Confused by the explosion of AI search acronyms? You're not alone. In this episode of the CX Pod, Customer Strategist Journal Editor Liz Glagowski sits down with SEO expert Kelsey Libert, co-founder of marketing agency Fractl, to cut through the noise and bring clarity to the rapidly evolving world of AI search.
Transcript:
Liz Glagowski: Hi, and welcome to the CX Pod. I'm Liz Glagowski of the Customer Strategist Journal. Today's conversation focuses on the rise of AI search—a critical channel for marketers. My guest today has spent considerable time researching what marketers know and what they're doing with AI search right now. I'm pleased to welcome Kelsey Libert, SEO expert and co-founder of marketing agency Fractl. Welcome to the podcast, Kelsey. I'm really excited to talk to you today.
Kelsey Libert: Thanks so much for having me, Elizabeth. I love the questions you sent over, and I'm excited to get into it.
LG: Before we dive in, can you quickly introduce yourself and what you do at Fractl?
KL: Yeah, sure. I'm one of Fractl's co-founders. We started our agency over 13 years ago. What we do is a lot of data-driven content marketing with the goal of earning media on really high-authority sites. We basically work in a variety of verticals, and what we're trying to do is create research that both a target market and writers at sites like Business Insider, Huffington Post, and CNBC would be interested in covering on various topics.
What this does is allow our clients to earn those high-authority brand mentions that drive their visibility on organic search, but also on emerging AI platforms—really building their digital footprint online around the entities they want to be known for and the authority they gain by getting those other credible sources to link to them about the topics they care about. We've been doing that for about 13 years, and I've spoken at conferences like MozCon, BrightonSEO, and SMX Advanced over the years, using industry research to help Fractl get ahead of the competition by conducting research into viral emotions and earned media strategies that journalists actually want to cover.
LG: Obviously, a key marketing channel is search, and AI is upending a lot of what we know about it. For us at the Customer Strategist Journal, we're an online publication, and figuring out AI search is a key goal for us in 2026. We've been writing a lot about it. There are many questions out there, a lot to learn, and things are changing every day with AAEO, GEO, AISO—all those terms we need to understand as AI search compares to traditional search. Can you talk a little bit about why you wanted to conduct research on emerging AI search-related categories?
KL: I'm very active on LinkedIn and contribute to blogs by writing columns for different marketing publishers. What I was seeing is that almost every week, there was a new acronym coming online that people were using in reference to AI search, discoverability, and visibility. It became the new "SEO is dead" hot take, which the industry has loved to produce since honestly the dawn of SEO. If you look at Google Trends, there's a peak every year of somebody saying it for whatever reason. Really, all that was happening was a lot of anxiety being created—a lot of discourse over what we're calling it.
Is it SEO still? Is it something totally new? Is SEO really going away? What's happening? Over the course of the year, I didn't really see anyone producing research to determine what was being adopted most and used most widely across agencies and larger in-house companies.
My own clients were coming to me saying, "Well, we use this," while others would say, "We use this." So I thought, let's get some data, because that's what Fractl does—we're a data-driven company. Let's get the data to show us what's gaining traction in the industry and why, and how we can use the language that's shaping strategy, hiring, and company visibility to drive that conversation and get more cohesion as an industry instead of just panic.
To do that, we partnered with Search Engine Land and triangulated three signals that mattered to us. First was what practitioners say they recognize and use—we surveyed hundreds of marketers to find out which terms they're using in-house. Second, we looked at what people are actually searching for on Google Trends and similar platforms. Third, we examined what hiring managers are actually paying for on Indeed job listings—how are they describing these roles? By using three different data sources, we could identify where we see trends emerging and what's being more widely adopted.
LG: Before we dive into the results of the research, can you define some of those terms for the audience? There were a few I was unfamiliar with when I was researching this.
