Should You Skip SEO and Go Straight to AI Search? [2026 UPDATE]

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Should you skip SEO and go straight to AI search? In 2026, the short answer is no—and the longer answer reveals why SEO is actually doing more work than ever, just quietly underneath every AI-generated answer.

In this UPDATE to one of Found in AI's most downloaded episodes, Cassie revisits the SEO, AEO, and GEO conversation she had with Ioana Wilkinson back in August—and unpacks what's changed in the eight months since. From Bing's new AI Performance dashboard to Yahoo Scout's quiet launch on Bing's grounding API, the AI search ecosystem now runs on infrastructure that rewards SEO fundamentals more than ever.

The episode walks through the FSA Framework—Freshness, Structure, and Authority—as a practical system for showing up in AI-generated answers, and closes the loop on a real-world experiment updating a HubSpot bio to shift how LLMs describe a brand.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why SEO is the foundation every AI engine retrieves from
• Which AI answer engines actually run on Bing's index (it's more than you think)
• What Yahoo Scout is and why marketers should pay attention
• How AEO and GEO fit together as layers on top of SEO
• The FSA Framework: Freshness, Structure, and Authority explained
• Results from a real experiment using off-site authority signals to change how LLMs describe a brand
• What to fix first when AI engines describe your brand wrong (hint: it's almost never your website)

If you've been wondering whether SEO still matters in an AI-first world, or where to start with AI search optimization, this episode connects the dots and gives you a clear next step.

Resources:

Should You Skip SEO and Go Straight to AEO for AI Search (OG)

What's the Difference Between SEO, AEO, and GEO in AI Search? (OG)

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Hey, welcome back to Found in AI. I'm Cassie Clark, a fractional content strategist, AI search optimization expert, and the host of this show where we talk about how search is changing so we don't get left behind in this new user search behavior. Here's a little bit of behind the scenes going on over here. Now, back in August, I sat down with my friend Joanna Wilkinson. She's a B2B content writer and the founder of ANOVA Tech Content. We recorded an episode breaking down SEO, AEO, and GEO. You might have heard it. We covered what are these acronyms, how do they fit together, and what do you actually do with them? That episode is one of the most downloaded episodes on this show. I'm a huge data nerd. I mean, heck, this entire podcast is about finding the patterns in the data and figuring out what to do with it. So when I'm looking at my podcast download numbers and I see that the definition episode is the top downloaded episode, it tells me something. It tells me that a lot of you are landing here because you typed something like, what is AEO or SEO versus GEO into Google or Chat GPT or the search bar on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and that episode is what surfaced. So first, hi, welcome. I am so glad that you are here. I'm so glad that you were learning with me. And second, that episode was recorded in August 2025. It is now April 2026. I know that doesn't seem like a lot of time, but in AI search time, that's about 17 years ago. Seriously. The landscape has changed once again. My own thinking has shifted and updated. And honestly, the the fact that that episode is still getting downloads and it's the top episode means that it deserves a refresh. Because if that's the door that people are walking through to get here to learn about AI search optimization, I want the room that they enter to be the one that's the most correct and most accurate in that moment. So today I'm doing the 2026 update. We're going to talk about what those terms mean now, why SEO is somehow more important than it was eight months ago, and I'm going to walk you through the FSA framework, which is a system that I've built for thinking about all of this. And then I'm going to close the loop on an experiment that I mentioned at the end of the original episode way back in August, because a lot has happened since then, and I want to give you an update on it. So let's get into it. Okay, so let's start where I think most people are getting tripped up, and maybe why that episode is getting downloaded so many times. If you're on LinkedIn at all or read it, you have probably seen declare someone declare, and I'm sure this is happening on Twitter too. I just or ex, I just kind of stay away from that one. But I'm sure that you have seen someone say, SEO is dead. Again, for the thousandth time, is kind of a hobby at this point, I think. But I'm gonna say this clearly: SEO is not dead. If anything, SEO is doing more work now than it was a year ago. It's just doing that work quietly in the background where everyone's staring at Chat GPT and not really thinking about Google in the way that we should be. I say Google, but I'm also really talking about Bing, and I'll get to that in a minute. Here's the thing that I really want you to internalize with this. AI engines do not make up answers out of thin air. They either have their knowledge base