Ep. 51 - Why AEO and GEO Don’t Replace SEO

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I break down two new terms that are suddenly everywhere in legal marketing conversations: AEO and GEO.

Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization are being positioned as the future of search — especially with AI reshaping how people find information. But here’s the reality: neither replaces traditional SEO. They build on it.

I explain what zero-click searches mean for your firm, how AI-driven results are changing visibility, and why chasing every new marketing acronym without understanding the foundations can leave your law firm vulnerable. Most importantly, we discuss how AEO and GEO still rely on the same bedrock principles that have driven successful SEO for the last 25 years — targeted keywords, user intent, high-quality content, and ethical optimization.

If your SEO agency starts throwing around new terminology and suggesting you “move beyond SEO,” this episode will help you ask the right questions and protect your firm from costly missteps.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi and welcome. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. And for my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over$10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. If you've been paying attention to SEO and how it has changed in the last year, you may have noticed some new terms floating around in the dictionary. I'm talking about terms like AEO and GEO, which didn't even exist a year ago. And some people might hear those new terms and be inclined to sing EIEIO to the tune of old McDonald and call it a day because who needs to know all these acronyms? Well, you do as an attorney. Now you don't necessarily need to, but your SEO agency certainly does. And there's an ongoing argument about these new terms and whether or not they batch under traditional SEO and they're just logical offshoots of that, or if they are actually terms onto themselves. There are great arguments, pro and con, on both sides of that divide, that really aren't relevant for our purposes here. What you need to know is that these terms are going to be creeping into your regular SEO considerations more and more frequently. This is for two reasons. Because first off, AI is making such a huge impact on how we search. A lot of people are looking for what we call zero-click searches, where the answer is presented right there at the top. You don't have to delve any deeper than that if you don't need to. So, like if you want a quick synopsis of what's going on in the news story, then a zero-click answer is probably what you're looking for. This is where we get AEO, which is answer engine optimization. AEO works pretty much the same way as SEO. It targets and plans to hit a lot of the same markers, but it is geared primarily towards a zero-click search as the intended endgame. The idea is to have an answer that is so succinct and so perfectly crafted that search engines say, well, we can't do any better than this. And they just go ahead and use that text as the answer. Of course, sometimes that gets cited and tracked back to your website, and sometimes it doesn't. And Google is trying to improve on that, but catching those zero-click positions can be problematic if your primary objective is to get clicks and get people into your sales funnel. And so you have to think about that. So answer engine optimization works a lot like SEO, it's just a different application of it. Then you have GEO, which is generative engine optimization. This is where you're going to get AI's attention. You want to be cited by AI in those results. So you may have a zero-click search answer at the top of the results, and then immediately below that, a number of other citations that give the user more depth and more insight into what's going on. So what you want to do is you want to set up the content on your site or on your social media so that AI will snag it and cite it as part of a zero-click search. This is where it gets weird because you may say, well, if it's all SEO and AEO and GEO are just offshoots of SEO, why are we even bothering with this? Well, again, like I said, there's a lot of great arguments that SEO is one big umbrella term that includes AEO and GEO. There's also a number of great arguments against that because each one of them requires you to target different things and requires you to set things up a little bit differently. And ultimately, if you've done it all right, then ideally you will gain the authority where AI and zero-click searches cite your work as the ideal answer. That's where it gets complicated. And whether or not they're actual parts of SEO that just branched off, or whether they are actually unique concepts that are aligned with SEO but separate entities in their own right is a much bigger topic than most attorneys are going to want to delve into. Let's face it, you don't care about this stuff. You care about what's going to make your law firm's phones ring, uh, what's going to get you more clients, what's going to build your company's coffers, and that's as it should be. But you at least have to understand the very basic rudiments of AEO and GEO to make sure that when your SEO agency starts throwing these terms at you, you have some idea of what they're talking about. And everybody's going to have their own different take on that. Some people are going to say it's like SEO, but not quite, because it's basically SEO targeted to a specific purpose. All of these arguments have merit. And if you want to dig deeper than that, then by all means I encourage you to do so. SEO Roundtable is a great place to get some really good perspective on the arguments surrounding whether SEO, AEO, and GEO are