SEO is dead; long live SEO

I keep reading that traditional SEO is dead or at least on life support. The claim is that people aren't using Google anymore and are getting all their information from AI. So now the latest thing is to optimize for AEO (answer engine optimization). I don't really know what that looks like, so I will continue to optimize for SEO if it is a small bet.

My latest experiment has been adding blog posts to my directory. Until now, it's been a directory of pure listings, with one small reference to Be Wellthy. I had learned that adding blog posts to a website somehow increases the SEO potential. That sounded like too much work to do manually, but it's a breeze with Claude Cowork. I identified all my previous newsletters that recapped conferences and asked Claude to repurpose them as blog posts in my directory. It handled it all in short order, and now I have 23 articles on the blog. 

This is one of the key benefits of AI — it takes larger bets and makes them much smaller. It's one thing to invest the time and effort, but another to hand it off to AI for minimal involvement. I shall ponder which other bets appeared large to me that are now trivial to hand to some guy named AI.