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August 4, 2025 15 mins

This episode explores the buzz around AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), explaining that they are simply new labels for what is still fundamentally SEO. Meredith’s husband reassures listeners not to panic over changing terminology. Instead, he offers practical advice on adapting websites to stay visible in AI-powered search results.

Chapter Markers
[0:00] Intro: AIO, GEO, and the Buzz Around New SEO Terms
[0:24] What AIO & GEO Mean (and Why They Don’t Really Matter)
[1:08] Agencies vs. Consultants and Why New Terms Get Invented
[2:32] Don't Freak Out: It’s Still SEO
[4:03] Google’s Guidance on AI Search Results
[5:45] Make Each Page a Complete Resource
[7:02] Combining Posts into Longer Pages
[7:58] Using Jump Links and Page Structure for AI Visibility
[8:22] What is llms.txt and Why It Matters
[10:09] Why AI Is Now Possible (Speed + Data)

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Meredith's husband (00:00):
A-I-O.
Have you heard these terms?

Meredith (00:02):
Yeah, I actually have heard these terms.

Meredith's husband (00:05):
Yeah, If you have.
If you're listening and theseare new terms to you, you're
going to probably start to hearthese terms.

Meredith (00:10):
And freak out.

Meredith's husband (00:12):
Yes, and you don't need to freak out, but
they stand for A-I-O isartificial intelligence
optimization and G-E-O isgenerative engine optimization.

Meredith (00:23):
What's the difference?

Meredith's husband (00:24):
Nothing I'm going to tell you, really.
I'm going to tell you, I'mgoing to let you in on a little
SEO industry secret.
These terms are made up, theseterms are practically
meaningless.

Meredith (00:37):
What do you mean?
They're meaningless.

Meredith's husband (00:39):
It's just SEO.
It's still SEO.

Meredith (00:42):
Then why are they calling it different things?
They?

Meredith's husband (00:44):
are calling it different things.
They are calling it differentthings and the people who
started these trends.
This was started by SEOagencies.
So an agency.
So the way I talk about SEO isthere's agencies and there's
consultants.
The SEO agencies are companiesor even professionals who are
going to do your SEO for you,okay.
Okay, consultants are going tohelp train your team, like I'm a

(01:06):
consultant.
Right, I used to run an SEOagency For 15 years.
I ran an agency, so I had ateam.
People would hire us.
We would do their SEO for them.
Right Now, I'm a consultant.
These terms originated withagencies because agencies are
always trying to differentiatethemselves from other agencies,

(01:27):
saying oh, we do AIO, we don'tdo SEO, we do AIO and GEO.
I can't even tell you how manytimes over the last 20 years
that new terms have beeninvented VMO, smo, mmo, like GMO
, smo, mmo, like all thesethings.
It's just SEO.

Meredith (01:46):
It's still SEO.

Meredith's husband (01:47):
It's SEO If it results from a search engine.
If it happens in a searchengine like Google, ai Mode or
ChatGPT, which is just usingBing, both of those are using
search engines.

Meredith (02:00):
It's just SEO, so don't freak out when you hear
these terms, you don't have todo anything new, because,
everyone's freaking out.

Meredith's husband (02:08):
Yeah, I know , it's not new.
Don't freak out, because I cantell people are all of a sudden
thinking oh my God, I don't needSEO.
I just was learning SEO.
That's all irrelevant.
Now I need to learn this newAIO and throwing everything else
in the trash.
Yes, don't do that.
You do not need to do that.

Meredith (02:28):
Okay, good to know.

Meredith's husband (02:30):
This is just the next evolution in SEO.
Seo is the one thing that isconstant in SEO is that it's
always changing.
Right Now, this is, I willadmit, the biggest change.
I mean at least since 2012.
Wow, probably since 2006, maybeever, but it's a huge change.
But it is, I will tell you, avery exciting time in SEO,

(02:53):
because people who do SEO, welike these new challenges, these
new things.
So I'm very excited for thefirst time in I don't know five,
six, seven, eight years.

Meredith (03:03):
Wow.

Meredith's husband (03:03):
About what's now happening in SEO, Because
for a while it's kind of been.

Meredith (03:09):
Same old, same old.

Meredith's husband (03:10):
I'll say stagnant, like it's been pretty
much the same.

Meredith (03:13):
Well look out stagnicity.

Meredith's husband (03:17):
One of the reasons that I am bringing this
up now is because number one youhave mentioned it to me, so I
know that it's out there andalso clients, potential clients,
come to me as a consultant.
They say and literally theyhave said things just in the
last week like well, we don'treally need SEO so much, we want
AIO and GEO.

Meredith (03:39):
Right.

