As the Founder and CEO of We Do SEO, I have spent years helping businesses improve how they are found online. For most of that time, the primary goal was relatively straightforward: understand what people are searching for, create valuable content, and make sure search engines could properly crawl, understand, and rank it.
That model is changing rapidly.
Today, your website no longer has just one audience. It has two:
The humans who visit your website and the AI agents that read, interpret, summarize, recommend, and cite your content.
Most business owners and marketing leaders recognize that artificial intelligence is changing search. What remains unclear is exactly what companies should do about it.
Should businesses create separate content for AI platforms? Should they rewrite their websites around frequently asked questions? Does an llms.txt file matter? Should they prioritize brand awareness, traditional SEO, personalization, or answer-engine optimization?
These are the questions Optimizely’s Content & Beyond event on August 20 intends to address.
The two-hour program is focused on one of the most important challenges facing marketers today: how to create a digital experience that works for both human visitors and AI-powered discovery systems.
Your Website Is No Longer Just a Destination
For years, websites were treated as digital destinations.
A potential customer searched Google, clicked a result, visited a website, reviewed the available information, and decided whether to contact the business or make a purchase.
AI-powered search changes that journey.
A customer may now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, or another answer engine for a recommendation. Instead of immediately visiting a website, the user may receive a summarized response assembled from multiple sources.
The AI platform becomes the intermediary.
That means your content may influence a decision even when the customer never clicks through to your website.
Your company may be cited, summarized, compared, recommended, or excluded entirely based on how clearly AI systems understand your content, services, authority, reputation, and relationship to the question being asked.
This does not mean websites are becoming less important. It means they are taking on a broader role.
Your website must now accomplish three things:
- Help potential customers understand and trust your business.
- Give search engines enough context to rank your pages.
- Give AI agents clear, reliable information they can extract, interpret, and cite.
Businesses that continue optimizing only for traditional keyword rankings may miss a growing portion of the customer discovery process.
Brand vs. Demand: Where Should Marketing Dollars Go?
One of the event’s central conversations will explore the relationship between brand investment and demand generation as AI search becomes a more influential referral source.
This is a particularly important discussion because AI discovery does not operate solely on traditional rankings.
AI systems look for recognizable entities, consistent information, trustworthy sources, third-party validation, topical authority, and evidence that a company is legitimately connected to the subject being discussed.
That makes brand authority more measurable and more important than it has been in the past.
Demand generation still matters. Businesses need qualified traffic, calls, leads, appointments, and sales. However, the way demand is created is evolving.
A person may discover a company through:
- A traditional Google result
- A Google Maps listing
- A Google AI Overview
- A ChatGPT recommendation
- A Reddit discussion
- A LinkedIn article
- A third-party review
- A local business citation
- A comparison article
- A voice assistant response
From my perspective, the strongest strategy is not to choose between brand and demand. It is to build a marketing ecosystem where the two reinforce each other.
Brand signals establish credibility. Demand-focused content captures intent. Search optimization connects the business with active buyers. Reviews and third-party mentions validate the company. Structured website content helps AI systems understand how all those signals fit together.
The businesses that win will not simply be the ones producing the most content. They will be the ones building the clearest and most credible digital identity.
Create for Humans: Make Every Visit Count
The event will also address an uncomfortable reality: human website visits may represent a smaller portion of the overall discovery journey as AI platforms answer more questions directly.
That makes each human visit more valuable.
When someone does reach your website, the experience must be relevant, clear, and persuasive.
Visitors should quickly understand:
- Who you help
- What you offer
- Where you provide services
- Why your company is different
- Why they should trust you
- What they should do next
This is where personalization and conversion strategy become essential.
Businesses often focus heavily on attracting website traffic without giving equal attention to what happens after the visitor arrives. More traffic does not automatically create more revenue. The site must convert attention into action.
A strong human experience includes clear messaging, intuitive navigation, useful content, credible proof, fast page performance, accessible design, and calls to action that match the visitor’s intent.
It also requires understanding that not every visitor arrives with the same level of awareness.
