AEO GEO LLM Seeding AI SEO

The search industry is having the stupidest argument in its history. This book refuses to join in.

Is it Answer Engine Optimisation? Generative Engine Optimisation? LLM SEO? AI SEO? LLM seeding? For two years, grown adults with agencies and speaking slots have drawn diagrams distinguishing acronyms from each other while their clients remain completely invisible to every AI system on earth.

Meanwhile, the actual shift is enormous. Customers now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews who to trust, and the machines answer with names. The businesses named win. The businesses the machines cannot confidently identify do not exist.

This book is the definitive practitioner playbook for that new game, whatever you decide to call it. Written by ten practitioners who do the work rather than name it, it covers:

• What actually changed — selection replaced ranking, entities replaced pages, and the evidence base widened to the entire web
• What never changed — crawling, quality, reputation and compounding still decide everything, and the shortcut merchants are still selling decay dressed as growth
• The one discipline behind every acronym — make your entity unmistakable, publish genuine answers, earn independent corroboration, and stay consistent everywhere machines read
• The technical playbook — entity resolution and disambiguation, how retrieval pipelines actually select sources, content that gets cited, the corroboration moat, the AI-bot access debate, and how to measure a game with no rankings
• The field guide to the snake oil — the certification grifters, the guarantee merchants and the volume merchants, and the tells that expose all three

Then ten practitioners take the stage, one chapter each, with their unfiltered opinions on AEO versus SEO and the future of search: AI James Dooley, Mads Singers, Paul Truscott, Vaibhav Sharda, Mike Lovatt, Luke Bastin, Adrian Ponce Del Rosario, Scott Calland, Abigail Dooley and Peter Jones. From enterprise Information Retrieval and agentic search to lead generation ROI and content systems at scale, they do not all agree. That is rather the point.

This is not a polite book. It is occasionally sweary, openly hostile to hype, and allergic to conference-slide advice. It is written for SEOs, agency owners and marketers who would rather hear what actually works than what the acronym should be.

The window is open right now. The machines are building their files on every business on earth, most of those files are vague, and the practitioners who fill them first get remembered by systems that do not forget.

Call it whatever the f$ck you want. Just do the work. This book is the work.