driven search/answer engines; participants recommend building on existing SEO skills rather than discarding them, adding new tactics for the AI era.
I do feel like a lot of the philosophies behind SEO will probably still apply to aeo. The thing I used to tell people when it comes to SEO is quality content, where you get people to land on the page. If they stay on the page for a long time, that's a signal to Google that they liked it. A lot of these engines, when you're using Perplexity, when you're using ChatGPT and Cloud and all these tools that have access to search the web actually still tapping the APIs of Google or Bing or whatever the search engines are, the thing that got you to rank with SEO is still going to be the thing that probably gets you the mention in the artificial intelligence models as well.
When you have a period of transformation of anything, you're sometimes tempted to throw the old out. And I think what you and I are saying is what people have been doing in like traditional search engine optimization, for example, it's still relevant. There's just some new stuff you have to do on top of it. So you're not throwing it out, but you have to build upon it. I think that's what the exciting opportunity is. You built these really good skills over the last five to 10 years, and now you just need to build some new skills to take them to the next level.
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