or they're going out to the open web to retrieve, synthesize, and cite their answer. And then when they retrieve something, they retrieve it from an index. Somebody has to call the web. They have to go understand what's on it and then make it retrievable. That is SEO. That has always been SEO. The crawling, the indexing, the structure, the understanding. That's the foundation that every AI answer is built on top of. So when someone tells you that SEO is dead, don't even bother. What they're really telling you is that they don't understand how any of this works. Now let me prove this to you with a real example because I think that's gonna make it click. Bing. Yes, that bing. In February, Microsoft rolled out a feature inside Bing Webmaster Tools called AI Performance. This is the first time that a major search engine has said, hey publishers, look at us. Here's how often your content is getting cited in AI answers, here are the queries that triggered those citations, and here are the pages that are working. That's kind of a big deal because as far as I know, no other search platform with these kind of tools have done that. I've heard talk that it's coming to Google Search Console. If it is, it's not in mine yet, so it must be in beta, but this is the closest thing that we have right now to Google Search Console, but for AI citations. Now I know what some of you are thinking, nobody uses Bing. Cassie, who cares? I hear you, but stay with me because here is who actually let me try that again. Here is who's actually running on Bing's index. Chat GPT search that uses Bing. So when you ask ChatGPT a question and it pulls up sources from the web, a big part of that is retrieval from Bing. DuckDuckGo, also Bing. They had a syndication deal with Microsoft years ago, it's still in place. Microsoft Copilot, obviously Bink. And then in January, Yahoo launched something called Yahoo Scout. This is the one that nobody's really talking about. I have not really played around with it a lot yet. It's on the list of things to dig into this week because Yahoo Scout is an answer engine that just rolled out to 250 million users in the US. It uses Clot's Anthropic model to handle the synthesis and the reasoning and the writing of the answer, but it uses Bing's grounding API to pull actual sources from the open web. Let me say the important part again. Yahoo Scout has 250 million US users. It's grounded in Bing's Index, and almost no one in the SEO space is paying attention to it yet. So when I tell you that Bing Webmaster Tools matter, I'm telling you that Bing's Index is the pipe feeding a massive chunk of that AI answer layer. Chat GPT, DuckDuckGo, Copilot, Yahoo Scout, all of them. One index, multiple answer engines on top of it. If you take nothing else from this episode, maybe write this one down. A strong Bing Index presence is no longer optional. It did used to be the backup. I mean, we all focused on Google, who cares about Bing, but it's now a primary surface for AI visibility. So the work that you've been doing for Google SEO, all of that, all of that still matters. The technical hygiene, the clean site structure, schema, indexable content, the same work that makes you visible in Google is the same work that makes you visible in Bing. So it just makes you more visible wherever Bing fuddles into, which is most of these AI engines. I say most, we're not talking about Gemini here, but we're talking about all of the other ones. So SEO is not dead. It's the foundation, it's the thing that's holding up the entire structure of GEO, AEO, or answer engine optimization or AI search optimization, whatever you want to call it. We still don't have a name for it. That's okay. Now that the foundation has been established, let's talk about what sits on top of that foundation. We have AEO, which is answer engine optimization. This is about optimizing your content to be the answer. So we are thinking like featured snippets, the FAQ blocks, think the direct answer box at the top of the search result. So when someone asks a question and an engine pulls up a direct response from your page, that's AEO working. The tactics here are what Joanna and I talked about back in August, and a lot of them are still super, super relevant. Clear definitions, we talk about this constantly. Question and answer structure where you actually include the question in the answer. We talk about that FAQ schema on the back end. Micro intent targeting, which means going after a very specific long version of the query. I'm not just talking like productivity, productivity software, but the best productivity software for a team of five under$100 a month. Those very specific conversational long tail queries are where a lot of the citation action happens. Then we have GEO, which is generative engine optimization. This is the newer one and it's about being cited inside AI-generated answers. Not the snippet, but the actual answer itself. So when Chat GPT or Perplexity or AI overviews or Gemini, you also scout whichever one that you're using, writes a full paragraph of information and then cites three sources underneath it. GEO is how you become one of those sources. There is some overlap here, and AEO and GEO both reward the same things. They reward clarity and structure, and they reward content