“SEO, Meet AEO.” How AI Accelerates the Shift in Search Behavior

Instead of searching for results, today’s users are increasingly searching for answers. As Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) technology develops, the answers to your burning questions are more likely to appear directly within search engine result pages (SERPs). 

Whether or not you’ve heard the term “AEO,” you’ve certainly experienced it. Questions like the following are easily answered directly in SERPs:

How many cups in a gallon?

What’s the weather?

Google’s Featured Snippets is another form of AEO. By marking up content with an FAQ schema, marketers can prime their content for making an appearance directly in SERPs.

As is always the case in digital marketing, change is the only constant. Heads of SEO and Heads of Content must adapt by allocating resources to both search engines, as well as answer engines. 

While answer engines function within SERPs, they also operate outside of the traditional search world. ChatGPT, Google Bard, and the like are answer engines that marketers should be optimizing for – especially now that ChatGPT is no longer stuck in time and can now search the web beyond September 2021.

Today’s high-value content must be written to optimize for the ways in which users ask questions. This includes taking into account the popularity of voice search, rise in chatbots, and the turning tide in consumer search behavior (e.g. users become more confident asking highly specific and direct questions).

E-commerce marketers must adapt by ensuring product description pages (PDPs) are optimized to provide answers that align with search intent. But the routine updating of hundreds or thousands of PDPs can be a daunting task. And what works now might not work six months from now, necessitating a rewrite of the rewrite.

That’s where EKOM comes in. EKOM trains its proprietary language model on your brand voice and then auto generates and auto optimizes your e-commerce assets with the input of real-time search analytics. EKOM then integrates into any content management system (CMS), Digital Asset Management (DAM), or Product Information Management (PIM) software to make those updates live in your e-commerce platform.

With EKOM, Heads of SEO are confident that content is not only being optimized for search, it’s also being optimized for answer engines. To learn more about how EKOM optimizes your e-commerce assets for the current and future web, schedule a walkthrough today.