the same thing in different baskets, or whether it's all one big basket, or whether they're even different baskets. They're completely different stores. And if you're interested in that argument, like I said, SEO Roundtable or Search Engine Journal are both great places to look. What you need to understand about these from a practical standpoint is that they all still turn on the same basic SEO concepts and principles. So as long as you're doing your SEO, you're creating good content, you're creating user-oriented content that's not strictly promotional and gives users viable information that they can then use to help strategize for themselves how they want to pursue their legal issues or what have you. You're still in pretty good shape. The big problem you're going to run into is when you've got three different people giving you six different opinions on how these things all fit together. And it depends on the time of day and who you talk to and whose perception of how these things work together is in style this hour. And this is one of those places where SEO has evolved at an incredibly rapid pace in a very short amount of time. The reason for that is because AI came along. It changed the game and it changed it big. Now you've got every single search engine investing heavily in their own versions of AI and a dozen other contenders just waiting in the wings to jump in and take over. So there's a bit of an arms race going on right now. It's a relatively quiet one as opposed to the knockdown drag out brawls we saw in search engines back in the late 90s and into the 2010s, when Google pretty much settled that argument once and for all by becoming the dominant search engine on the planet. Again, Google handles about 92% of worldwide internet traffic every second, every day, every year. 92% of a global market. So of course it behooves them to get this stuff right. Now, does it really matter to you? Do you particularly need or want to know how the SEO gets done? As long as it's done ethically and as long as it gets the results that you're looking for. Likely, none of this stuff matters to you. It's only good to you when you're talking to an SEO, uh, an SEO agency, one that has locked onto those and basically said, okay, listen, you need to ignore SEO. You need to be looking at your AEO and GEO instead exclusively. This, I'm sorry to say, is not accurate because the bedrock foundations of good SEO have not changed. Targeted keywords, user intent, great content, none of these things have changed and none of them are going to go away. So you need to be focusing on the SEO elements more or less to the exclusion of all else. This is why I advocate personally for considering AEO and GEO as being branch topics of SEO. So if you're doing your SEO right to begin with, uh then the AEO and GEO should follow as a natural progression from doing your SEO. And this is what I think a lot of people uh end up getting lost in the weeds over. They're too busy. They want to play with the shiny new toy instead of putting some time and TLC and some more work into their SEO. They might think, oh, that's boring. We do SEO all the time. Let's look at AEO and GEO to see if we can't really wow them. Well, that's great. Except by utilizing this approach, you're inevitably undercutting your investment in SEO. When you focus on AEO and GEO to the exclusion of SEO, because they all hinge on the same basic principles, you're just looking for different outcomes using the same tools. Those results might not look anything like what you had hoped they would. That's why I wanted to go through this topic. And yes, to be fair, it does seem like sometimes the lexicon around search engine marketing and search engine optimization is getting a bit out of control. So the key point to take away here is that you need to know these terms. Why? Because sooner or later, you're gonna hear them used in conjunction with your law firm's marketing. How your particular SEO agency chooses to approach them, whether they want to make AEO and GEO their own separate categories, or whether they trade at all, it's all SEO. In the end, it's just what you're trying to accomplish with your SEO that determines whether it's actually SEO or AEO or GEO. And so the reason you need to understand this stuff is because sooner or later you're going to be asked to weigh in on this by your SEO agency. They're going to ask, which of these do you really want to target? And the answer, as I said earlier, and I'm going to stress this part because I feel like it's really important, is that there's nothing wrong with going for the hat trick. You can go for all three. And if your SEO is on point and your content creation looks good and it answers questions for your audience and gives your users valuable information that they can apply to their situation, then you're already in better shape than most places that are running around freaking out. These people are going, oh, we have to get AEO in. Now we have to go get the GEO. And we have to hammer on this and completely ignore the basic tenants of SEO because we have to get on the latest bandwagon. That's another reason that you need to be aware of this stuff because if your SEO agency is suddenly talking about, now we're going to have to focus on AEO and GEO, and we're pretty much going to put uh SEO on the back burner, you should be asking some really serious and pointed questions. Because if they're doing this, they're missing steps. And that says to me that they may not really understand AEO and GEO as well as you might anticipate or as well as you would expect. And if they're okay with skipping steps on your SEO to try to pinpoint AEO and GEO results, this is going to leave you in a situation where you've got an entirely different