that is easy to extract and easy to attribute. That is what I got wrong, or at least underexplained in the August episode. I talked about those things kind of as separate disciplines, but they're really not. They're layers of the same project, which is making your content legible to machines that are trying to synthesize an answer for a human. Which brings me to the framework that's been driving all of this for me and for my clients. So I spent a lot of time last year running controlled tests. I would ask the same question, my chair, I need a new one. I'm sorry, you all can hear it popping in the background. So sorry. But back to my test. Um, I would ask the same question across Chat GPT, Perplexity, all of the different models about a dozen different ways. And then I would just watch what got cited and what didn't. And I noticed that the winners were not the biggest brands. They were the ones that didn't really even have the highest domain authority scores. These sites had three things in common. They were fresh, they were structured, and they had authoritative content across the web. It's FSA. If you are a longtime listener, you know what I'm about ready to say. We're about ready to talk about the FSA framework. If you are a new listener, this is how I think about AI search optimization. And I want to walk you through what each one of those letters stand for. Freshness is F. AI engines favor content that signals activity. That does not mean going onto your blog or your website or wherever and posting 10 blog posts a day or 10 new YouTube videos a day. It just means showing the engines that your content is maintained, updated, and current, that your brand is an active brand. How do we do that if we're talking about the content on our own website? Well, there's a couple things we can do. First, update the timestamps. Now, when I say that, I do not mean that is the only thing that we're doing. If you just update the timestamp and nothing else, you have just wasted your time. What I mean is we are gonna go in there, we're gonna update the timestamp, but we're also gonna add in new data. Add in as of 2026 phrasing when it makes sense to do that. We're gonna rewrite complete sections. If nothing substantial has changed, go in there and add a section called what's next to show that the topic is still being thought about and talked about. This episode itself is a freshest move. The original episode, like I mentioned, is a top performer. I mean, downloads are still happening on that episode, but I'm not gonna just let it sit there and go stale while the entire industry moves along. So I'm updating it today with this episode. Bing's own guidance in the AI performance dashboard explicitly calls out update velocity. They want to see active maintenance, and so do these models. And because Bing is used everywhere, we really need to keep our content fresh. Then we have structure, which is S. If you are used to SEO writing or SEO strategy, this is not gonna feel like new information. This is gonna feel probably super familiar, maybe the most familiar of this entire thing. AI engines do not want to interpret your writing. Readers do not want to interpret your writing. They want to skim it, they want to extract it. In terms of writing for AI engines, use the things that we know already. Clear H2s and H3s, use the questions that people are asking inside of those headings. We're gonna use short paragraphs, we're gonna put the definitions at the top in a call-out box, we're gonna use lists where it makes sense to do that. We're gonna add in those comparison tables and FAQ sections. We're gonna have step-by-step breakdowns in our content when it makes sense to do that too. I really like using the bottom line up front strategy, B-L-U-F, where the very final point of whatever I'm trying to make, I move it straight to the top. So if we have that question as the heading, the next sentence is the answer, and then the following commentary is why it's the answer. Think about it this way. Every time a model can lift clean, chunked content, I hate that word. I hate that word. But every time it can just lift a piece of your content and then drop it into an answer, you're gonna win that citation. If your flashcard, uh if your content looks like a flashcard, the model is gonna treat it like a flashcard. But every time the model has to work too hard to figure out what you're saying, think walls of text with nothing in them but just text, paragraphs over and over, it's gonna skip it, your readers will too, and they're gonna go to a different source. So, flashcard is the answer. Break up everything, make it easy to extract. Then we have authority. This is the one that has changed the most since August when Joanna and I first recorded this episode. Authority used to mean backlinks and domain authority scores. That is still helpful, but not really. In an AI search world, authority means entity strength. So that means does this brand exist across the internet? Is it consistent? Is it mentioned by other entities? Does the same descriptor, this is this this is the important one, so write this down, does the same descriptor follow this brand around from place to place? On-page authority still matters. So you need to cite your sources, name your methodology, link