KL: I think the biggest thing heading into this discussion is understanding that each one of these acronyms—they're not really competing religions or competing strategies. They're really all used to describe different layers of the same system. The way I think about it is SEO—search engine optimization—is your ground floor, your umbrella strategy for all the things you're doing to drive brand authority and qualified search traffic.
Typically, we're thinking of search engines when we say that. But to me, AI is just another type of search engine. When you're using ChatGPT or Claude, you're giving it a prompt, and it's going out and generally using RAG to search, or it's using its own corpus of knowledge—that knowledge graph it's been trained on from largely search data—to distill what the answer is for you.
I think the biggest difference between the two platforms right now is that one uses more of a ranking system, whereas the other is distilling everything it knows about a topic from its corpus into the best answer. So it's more about visibility versus rankings, but generally they're both reliant on taking the best content from the web to give you a distilled answer. I don't want people to think that GEO is necessarily different from SEO.
To describe them more: SEO, to me, as an agency over the years—everybody knows content clusters, content hubs, pillar pages, the on-site content that educates your demographic about the frequently asked questions they have, their concerns, and general information about your industry and offerings. That creates the breadth of knowledge on your site and conversion mechanisms. Then you also pursue earned media strategies, using data journalism to produce newsworthy content about your brand instead of just a press release—because who's really covering press releases these days?
You can use press release distribution strategies all you want, but to really get an authoritative publisher writing a unique story about your brand, it takes going beyond just announcing your latest feature. It's about what value you have in thought leadership, subject matter expertise, or internal data that's exclusive to you and can educate consumers. I think it's more about valuable on-site content, earned media authority, and brand building—and that all contributes to the knowledge graph, the authority, and the rankings it takes to be visible across all channels nowadays. To me, that is SEO.
Then GEO—generative engine optimization—is the one that seems to be gaining a lot of traction next to AEO. Generative engine optimization is when you're thinking of platforms like ChatGPT or Claude—these are the AI platforms you're interacting with—and how do you drive that brand visibility? That's a combination of factors. They're also using largely top-ranked search results when they're doing RAG searches on more real-time information, or they're using the most trusted, authoritative sources they've distilled from their corpus of training—which, again, can be determined by many of the sites used to train these systems.
Many of them have media partnerships they use to train their LLMs. They use directories, Reddit, and LinkedIn. They're using all sorts of different information sources. So it's just tweaking it a little bit to drive visibility on those AI platforms. That's generative engine optimization, but it still largely relies on quality SEO strategies.
And then AEO is answer engine optimization. It appears people are associating this more with AIOs—AI overviews in Google and featured snippets—where AI is incorporated into search, but it's not an AI-exclusive platform like ChatGPT or Claude. I try to use language that bridges the gap between tech people and marketing people. That's really what's happening in the industry right now—that's where a lot of these acronyms are coming from. Then AI SEO—artificial intelligence search engine optimization—is a big mouthful. That's more inclusive of all the platforms people are talking about, from ChatGPT to AI overviews and beyond.
The ones we saw gaining the most traction: 84% recognized GEO as a term related to driving brand visibility within ChatGPT or Claude, and only 14% described their work as SEO. What's really interesting about that is it seems like everyone understands that SEO is what's driving a lot of the visibility.
But when people are discussing generative engine optimization and overall brand visibility in Gen AI platforms, that's when they want to use a slightly different term just to specify the channels they're optimizing visibility for—not necessarily the strategies that go into them.
LG: What are some of the other key findings you discovered in your research?
KL: Another thing we found was that GEO is leading in awareness and search growth—in adoption and people searching for that term. AI SEO and AEO were driving the most social engagement on LinkedIn. We did a massive LinkedIn scrape of thought leaders and the broader industry to see what was being most adopted. So while it's not being used most prolifically, it was actually driving more social engagement.
And SEO still carries the strongest emotional trust. I think for me and what I've been posting, I'm really leaning into sticking with SEO—the best practices we all know. Then, when I'm talking about generative engine visibility, I'm using more of the GEO phrasing.