Meredith's husband (03:40):
And that's absurd to me.
But the one of the reasons Ikind of shifted to becoming a
consultant is because I can justbe very honest with these
people.
Yeah, yeah, like that's absurdto me, but one of the reasons I
kind of shifted to becoming aconsultant is because I can just
be very honest with thesepeople.
Yeah yeah, Like that's one thingI didn't like about running an
agency is, you know, you kind ofhave to play along to get the
business.
If other agencies are sayingthey're doing AIO and I'm just
saying no, it's all SEO, peopleare likely to believe that it's

(04:03):
this new thing.

Meredith (04:04):
Of course, because that's what we're trained.
We're trained that new isbetter, because things are only
hopefully improving in some ways, and so they want to jump on
the new train rather than theold one.

Meredith's husband (04:19):
Right.
Well, it's fear of missing out,sort of, yeah.
And so also very recently,google has come out and provided
guidance on how to get into theresults for their AI mode.
Okay, this is essential.
You can think of this asGoogle's guide to AIO or GEO,
right, geo, okay, so Google hasa page and it lists a whole

(04:41):
bunch of different things thatyou can do to improve your odds
of getting into those AI searchresults.
It's 95% just SEO.
They even link back to the oldarticles that they had for their
normal how to get into theorganic results.
Now, some things are moreimportant.
Now there's a few things thatare like oh, this is going to be

(05:02):
really.
This was important for SEO,it's now going to be really
important for the AI results.
And there is one brand newthing that never existed before.
So I'm going to go throughthese.
I'm going to first.
I'm going to begin with thestuff that's old, that is now
more important.
Oh, okay.
So the kind of overridingprinciple, I think, is that

(05:24):
every page on your websiteshould be a complete resource in
itself.
Okay, so people go to a page.
You need to craft that page sothat they don't need to go visit
another page in order tocomplete the picture, so that
they don't need to get fullinformation.
Everything needs to be on onepage.
If you think about the way AIresults are presented, you know

(05:48):
they list different sources.
It never lists a website as asource.
It lists a web page, takes aweb page so it compares a web
page from your site to a webpage from another site.
It doesn't compare everythingon your website to another
website, it just takes a singlepage.
So let's say your children'sphotography page as an example.

(06:08):
You need to have all therelevant information that
somebody would presumably wantbefore they contact you needs to
be on that page, okay.
Okay, a little bit ofinformation about pricing, a
little bit of information aboutyou, some probably testimonials,
what's included, etc.
Same thing with a blog Ifyou're writing about a

(06:28):
particular topic, it needs toanswer all the questions about
that topic on a single pagerather than have other pages.

Meredith (06:36):
Okay, complete capsules.

Meredith's husband (06:38):
So one thing that I'm thinking about doing
and testing on my own is likeultra long pages.
Okay, so you might have aseries of blog posts about
something I'm thinking that it'sgoing to perform better in AI
results if you combine them allinto a single really long page.
Now that will create challenge,like I'm just going to test

(07:00):
this myself as an SEOpractitioner.
This is what I'm going to startdoing myself.

Meredith (07:05):
Right and get back to us.

Meredith's husband (07:07):
I can't guarantee it's going to work.

Meredith (07:08):
Okay.

Meredith's husband (07:09):
But it's what I'm going to test.

Meredith (07:10):
It's what I'm going to do next.
We shouldn't be doing thatuntil we hear from you.

Meredith's husband (07:14):
Right, but that's what let's just make that
clear.
Don't have seven different blogentries about a topic.
Figure out a way to put themall into one, and then that
creates a new challenge in howdo you make it digestible for
users.

Meredith (07:33):
Right.

Meredith's husband (07:34):
So then your headings and your subheadings
become important and most likelywhat you will want to do on a
longer page like that is have asort of what I would think of as
almost like a table of contents.
At the top List, the hub set,like you know.
List what is covered below withyou know, by listing
subheadings, yeah, bullet pointsand then hyperlink those bullet

(07:55):
points to individual sectionson the blog the subheaders.
Yes, those are called jump links.
If you do that, you've probablyseen blogs like that that have
like a little intro and then itsays what's covered in this blog
and then has a list of bulletpoints and those bullet points
are hyperlinked down to specificplaces in that article.
Those are called jump links.
Ok, that sort of thing is goingthing.

(08:23):
That's brand new.
That's not like anything elseis what they call LLMStxt files.
What it's like a sitemap?
It's like a sitemapxml file.
It is for AI bots, like alittle directory of your website
.
So for Google and searchengines, you have a sitemap file

(08:45):
and the sitemap file is like alittle list of all the pages on
your website.
So for Google and searchengines, you have a sitemap file
and the sitemap file is like alittle list of all the pages on
your website.
It's a little set ofinstructions that you give to
Google and it essentially sayshere, google, here are all my
pages.
This new file is the same thing, but for AI bots, because AI
bots cannot read your sitemapfile.

Meredith (09:03):
Oh not yet.
Do you think they will be ableto eventually?

