With AI search becoming a bigger part of how people discover information, I’m wondering how everyone is approaching content optimization now.
Are you still primarily optimizing for traditional Google search, or are you actively changing your content for AI-generated answers and citations?
I’m curious about real experiences:
- Have you noticed traffic changing because of AI search?
- Are you optimizing specifically for ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI platforms?
- Is traditional SEO still your main priority?
- What actually seems to improve visibility?
It feels like there is a lot of advice around AEO/GEO right now, but I’d love to hear what people are actually seeing in their own projects.
Hi there @ApexSaad
Such a timely question, as AEO/GEO has definitely been a hot topic lately, and it feels like everyone’s still figuring it out in real time.
I would love to hear what @karstenkoehler @danmoyle @franksteiner79 are experiencing regarding AEO/SEO 
?
Cassie, Community Manager
Hi @ApexSaad - interesting question for sure. And like @chighsmith said, timely! I’m encouraging clients to definitely lean into AEO. But that doesn’t mean abandoning traditional SEO. These two ongoing efforts compliment each other. AEO is part evolution of SEO, and part new consumer behavior. So it’s not a binary decision of one or the other. It’s more of an evolution for us as businesses along with the consumer evolution.
As for which platforms, I’d suggest taking the HubSpot Academy courses on AEO and learning the HubSpot AEO tool. Again, it’s not necessarily one platform over the other with AEO - it’s not like Google vs. Bing just yet. But using the right AEP monitoring tools, you can see trends overall and trends for your content + competitors. This will tell you where you might find quick wins, and where you need to spend more time.
So that’s how I’m advising clients.
- Use the HubSpot AEO tool
- HubSpot Academy AEO courses are helpful
- Make specific business-informed decisions about where to spend effort
- Think of it as an evolution, not one or the other
Hope that helps!
There is no disconnect between what you’d do to perform well in search engines or AI, and Googlers has repeatedly stated this. I can link all the legitimate “tips”, “tricks”, and “optimizations” for the alphabet soup of acronyms to a recommendation or article from the early-to-mid-2010s for SEO.
There is no way to strictly optimize for any specific model.
LLMs were designed to understand and respond with natural language. Search engines have been working to improve that the entire time (1990s through ChatGPT Launch (2022)). Therefore, write for humans and sprinkle in keywords strategically and naturally.
I have seen a reduction in overall organic search traffic, but other KPIs are stable or improving.