set of problems that you have to work through with your SEO agency. So that's a concern point that you need to be aware of. Now, is everything going to uh everybody gonna jump on the train and start going, oh, they've come out with new terms. Let's start throwing those around everywhere we possibly can. No. And luckily not. Most agencies and most people aren't going to do that. Most SEO agencies are going to say, you know, it's all SEO. We need to ask the client, what's your end game? Because that's what's going to guide a good, solid, ethical SEO agency. For places like law firms that are still primarily focused on getting potential clients to the site, getting them to interact with the site, and then getting them to set up a consultation, sign a contract, and become functioning paying clients, you're going to want to stick with SEO. And that means most law firms will be looking for SEO primarily. And sure, they'll try to target and optimize AEO and GEO when and where it's feasible and when and where it doesn't interfere with the primary consideration, which is to get clients clicking on your site. It's just that simple. So if you want to be very, very careful of an SEO agency that says, oh well, so you don't need to worry about SEO anymore because it's all become AEO. Or if they say it's all become GEO, that's they're way off base because AEO and GEO still rely on the tenants and the foundational concepts of SEO as they've been established over the past 25 years. Anybody who is willing to dispense with your SEO in favor of targeted AEO and GEO probably doesn't fully understand what they're doing and why the difference in your intention and their approach matters. So it's important that you do understand this stuff at least well enough to say, well, wait a minute, but you're still using keyword searches and search strings and understanding user intent and working on user experience and all of these things that go into traditional SEO, right? If the answer that your SEO agency gives you is anything but yes, you need to start asking some questions. Okay, that all sounds great, but how are you going to implement AEO and GEO without using search engine optimization? That doesn't make any sense. And the answer is probably going to be something along the lines of when you really break it down to the last compound, we're reinventing the wheel because we want to use these shiny new terms because they're cool and they're make us feel cutting edge. And nobody had ever heard of them a year ago. So we want to plaster them over our marketing as much as we possibly can, uh, but they don't change anything. So as long as you understand that, you're in pretty good shape and you should be able to effectively manage your SEO agency when they say, okay, well, let's talk about answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. Now you can say, sure, let's talk about those things. Okay, great. What are the SEO underpinnings that we're going to target to make sure that this happens? Because in the end, it all filters back to search engine optimization. And if you know that, and if you understand that difference and why it matters, you already have an edge over the guy who's saying, Oh, I don't want to talk about SEO. That's 25 years ago. I want to talk about AEO or answer engine optimization, because I hadn't heard about that until last week. Well, okay, that's fine. But this person doesn't understand uh that all of it still rests on SEO. And if you don't have your SEO on point, your AEO and your GEO isn't going to go anywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it. So keep that in mind and think about that and do a little bit of your own homework. I really strongly recommend when people start throwing uh unfamiliar or new terms around, make it your business to drill down into it at least enough so that you're comfortable with it with at least a cookbook definition of what they're talking about. If you do that, and you're then you will be in a much better position to understand when someone's actually trying to help you and when they're just pushing snake oil your way. And of course, it's better for your firm if you understand these things well enough to explain to others, okay, this is how we're allocating our resources, this is what we're investing in, these are the strategy points that we want to hit. But if you're not prioritizing your SEO, you're setting yourself up for a big headache that you're going to have to fix later on. Because chances are, if you go chasing every new trend without understanding it fully, you're going to end up with a situation where your SEO agency is going to say, Well, we performed per contract. I don't know what to tell you. And the worst part is they'll be right, at least according to the letter of the contract and the law, leaving you and your law firm holding the bag. So keep that in mind. Do your own homework, do your own research, and at least get a broad idea of how SEO, AEO, and GEO all work together to accomplish different outcomes. If you know that, you can pretty much be sure that your firm's marketing is in good hands, especially if your agency is on the same page with you. And of course, you'll be less prone to get fooled by enticing smoke and mirrors and more ready to get the results from that your firm needs and deserves. Again, I'm John Risby, the law firm growth professor. Before I leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button and make sure you subscribe so that you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends and colleagues that are attorneys trying to grow their law firm who might find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas for making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you all next week.