One of the really interesting things we found, though, is when we drilled into Indeed—this is more HR and hiring. You take a step away from maybe the expert practitioners and look at the people actually writing the job descriptions. When we analyzed 33,000 job postings on Indeed, the one term that dominated was AISO—AI search optimization. That outpaced SEO, GEO, AEO, and LMO combined.
I think the real takeaway there is that hiring managers want breadth, not buzzwords. What's the most clearly understood phrasing that people might search for, especially at entry level or mid-level? AI search optimization seems pretty specific to what that might be, versus the industry thought leadership that's looking for something more accurate to the platform itself—where the "generative" comes from, I would say.
LG: I like how you took a wide-angle lens to this topic but then also drilled into that job search part of it, because like you're saying, people are trying to really narrow down the types of experience they're looking for or the types of search they want to highlight. What surprised you most during this research process?
KL: Honestly, what really surprised me—we did an additional study that we just published on Search Engine Land—once we understood the landscape of the terms being used online (GEO, AEO, all that), we wanted to look specifically at industry thought leaders. To me, the SEO landscape has just boomed over the last five years especially. There's been a huge influx of agencies in the UK, more and more people overseas trying to build themselves as link builders and spam networks. There are more people in the US starting to come to market with it.
The biggest thing to me was: I want to understand the people I always saw as thought leaders in this industry who have been doing this work for 20, 30 years—since the dawn of the internet. What are they saying? What are they seeing? They've seen a lot of new platforms come and go. How does this change the lens on what terms are leading?
What surprised me in this extension of the research was the volatility of the terms being used—not necessarily the disagreement over terms. We analyzed 75 individual thought leaders and all their posts in 2025 to see what terms they were using. Fewer than one-third used AI search terminology consistently over time. That means of all the different terms we studied, none of them—only a third—were really consistent in what they were using.
Even the thought leaders themselves are like, "What the hell are we calling this?" And the loudest voices—the ones posting most prolifically—changed their framing the fastest. They would use a different term almost every month. I think they were just trying to demonstrate their thought leadership and cover the whole spectrum versus really taking a stance on what they were calling it. I think that honestly led to a lot of the industry confusion we're all dealing with now—this sense of, "Oh God, what is it? Nobody knows."
The positive thing here, though, was that in that analysis, over 70% of the posts about AI search—using any one of these terminologies—had a positive sentiment. So despite all the panic headlines, this is a really optimistic industry. We're negotiating language, not saying that SEO is no longer relevant.
If anything, I think a lot of the studies that came out of Ahrefs last year really pointed to how the best practices we've been doing in SEO still matter now more than ever—like building up your brand authority around the topics you want to be known for, getting coverage on other authoritative sites in your niche or that cover topics within your niche and point to you as a credible source. It's not so much that this is a whole new ecosystem. It's more: keep applying the best practices that have been tried and true for decades now.
LG: It's nice to see some optimism around AI and advancing technology like that. Based on this research, what would you recommend as steps for marketers to take?
KL: The best marketers—especially the best content marketers—we're all in digital marketing. The way we succeed is: how do we get more traffic and build up our authority on certain topics? That's through creating really high-quality, unique content. I think the biggest danger right now for anyone in digital marketing is investing too much in platforms that maybe are currently being used to train AI, like LLMs, but that will quickly be inundated with AI slop.
To me, there was a huge surge in people prioritizing Reddit, especially at the beginning of last year, because it had been acquired and was suddenly ranking very high in Google for almost everything. But then you think about it—that's user-generated content. That's one of the easiest platforms to drown in AI slop. Will it be a trusted resource next year? Maybe not. Maybe it will be devalued a little bit more.
Where are these companies investing in getting more content from? Where are more protected sources of information? Podcasts are probably a great example because there are actual individuals running those, curating experts within their fields. A lot of them have transcripts they're producing, so there's lots of great content for these systems to scrape or learn from.