internally like we would for traditional SEO, reference frameworks and tools by name. You need all of that. But off-page is where it really gets interesting and where this really kicks into high gear. So when I say off-page, I'm talking like guest podcast, third-party articles, participating in Reddit conversations, quoted quotes. There's a whole episode with Kelly Jura from Quoted about how to do that and how to do it efficiently. I will link that below. There was a lot of good information in that episode. Um, it also means like Reddit and that's not Reddit, Medium Post. I mean yes, Reddit, but medium post, newsletter features. Anywhere that your name appears next to a topic, somewhere other than your own website, you are teaching the models, hey, this person is an authority on this topic. They know what they're talking about. Quick tip the part that I said, write it down. Use one consistent descriptor for yourself across platforms. Mine is fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands, an AI search optimization expert. That's why I say it in every episode because podcast transcripts do help teach the model who I am. I say the same thing on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on podcasts that I'm guests on. It's in my bio, it's on guest posts, it's everywhere. Repetition is the point. Like I maybe I just thought about saying it and didn't actually say it. When I taught middle school Spanish, I repeated everything. A million times. These AI engines are like seventh graders. You have to repeat yourself a million times to teach the models how to categorize you. Which, by the way, let's talk about that experiment that I mentioned in the first episode, the original episode. So let's just close up that loop a little bit. So in the original episode, the one with Yolana, I told you about an experiment I was running. Here was the problem. When I prompted ChatGPT like with things like find a fractional content strategist for series A and B startups, I was not showing up, like at all. And now to be fair, I had just completed a website refresh, so I guess I was expecting miracles. I don't know. But I was not on the list, I was not anywhere close to being on that list. So to figure out what the AI engine was saying about me, I said something like, Okay, but what about Cassie Clark? She's a fractional content strategist. If anybody is reading my chats, they're gonna be like, man, she is so impatient. But when they finally said, Okay, Cassie Clark, instead of saying she is a fractional content strategist, they pulled an old bio of mine and described me as a teacher-turned writer. That is true. I did teach middle school and high school Spanish. I was a teacher that transitioned to freelance writing, and I got out of the classroom by doing that. But that is not the brand I'm building now. That is not how I want potential clients to find me. That is a 10-ish year old version of me. It's not what I'm doing now. So I did what I tell my clients to do. I traced it back. I had to go find where those bios actually lived, and then track down the content managers to figure out if we can get those updated. So when I did this, the answer was those bios lived on high authority third-party sites. HubSpot, I have worked with HubSpot for a long time, was one of the biggest ones. So I reached out to the HubSpot team, I asked them to update my bio with the current positioning, fractional content strategies for B2B SaaS, AI search optimization expert, the whole works, and they graciously did that for me. And then the patient had to kick in, I had to wait. But here's the update on that experiment. It worked, and it did not take very long, like a week, two weeks, three weeks. I I don't remember at this point, I just know that it was very quick. So when I prompt these engines now, the old bio is not the default anymore. Their current descriptor is surfacing, which is the authority and FSA in action. I fixed this on my own website, but I didn't leave it there. I could have, if AI engines were not a thing. SEO probably would have been just pulling from my own website when looking for fractional content strategy. I could have just rewritten my about page a hundred times and hope that it worked, but that's not what moved the I hate the word, it that's not what moved the needle. I really hate that phrasing, but it fits here. That is not what moved the needle. The fix was the off-site stuff that I did on, you know, those bios on third-party websites. That is the lesson here. If these AI engines are describing you wrong, if your bios across different channels, across different websites are incorrect for your current positioning, the models are gonna repeat what they know from everyone else. They like to verify their information. So they're gonna go out to a hundred different sites, or however many that you're listed on, to see what it is that you said about yourself and then spit that back out. So if it's not matching your current positioning, you're gonna have the old version of yourself. Now I want to give you a real-time example of how common this problem is when it comes to AI search. Just this morning I ran a mini audit on a brand, like hours before I sat down to do this recording, like literally today, and one of the very first things that