Meredith's husband (09:08):
No, no, I don't actually AI.
I'll get to that in a secondbut AI bots are also not very
good, or they're not efficientat crawling a website and
putting all those pages together.

Meredith (09:23):
Okay.

Meredith's husband (09:24):
And they don't need to do that.
That's not their job, okay,because Google already has an
index and what the AI bot isdoing is using the search
engine's index to figure out allthe pages of your website.
Ai is not replacing searchengines, it's using search
engines.

Meredith (09:43):
That's a big, important factor.

Meredith's husband (09:45):
Yes, ai, so let me put that in context a
little bit AI, the concept andwhat it's doing is nothing new,
like it's been around fordecades and decades.

Meredith (09:56):
AI.

Meredith's husband (09:56):
Yes, the concept.
Now, what AI needs to function?
Two things, and they are new.
So number one it needs a hugelibrary.
It needs a big set of data Okay, it needs a whole bunch of data
that it can scan, okay.
So Google and Bing and othersearch engines have done that.
Now they have created this hugeindex of like basically the
entire internet.

(10:17):
So now that's there.
The other thing that AI needsto function is speed.

Meredith (10:22):
Yeah.

Meredith's husband (10:22):
And so you may have heard about companies
like NVIDIA creating these chipsthat are really fast for AI.
So the computer chips now areway faster than they have been
in the past.

Meredith (10:33):
Interesting.
So they Are we all gonna haveto get new computers.

Meredith's husband (10:37):
No, no, okay , no, these are specifically to
power the AI.

Meredith (10:42):
Oh, okay.

Meredith's husband (10:43):
Okay.
So the computer chips, like Isaid, have been getting
exponentially faster over theyears.
They just get faster and fasterevery year.
Now, the reason that AI needsthese faster chips in order to
work is because a human beingcan do somewhere between one and
three calculations per second.
Okay, okay, and these are.

(11:04):
When I say calculations, I meansort of like think about an
easy math question.
Okay, okay, a human being cando one to three of those per
second.

Meredith (11:13):
Okay.

Meredith's husband (11:14):
AI.
Can you take a guess at howmany AI?

Meredith (11:17):
47 million.

Meredith's husband (11:19):
Not even close Somewhere between 100
trillion and one quadrillioncalculations per second.
So you see, very fast.
So what AI is doing essentiallyis going out and using Google
super, super fast yeah, like 100trillion times faster than you

(11:41):
or I could.
So by the time you or I couldthink of, even start to think
about what to type into Google,ai has typed it in and searched
and condensed all the results.
So speed is the issue, andspeed is now possible like it
has never been before.
So that's why AI is now such abig thing.
It's able to be done now.

(12:04):
Okay, so if you say to somebodyyou're working on your SEO and
they say to you oh, seo is dead,that is a whole news, and that
will probably happen, becauseagain everybody thinks oh, seo
is dead, it's now AIO.

Meredith (12:20):
Yep, I have to start all over.

Meredith's husband (12:21):
You can kind of quietly smile to yourself
and know that that person is onthe wrong track.
Or, if you want, if it's afriend of yours and you want to
clue them in a little bit, youcan say well, how do you suppose
AI searches the Internet?
Right, okay, it's SEO.
This is the next evolution ofSEO.
Wow, and, like I said, aio andGEO is 95% SEO, with a few more

(12:46):
things tacked onto it.

Meredith (12:48):
And are you going to be guiding the few things tacked
onto it bits?

Meredith's husband (12:55):
Yes, I have a lesson on that.
It covers a whole lot more thanwe did here.
If you want to just do that oneextra thing create the llmstxt
file you can just Google that orchat GPT it.
Ask how to create an llms filefor your website.
A tip you cannot do it onSquarespace.

Meredith (13:17):
Oh yes, as of this recording.

Meredith's husband (13:19):
I don't think you will be able to.

Meredith (13:21):
Oh really.

Meredith's husband (13:22):
I've been dealing with Squarespace support
for over a year now, andwhenever I ask them things about
anything even slightly similarto that, their response is oh,
we don't support third partywhatever.
Yeah, Okay.
So if they do, great, I'm not,I'm not, my fingers are not
crossed for it Right, but youcan go to chat.
You can say how do I do thisfor my WordPress site and ShowIt

(13:45):
?
You can not really do it, but Iexpect there will be a
workaround for ShowIt.
I do think that they willadjust.
If you're on WordPress or ShowIt.
The link below will alsoexplain in more detail what that
other guidance from Google is.

Meredith (14:01):
Fabulous.

Meredith's husband (14:02):
Well, this is very exciting yeah do not
freak out when you hear AI isthe new thing.
It's just the latest change inSEO.

Meredith (14:10):
Okay.

Meredith's husband (14:11):
Which I think like many to come is the
one of the most exciting changesin several years.

Meredith (14:16):
That's pretty don't freak out.
He says that to me all the time, and it's true.
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