Someone reading an educational article may need more information. Someone searching for a specific local service may be ready to call. Someone comparing providers may need reviews, case studies, pricing guidance, or evidence of expertise.
The website should support each stage of that journey.
Create for Agents: What Has AEO Actually Taught Us?
Another major session will examine what businesses learned during the first year of widespread answer-engine optimization.
This is a conversation the marketing industry urgently needs.
AEO has already attracted its share of shortcuts, speculation, and questionable tactics. Some businesses have been told to create hidden content for AI systems, publish separate “AI versions” of pages, dramatically overuse FAQs, or treat an llms.txt file as a complete AI visibility strategy.
The reality is more nuanced.
AI agents need many of the same things human visitors need:
- Clear answers
- Accurate information
- Logical organization
- Consistent terminology
- Demonstrated expertise
- Supporting evidence
- Trustworthy brand signals
The objective should not be to create one website for humans and another for machines.
The objective should be to create content that is genuinely useful to humans while being structured clearly enough for machines to understand.
At We Do SEO, we approach this through the combined disciplines of SEO, AEO, and GEO.
SEO helps search engines crawl, index, and rank content.
AEO, or answer-engine optimization, helps platforms identify and extract direct answers.
GEO, or generative-engine optimization, strengthens the signals that may influence whether a brand is referenced, summarized, or recommended within generative AI responses.
These strategies overlap, but they are not identical.
Effective AI visibility may involve:
- Clear service and product definitions
- Direct answers to specific customer questions
- Consistent entity and brand information
- Well-organized headings
- Internal links between related topics
- Structured data and schema
- Strong author and business credentials
- Original research, examples, or first-hand expertise
- Reviews and third-party validation
- Mentions across reputable external platforms
- Technically accessible, crawlable content
The goal is not to manipulate AI agents. It is to reduce ambiguity.
When a website clearly explains who the company is, what it does, where it operates, who it serves, and why it is credible, both search engines and AI systems have a better chance of accurately representing the brand.
What Rebuilding Optimizely.com Can Teach Other Businesses
The agenda also includes a behind-the-scenes discussion about rebuilding Optimizely.com in the agentic era.
This may be one of the most practical sessions because many companies are currently facing the same problem on a smaller scale.
Their websites were built for an earlier version of search.
The content may be fragmented. Service descriptions may be vague. Pages may compete against one another. Important information may be buried inside images, PDFs, or outdated templates. The company may describe the same service differently across its website, social profiles, directories, and sales materials.
Adding more content to that environment does not necessarily solve the problem.
Sometimes the underlying digital structure must be reconsidered.
An AI-ready website requires more than adding a chatbot or producing articles faster. It requires a clear content architecture, defined entities, strong topic relationships, intentional internal linking, reliable technical performance, and a publishing process that maintains quality as output increases.
AI can dramatically improve content velocity, but velocity without strategy can create more confusion.
Companies need governance.
They need clear standards for fact-checking, brand voice, page structure, subject-matter review, duplicate content, internal links, citations, and human oversight.
The question is no longer simply, “How quickly can we publish?”
It is:
How quickly can we publish content that is accurate, differentiated, useful, and connected to a larger authority-building strategy?
The Future Is Not Human or AI—It Is Both
The central idea behind Content & Beyond reflects what I am seeing across nearly every industry.
Businesses cannot optimize exclusively for people while ignoring how AI systems interpret their information. They also cannot chase AI visibility at the expense of clarity, trust, and the human customer experience.
The future of marketing belongs to companies that can do both.
They will create content that answers real questions. They will build recognizable brands rather than anonymous collections of keyword-targeted pages. They will make their expertise easy to verify. They will structure their websites so that both people and machines can understand them.
Most importantly, they will stop treating SEO, AEO, GEO, content strategy, branding, reputation, and conversion optimization as separate initiatives.
These disciplines are becoming parts of the same discovery ecosystem.
At We Do SEO, our focus is helping businesses prepare for that ecosystem—not only by improving where they rank today, but by strengthening how they are understood, trusted, and recommended across every place their customers search.
The search journey is changing.
The companies that adapt now will have a significant advantage over those waiting for the industry to settle on a new set of rules.