SEO Is at an All-Time High - The AEO Panic Has Turned Into Regret

If you do SEO or you're interested in SEO, you've probably been hearing SEO is dead since you started doing it. People have been saying this since before 2010. People have been saying every year, every month SEO is dead. I last made a podcast on this one year ago and I wasn't sure if it was a bug or not. I saw in Google Trends that interest in search engine optimization was spiking. This was a year ago and I didn't know if it was a bug or not, but I thought it was incredible. It was spiking up. It was at the highest that it's ever been. And I made this podcast on May 20th showing it. Episode 685 of this show. And when I made that, I I said there's no way it's going to keep going up. And since then, it has kept rising. And now it is at another crazy all-time high. It just keeps spiking up. In fact, when I made that podcast, interest in search engine optimization as a topic within Google Trends was at what is now 68 and now is the new 100. It's increased. Interest has increased a lot since then. And and I just can't it's so crazy to see interest in SEO keep going up. So, I started looking into this more. I thought, could this be related to generative engine optimization? I still think it is a bit related but more people are understanding that you need SEO in order to get shown within large language models. So if you put into Google Trends and this is looking at worldwide 2004 to present and you see that interest is at the all-time high. If you put into Google Trends generative engine optimization as a topic and you try to put in answer engine optimization as a topic and you can't because Google classifies answer engine optimization too closely with generative engine optimization. So it just bundles the two together. So you can really just compare search engine optimization as a topic and generative engine optimization as a topic and search engine optimization is still way ahead. Google Trends is not bundling generative engine optimization with search engine optimization. It's two distinct things. Then I also tried looking at just the raw search terms within Google Trends. Search engine optimization, generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization. And still search engine optimization is way ahead of them in interest. And again, the topic of search engine optimization, which is broader than just the search term, is at this amazing ATTH, this amazing all-time high. And I actually don't think that it's because there's more people I' I've heard some people suggest, oh, it's because just more people are now searching. Is SEO dead? It's just because more people want to know if search engine optimization is actually dead. I don't think that's the reason. I'm going to share some possible things that are going on that could contribute to this spike. This was shared on X by Eli Schwarz. He said, "The calls I'm getting now sound very different from the calls I was getting six months ago." The AEO panic has turned into regret. Companies that panicked when SEO traffic dipped made a series of moves that felt logical at the time. They fired their SEO teams. They bought expensive tools with vague promises. They pivoted their entire strategy into AEO. The thinking was SEO is dying. Answer engines are the future. Move fast. They moved in the wrong direction. AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It's an extension of it. And they tried to build an extension on a foundation they demolished. Here's what happened in the last 24 months. HCU dropped traffic to sites that were gaming SEO. AI overviews dropped that traffic further. Snake oil marketers who have never done SEO pop up with the antidote to the traffic ills selling a new channel. Vendors pop up with promises of bold claims of easy recovery. Companies overreact. We're in the regret phase now. The good news, it's not too late to course correct. Many of the brilliant people who are let go are still available. So, reach out if I can make introductions. And this post says, "The AEO panic has turned into regret because it feels like every day you're hearing stories of companies that focused on short-term AEO traffic, for example, spamming self-promotional best listicles, flashy tactics they saw in X. Then two things happen. They lose their search traffic. And because they lose their search traffic, they stop getting recommended in AI. And so then where are they going to go? They're going and looking at SEO. Oh my gosh, we effed this up. And you're seeing that. You're seeing these horror stories every day. I think people and businesses are waking up to the fact that the best way to show up in AI is to know how to do SEO. It's, oh wow, you can actually see what chat GPT is searching for and then you can make pages targeting that language. Wow, there's people like me sharing how to do that all the time. If you don't know how to do that, here's how you do it. Has the Empire State Building made any changes to its observation deck or ticketing setup? People don't know this, but when you do prompts, ChachiPT searches the web and you can literally see what it search with. Often times, what it searches with is different from the prompt that you put in. Copy the part of your chatpt URL that comes after forward/ C. Rightclick, inspect, go to network, paste in what you copied, refresh the page, click the orange brackets with what you copied, go to response, search this for queries. Then you can see what ChachiPT searched. My prompt was, "Has the Empire State Building made any changes to its observation deck experience or ticketing setup?" ChachiPT searched Empire State Building observation deck changes 2025 ticketing. If you do enough prompts around your brand, you can see the language that Chach will search with when gathering information about you. Use this language in your page titles, in your URL slugs, in the H2s on your pages. Put it in the first sentence of your pages. put it high up on your pages. Find all the different language it uses and use that in your marketing. Then when people ask Chat GPT about your brand, it'll do searches, come across what you wrote. And if you put out nice things about your brand, that's what Chat GPT is going to see and quote. And learn SEO that gets paying customers, users, warm leads calling you up at compactkeywords.com. Something else that is contributing to the rapid increase in interest in SEO is that it is just easier than ever to spin up a site or a SAS or a project online using AI. Vibe coding is really easy. You can put up a site really really quickly. You you could have never used WordPress and you can just vibe code a site and put it up in a day. Same with the SAS. The creator economy and startups are more popular than ever before and a lot of people want to understand how to have their new projects show on Google and get recommended on Google for the niches that their projects are in an AI. I got this interesting theory on X a couple of hours ago from