Obviously, leading publishers were huge in this space. That's what I presented at SMX Advanced last year—who were the major publishers that each platform, Claude versus GPT, had set up partnership deals with for content, and how does that influence the results?
Really, I think continuing to invest in robust content hubs on the topics you want to be known for, building out that entity authority around the keywords or topics you want to be the authority on—both on-site and off-site through promotion, through earned media, through social content repurposing and promotion—getting your thought leaders on podcasts, on video, YouTube videos, and really just compounding your individual expertise.
Take that top-funnel content and, in a way, forget about it—AI is going to absorb that so fast. That's why we saw massive declines in organic traffic for a lot of sites last year. We're working on some research about that now. But really, what you see is that traffic doesn't matter as much as your general awareness. What you want to focus on is the mid- to bottom-tier of your funnel, because that's what's converting—that's where the money is.
Adding unique data that you have or unique subject matter expertise and really being the authority in your industry by getting those citations helps you stand out on both organic search—it builds the authority there, it builds the authority within chat platforms, and it can be repurposed for social engagement content as well. It's just a matter of really drilling into where your target market resides online, what questions they have, and how you build content and PR strategies to get your brand out there on all those topics, on all those platforms. I personally love SparkToro as a great tool for doing a lot of that research—backing into those questions and then building strategies against them.
I wouldn't get so hung up on all the different terms people are using nowadays, because it all comes back to: create something of value, create a brand of value, showcase that expertise and data, and be unique. Don't be the person just regurgitating what everyone else is saying—that's a lot of what AI will do unless you're giving it proprietary data and expertise.
I'm a huge fan of using agentic workflows and using ChatGPT and Claude to help scale my own workflow, but it takes my data and my expertise to make it truly valuable versus just saying, "Describe what digital PR is"—everybody's going to do that. Ultimately, stop using acronyms and start tracking the surfaces where you're getting qualified traffic, where you're not, and how you can expand your footprint to get more of it.
LG: What are you most excited about? What gets you excited about where 2026 is headed?
KL: I think search is really a multi-surface ecosystem now more than ever, especially when you think about younger demographics and the tools they're going to use. Fractl was really fortunate. One of our co-founders had started a nonprofit back in 2020, and she was one of the first people to get access to ChatGPT before it was released to the broader market. We were able to see what was coming. When I saw a lot of the doom and gloom from SEO leaders at that time saying, "AI search is nothing, it's confusing, it's not valuable, it's going to be crap"—we knew right away from what we had already started doing early on that this was going to be a game changer. Stop looking at it as this bad thing—it's just another platform you're optimizing for through doing great work.
I'm really curious to see how people change their sentiment, adoption, and use cases with AI this year. I think it's super exciting in all the ways it can be used. It's helping us do massive data studies and analysis that we couldn't do previously because it takes on the role of a statistician and can do very robust methodologies, statistical testing, and things that previously made people who were incapable of doing these things very powerful if they just learn how to refine prompting or give it the right data.
To me, it's not about scaling AI slop. It's using AI to scale some of the most robust, interesting research in your industry that anyone could do—and an entry-level college grad can probably do it even better than the senior-level marketer in some ways, because they're the ones really embracing AI right now.
I think we're moving away from this fear space to really empowering us as marketers to create better content and to get more qualified traffic from another platform—not less. Even if we're losing some traffic from organic search, we're gaining it from AI, as we're seeing. Also, how do you use AI to repurpose your content to get on more channels or to identify different places you haven't been seen before that maybe you didn't know about? You can do tons of research like that. Really, we want to focus on just building that brand authority and trust signals in the way we always knew how to do, and look at it as this is another great, exciting opportunity for our brand to get mentioned by doing more of what we know works.
LG: This is really great, impactful insight that could be used in the content marketing space and just for marketers in general who are curious about where AI is going when it comes to search. I really appreciate your time and your research. Thank you again, Kelsey, and thanks everyone for listening. We'll catch you next time.
KL: Thanks for having me, Liz.
