fine. AEO might actually be a good idea.

hey babe. welcome back to unprompted.

this is a new thing. we’re still figuring out exactly what this will look like, so please bear with us if the format changes. we want this to be valuable, interesting, and actually worth the time it takes — for us to make and you to read.

(if you’re about to hit me with some em dash slander, kindly shut up. that conversation is as stale as the saltines that have been in the back of your pantry since 2021.)

anywayyy, let’s get into it. we’ll clue you in on a few pieces of news you should know about, and then we’ll dive into this whole AEO thing.

👀 what’s happening in AI & marketing this week

1. AEO is the new SEO (god help us all)
you know how brands used to stuff blog posts with keywords for google? now they’re doing it for LLMs. answer engine optimization (AEO). marketers are panicking. content teams are rewriting everything to please the new way of search. (annnnnnd….. if you keep scrolling, you’ll learn that we kinda feel like this is the way we should’ve been doing content all along? nobody come for us.)
📎 business insider / airops

2. perplexity is aiming for a $14B valuation (yes, billion)
the AI answer engine just raised another $500M, partnered with paypal (you can shop in the chat now), and is catching heat for scraping content from publishers. they’re disrupting google, trying to kill affiliate links, and poking the copyright bear… all at once. what overachievers.
📎 wsj / reuters

3. microsoft lays off 6k (including its own AI exec)
microsoft just let go 3% of its workforce as part of a reorg to double down on AI. one of the impacted employees? a director on their AI team. wtf. leadership says it’s about streamlining for growth. we say… we’ll circle back in 6 months to see if they’re rehiring for the same roles that just got cut.
📎 ny post / linkedin

ugh, AEO is actually… kind of a good idea…

breaking news: not everything AI touches turns to shit. enter, AEO.

you’ve probably seen “AEO” floating around. it stands for Answer Engine Optimization, and, basically, it’s how you write content that gets picked up by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s new SGE, and AI Overviews. pretty much anywhere someone asks a question and gets an answer without clicking through to a website.

you’re optimizing to be the answer, not the link.

we think this actually makes a ton of sense. and we’re kind of excited about it? (SEO folks, don’t kill us.)

AEO rewards the stuff we should’ve been doing all along:
🎀 clear, useful, fast answers
🎀 content structured in a way that’s easy to parse through
🎀 less bullshit, more clarity

it’s not about learning something new. really, we just need to work on unlearning a lot of the bad habits we picked up trying to please algorithms.

(… in order to… please new algorithms… ?)

here’s the downside. we’re all seeing traffic hits. which makes sense, because people no longer need to click through to our site to find the answer they were looking for. AI is changing how people find us, what they do once they’ve found us, and basically everything we thought we knew about customer journeys.

the good news? everybody’s figuring this shit out at the same time.

so what can you do?

start by getting painfully aligned with your ICP

this is not the time to be vague or “for everyone.”

AI tools are trained to pull the clearest, most relevant answers. they can’t do that if your content is trying to speak to five personas at once.

know who you’re talking to

understand what they’re Googling at 11pm and WHY

and then answer that — quickly, clearly, and like a human. use real language, not jargon.

okay, but then what…

here’s what we’re doing (and what we recommend):

✅ audit your top-performing content
is it actually answering a specific question?
would an AI tool be able to pull a clean summary from it?

✅ lean into formatting
bullets, FAQs, subheadings, bolded key phrases
structure makes it easier to get picked up and easier to read

✅ add schema markup where you can
not sexy, but it helps machines understand your content
tools/plugins can help with this… think, Google Tag Manager or Yoast

✅ don’t obsess over the wrong metrics
traffic might dip. that doesn’t mean your content failed.
look at engagement, conversions, time to value. (is your audience getting what they need?)

✅ focus on what your ICP can’t get from ChatGPT
personal stories, POVs, spicy opinions, lived expertise…
anything that is uniquely you

so yeah. less panic, more clarity.
less bloat, more answers.
less “we need to be everywhere,” more “we need to be understood.”

and most importantly?

stop gaslighting yourself.

you don’t need to reinvent your entire strategy.
you don’t need to become an AI prompt engineer.
you just need to be clear, helpful, and worth quoting.

learn from people smarter than us:
🔗 ahrefs
📔 hubspot 
🤝 r/SEO

remember: the future of marketing isn’t reliant on who adopts the most tools. it’s all about who has the best taste using them.

(and no, you still can’t automate that.)

cheers!

drue & beth, unprompted

if someone forwarded this to you, it’s because they think you’re really pretty and smart. and because you might like getting these emails every week.