Mr. Spencer Hecathornne and this was in response to me sharing a screenshot of search engine optimization at an all-time high within Google Trends. Spencer shared this theory. He said, "Everything is up so much. For years, I've been using quote unquote online marketing as an anchor search in trends because it has always been incredibly steady and less searched than most terms, so it doesn't drown them out. It's way up. I've also been in a position to help a lot of very quote unquote regular people with AI related things. People that have been mostly computer illiterate their entire lives. Based on observing these people and talking to them, I've developed the theory. The theory is simple. Less people use search the way we think they do, and more of them are afraid of exploring the internet. LLMs bridge the gap. And now you have people looking things up and searching without even realizing it because they are quote unquote talking to AI and having conversations. It's bringing entirely new groups of people to the table that previously only searched for exactly what they needed, like typing Google into Bing before typing in Walmart. LMS make understanding the internet a lot more attainable. Even just asking questions about SEO and then realizing, oh my gosh, it's not actually this obscure piece of magic that only hackers can do. Regular business owners can do it, too. Or anybody with a website can do it. And then you start having that conversation within chat GPT and then it stops being as intimidating and now you're open to learning more. But again, just more people are spinning up businesses or projects than ever before. SEO has always been an incredible channel. You don't need to put your face out there. You don't need to have a podcast. You don't need to do videos. Videos rank really well, but you don't need to do that. You just need to understand relevance and authority. And anybody can do that completely anonymously. Is it better if you're not anonymous? It's better if you're not anonymous, but you can still do it completely anonymously. I can't even tell you how many times I've created fake avatars. This is something I've really done a lot. I have created fake avatars, fake people on on Gmail, created fake social profiles for them, and then actually built up entire lives for these people and used these people to respond to journalists, to pitch ideas, to do all sorts of things that would make my businesses get more backlinks. I think anybody who has been in SEO for a while has done that. But the point is, you don't actually have to be a public person to do SEO. You can just optimize your site, get links from a few places, you could do it anonymously, and then you can start ranking for things, things that bring you money, things that bring you sales or phone calls. Or if you just want your blog to rank, you can do that, too. If you just want to get more eyeballs on your blog, you can do that, too. The other element that I have to bring up, Google is going very hard fighting generative engine optimization disinformation. I made a podcast about this a few weeks ago. Episode 1047 of this show. Google says GEO doesn't exist. Here's what they're not telling you. Google literally put out documentation saying, "Is SEO still relevant for generative AI search?" In short, yes. The best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google search are rooted in our core search ranking and quality systems. And in the same document they wrote, "What about AEO and GEO? From Google searches perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience and thus still SEO." And this update, Glenn Glen Gabe just shared this on X. He shared this just yesterday. I record these things a day in advance, so for you watching it'll be two days ago. But he said, "Heads up, two new updates from Google in their docs. First, Google just updated its do you need an SEO page in their documentation with mentions of optimizing for generative AI. It now contains guidance advising site owners to check if advice on optimizing for AEO/GEO aligns with its new guidelines. The page also says to make sure any tools you use are aligned with Google's guidance. if they have advice on optimizing for AI experiences, also known as AEO GEO services. Is their advice aligned with Google search's official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features? Google is going out of their way to make people know that the best way to get covered in AI is to do and of course they're going to promote white hat SEO, but there's still there's Google is still using its marketing resources to promote this stuff, to share this stuff. And let me tell you something else. When the average person is asking an LLM how to do geo or AEO, LLMs cover the most authoritative resources and it's very likely that Google documentation is going to show up. So there's a lot of factors that's going into this. But despite what pundits have been saying and fear-mongers have been saying for the last at least a decade and a half, SEO is far from dead. If you want a shortcut to learning SEO, especially SEO that gets paying customers, that gets users using your app or that gets you warm leads calling you up, I have a course on how to do just this at This is a testimonial I got 8 days ago from Maton who said, "Thank you so much for this beautiful course. So informative, wellput, and I wish I bought it a year ago before I started printing 4,000word articles on the high search volume keywords. Compact Keywords is about finding high intent, less competitive terms that are just easier to show up for. And because they're so niche and high intent, they also do really, really well with AI. They're covered more with large language models. Instead of putting up 4,000word blog posts targetingformational keywords that won't convert, you're putting up 415word conversion-based SEO landing pages targeting searchers who are looking for what you offer right now. They just these searchers just don't know that your brand exists. And so they're searching or they're asking large language models to recommend a brand. And your brand is getting recommended because you are using the language that these searchers are using when they're searching. It's that simple. And my course shows you how to find this language, how to target these people, how to make these pages, how to build links, how to structure your site for these pages, how to do an SEO tech audit. So much is in this course. There's templates and Google Sheets and Google Docs and bonus videos and written portions and constant updates. I'm updating the course several times a month, always trying to make it better. So, if you want to get that for your business, that's at compactkeywords.com. You're going to love it. And that's all for episode 1,69 of the Edward Show. 1,69 days in a row doing this podcast. Got a lot of awesome guests coming on the show this week. It's going to be a good week. If you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow.