Ep. 51 Found in AI: Should You Skip SEO and Go Straight to AI Search? The 2026 Update
Eight months ago, I sat down with Ioana Wilkinson to record an episode on SEO, AEO, and GEO. It became one of the most downloaded episodes of Found in AI—which tells me a lot of you are landing here trying to figure out how all these acronyms actually fit together. And, it tells me many of you are wondering if you should just skip SEO.
A lot has changed since August. So I recorded the update.
If you’d rather read the highlights first, here’s what we cover.
Should you skip SEO? No, it’s doing more work than ever.
You’ve probably seen someone declare on LinkedIn that SEO is dead. Again. It’s a hobby at this point.
Here’s the truth: AI engines don’t make up answers out of thin air. They retrieve. They synthesize. They cite. And they retrieve from an index. Somebody has to crawl the web, understand what’s on it, and make it retrievable. That’s SEO. That has always been SEO.
When someone tells you SEO is dead, what they’re really telling you is that they don’t understand how AI search works.
The Bing thing nobody is talking about.
In February, Microsoft rolled out a feature inside Bing Webmaster Tools called AI Performance—the closest thing we have to Google Search Console for AI citations.
I know. Bing. Stay with me.
Here’s who’s actually running on Bing’s index:
- ChatGPT Search uses Bing for web retrieval
- DuckDuckGo has been a Bing syndication partner for years
- Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing (obviously)
- Yahoo Scout, the new AI answer engine that just launched to 250 million US users, uses Bing’s grounding API for source retrieval (with Claude handling the synthesis)
That’s a massive chunk of the AI answer ecosystem feeding from one index. And almost nobody in the SEO space is paying attention to Bing yet.
If you take one thing from this post, take this: a strong Bing index presence is no longer optional. It used to be the backup. Now it’s a primary surface for AI visibility.
What AEO and GEO actually mean (without the hype)
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Optimizing your content to be the answer. Featured snippets, FAQ blocks, the direct-answer box at the top of a search result.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Optimizing your content to be cited inside AI-generated answers. When ChatGPT or Perplexity writes a paragraph and lists three sources underneath, GEO is how you become one of those sources.
Here’s what I got partially wrong in the August episode: I talked about these as separate disciplines. They’re not. They’re layers of the same project—making your content legible to machines synthesizing answers for humans.
The FSA Framework: Freshness, Structure, Authority
After running controlled tests across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Gemini, I noticed the same three signals kept separating cited content from ignored content:
- Freshness. Update timestamps, new data, current context. Show the engines your content is maintained.
- Structure. Clear headings, short paragraphs, definitions, lists, tables, FAQs. AI engines don’t want to interpret your writing—they want to extract it.
- Authority. Not just backlinks. Entity strength. Where else does your brand exist? Who else mentions you? Does the same descriptor follow you across the internet?
I walked through the full framework in detail in this post on the FSA Framework—and I dig into how each signal actually plays out in the episode itself.
The HubSpot experiment: closed loop
In the original episode, I told you about an experiment. When I prompted ChatGPT to find a fractional content strategist for Series A and B startups, I wasn’t showing up. The LLMs were pulling an old bio describing me as a “teacher turned writer.”
I traced it back. The old bio was living on high-authority third-party sites, including HubSpot. So I asked the HubSpot team to update my bio with current positioning.
It worked. The new descriptor is now surfacing in AI answers.
The lesson: if AI engines are describing you wrong, the fix is almost never on your own website. It’s out there—on the high-authority sources the models trust more than your About page.
I ran an audit for another brand this morning that surfaced a related issue: four social channels, four completely different bios, none of which clearly stated what the brand does or who they serve. That’s four conflicting signals to AI engines trying to figure out who that brand is. The result is no clear entity, no confident categorization, no citations.
Consistency is how you teach the models who you are.
Where to start
Three things. That’s it.
- Don’t rewrite. Refine. Audit your best-performing pages for clarity, structure, and recency.
- Check Bing Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t looked at AI Performance yet, that’s your homework this week.
- Audit your own bios side by side. LinkedIn, Twitter/X, podcast guest descriptions, third-party profiles. Are they telling the same story?
If we haven’t met yet….
Hi, I’m Cassie, a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands who focuses on AI search optimization.
If AI-generated answers are already influencing your buyers, your content strategy needs to account for that. I build content programs that connect strategy with execution: clear positioning, systems, and content that actually drive revenue. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start growing, here’s how we can work together.Want more insights like this?
Subscribe to The Visibility Report, where I break down how AI engines interpret authority—and how you can show up in the results.
