Growth — how AEO and SEO work together now
The search box isn’t where people find you anymore.
Answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) increasingly answer the question before anyone clicks a link. Traditional search still matters — it just isn't the only front door anymore. Here's what that means, what's already shipped for Waymaker, and the exact channel work that's still ahead.
Optimizing to be the answer, not just a result.
SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of ten links a human then chooses from. AEO — answer engine optimization — optimizes for being the fact an AI system pulls into the one answer it gives, often with no click at all. Same underlying goal (be found, be trusted, be chosen) — different mechanics.
The two aren’t in competition. The content and structure that make a page easy for an AI to parse and cite (clear facts, structured data, direct answers) are largely the same things that make it rank well the old-fashioned way too. AEO is additive, not a replacement.
The benefit isn’t traffic. It’s being the trusted source.
A lot of AI answers now happen at the research stage, before someone would have typed a search query at all. Being cited there gets you into the decision before the traditional funnel even starts.
AI systems tend to cite sources that already look authoritative to search engines — structured, consistent, well-linked. Investing in AEO and SEO together reinforces both.
Vague marketing copy doesn’t get cited. Specific, structured facts — pricing, scope, what a service actually includes — do. AEO is a forcing function toward clearer writing.
What’s shipped, and the work still ahead.
The content engine is real. The next layer is authority.
Blog content isn’t the bottleneck — Waymaker already publishes on a real cadence, and every post feeds both the sitemap and the AEO layer above automatically. What’s missing is entity consistency and off-site authority: being recognized as the same trusted business everywhere it shows up, and earning credibility from other people’s pages instead of only publishing on our own.
Nine channels, and the actual tip for each.
Claim and verify it even for a software business if there’s any real local presence. Keep name/address/phone identical everywhere it appears — inconsistency is what breaks local trust signals, and increasingly what AI Overviews pull from directly.
The Google Business Profile equivalent for Siri, Apple Maps, and the App Store — almost always skipped. Same rule: identical business info, real photos, real hours.
Free to register via Dun & Bradstreet. Establishes a verifiable business identity that data aggregators and some directory/local-pack systems check against — worth having before it’s needed, not after.
A handful of real, relevant links (partners, press, genuine tool directories) beats a hundred low-quality ones. Search engines and AI crawlers both discount spammy link profiles now — quality is the whole game.
Pick directories your actual customers use — AI tool directories, industry-specific lists, the local chamber of commerce — instead of submitting everywhere generically.
Write for publications the target customer already reads. One link from a relevant, real-traffic site outperforms ten SEO-only guest posts on sites nobody visits.
Deliberately link between waymaker.cx, agency.waymaker.cx, and the blog — a service page linked from a relevant post, a post linked from a service page. This is free equity already owned; most sites never use it.
Already shipped and running (40+ posts). The lever left to pull isn’t more volume — it’s writing answer-first, so the content pulls double duty for SEO and AEO at once.
Not about virality. Consistent posting gives search and AI crawlers fresh, dated signals tied to the brand entity, and gives humans something to actually share and link to.