jumped out to me was their bios. They had four different social channels, four of them, and every single bio said something different. Not one of them actually stated what this brand does, who they serve, or even what they sell. Sure, if you are human and you look at their feeds, you're gonna get pretty quickly what kind of products that they offer. If you're an AI engine and you're just looking at the text or the bio, it's not immediately clear. So think about that what that's teaching the models. These models are out there crawling. They're trying to piece together who this brand is, they're getting four conflicting signals from four different surfaces. And the result is nothing. No clear entity, no confident categorization. There's absolutely no reason for the engines to cite them for anything in particular because these engines genuinely can't tell what they are or who they serve. This part, the consistent descriptor, is the easiest thing to fix, but it is so often overlooked. Your bio across LinkedIn, Twitter, or X or whatever that platform is called now, Instagram, your podcast description, your guest bios, your HubSpot profile, wherever you show up, wherever your brand shows up, should say the same. Thing the same descriptor, the same positioning, the same language every time. If it feels boring, that is the point. Boring is good when it comes to AI engines. Because boring is consistent, and consistency is a signal, and it is how you teach the models who you are. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, wait, what are those engines saying about me? Go find out. Open Chat GPT, open perplexity, compare them across the two. So you definitely want to see what two of them are saying because they do act differently sometimes. Ask them about your brand, your name, your company, whatever. And then just see what comes back. Now, while you're doing that, go pull up your social profiles at once. Read them side by side. If they are not saying the exact same thing, that's your first fix. This one is completely free. It takes 10 minutes. It is the highest leverage thing that you can do for your AI visibility. So if you are listening to this episode, you've got the definitions down pat now, and you're thinking, okay, where do I actually start? Here are the top two top three things to do. Number one, we are not rewriting anything, we are just refining it. Look at your past best performing pages, the ones that are already driving traffic, and then just look. Are these pages clear? Do they have definitions at the top? Do they have FAQ sections? Do they have comparison language if they are comparison pages? Do the headings tell a story that the model can extract? That's your first pass. If you have a giant content library, you don't need new content, you just need cleaner content. Two, go check out that Bing Webmaster tool. If you've not yet looked at the AI performance, consider that your homework this week. Go find out which of those pages are already being cited and look for those grounding queries or the actual phrases AI engines are using to retrieve your content. That data tells you where your authority is already forming. Lean heavily into those topics and just expand around them. Don't just keep that content on your own website though. Because that brings me to point three. Spread it around. Think about where you exist off your own website. The only place that your experience or expertise lives is on your blog. You're gonna struggle to build authority in AI search. Where else can your perspective show up this quarter? Can you get a guest guest spot on a podcast or someone else's blog? Is there a Reddit thread where you can show up and actually help someone? Can you secure a byline or a third-party publication? Your brand needs to exist in the ecosystem, not just your own domain. When you start spreading yourself out, your brand out, your name out, and getting it out in front of all of these places, that's when your entity really starts to form. Okay, that is the update for 2026. SEO is still the foundation. AEO and GEO are layers on top of it. FSA or fascia structure and authority is how you actually execute across all of it. And Bing is running more of the AI search ecosystem than most people realize. So get familiar with the Bing Webmaster tool sooner rather than later. Giant shout out to Joanna Wilkison for being the guest on the original episode that started this whole conversation. If you haven't listened to that one yet, I will link it in the show notes. It is still a great starting point, but now with this episode, you have the April 2026 update to go with it. If you are sitting there thinking, I need someone to actually look at my content and tell me where I stand in AI search, that is exactly what I do. You can head over to CassieClarkmarketing.com or take a little peek at the show notes to learn more about an AI visibility audit, or you can come find me on LinkedIn and we'll talk about it over there. Actually, if you just want to talk about AI search optimization in general, find me on LinkedIn. I love yapping with my listeners. If this episode helped you, please hit subscribe, leave a review, and send it to the one person on your marketing team or your CMO who needs to hear it. Until next time, stay visible.