Hey AEO Community! - 🎥 Here you'll find the latest "State Of AEO" call recordings. - ❓Also you'll be able to ask questions in advance! (Specially useful for people that cannot make it to the call!) So every week make sure to: 1️⃣ Check out the latest "State of AEO" call recording. 2️⃣ Send Us your questions to the next Call!

[State of AEO Call Recording] [State of AEO Slide Deck] [The AEO Semantic Entity Guide] The New Frontier: AI as Your Primary Interface Julian kicked off today's State of AEO by highlighting a pivotal shift: AI is rapidly becoming the primary interface between businesses and users. We're moving beyond simple product research; the "Year of Action" means AI agents will increasingly perform purchases and transactions on our behalf. With a surge in AI wearables from giants like OpenAI and Apple, users will soon interact with products and brands through voice prompts and visual cues, demanding businesses adapt to this AI-first reality. Understanding how AI agents interpret the world is no longer optional—it's essential for visibility and recommendation. 🤖 The Evolving Discovery Path: From Sources to Action The traditional three-step user journey has transformed: Past (Sources): Users manually sifted through sources. Near Future (Recommendations): By 2025, AI delivered product recommendations based on complex queries. Now (Action): In 2026, AI agents will perform transactions. To succeed, businesses must translate their brand, business information, and products so they are not just understood, but recommended by AI. This means optimizing for a future where your website is often the last touchpoint, not the first. Julian shared a critical insight from AEO.co's research: Google's AI mode often cites URLs that don't match its own traditional search rankings. This underscores the emergence of a new rulebook for AI visibility, where organic blue links are being pushed further down the page by AI Overviews, even for commercial queries. 🛍️ The AEO Framework: Foundation, Representation, Authority

[State of AEO Call Recording] [State of AEO Slide Deck] [The AEO Semantic Entity Guide] Julian continued this week by moving from Indexability to the second pillar of the BRAIN framework: Brand Representation. While ensuring AI can access and understand your content is foundational, truly becoming the recommended answer requires building a robust, machine-readable brand identity. The shift is from merely being seen to being recognized, understood, and trusted by AI. 1. 🤖 Branding for Machines: Facts, Not Feelings Gone are the days when branding was solely about human emotion and connection. For AI, a brand is a collection of factual, verifiable data points. Corroboration is Key: AI builds "trust" through corroboration. If a fact about your brand is consistently found across multiple, validated sources, AI gains confidence in its accuracy. The Knowledge Graph: Google's Knowledge Graph is a prime example of this. Brands gain entry and authority by demonstrating a sustained, validated presence across the internet, historically through curated sources like Wikipedia, and now through an ever-expanding web of interconnected data. Structured Data as the Language: Visual persuasion for humans is no longer enough. AI agents interpret the world through structured data (Schema markup), which is the "only way they get to understand, classify, index, retrieve, and send information back to the user." 2.🛍️ Brand Density: Your Footprint in the AI Landscape Julian introduced the concept of Brand Density—a measure of how much space your brand occupies in the digital places that matter for AI. Volume & Weight: It's not just about how many mentions you have, but also the authority and relevance (weight) of those mentions.

[State of AEO Call Recording] [State of AEO Slide Deck] [The AEO Semantic Entity Guide] Welcome to 2026. If 2025 was the "Year of Development"—a period of frantic experimentation and massive leaps in AI compute—then 2026 is the Year of Deployment. We are moving past the "wow" factor and into the "how" factor. AI task capabilities are now doubling every seven months, and for businesses, the goal has shifted from curiosity to visibility. To succeed this year, you must stop treating your website as a destination for humans and start treating it as a high-speed knowledge base for silicon intelligence. 1. 🤖 The Year of the Agent: Deployment over Development We have entered an era where AI is no longer just a chatbot; it is a decision-maker. - The Agentic Shift: Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise apps will use agents this year. We are handing over the keys of decision-making to AI, trusting it to research, compare, and eventually purchase on our behalf. - Assistant-First Journeys: Consumers are now starting their journeys inside AI assistants—shaping their preferences and choosing who to trust before they ever click a website link. - The New Reality: If your brand isn't recommended in that initial AI research phase, the human user may never know you exist. Your website is now the "Source of Truth" that feeds these agents, not the first point of contact. 2. 🛍️ The Monetization of Discovery: Shopping & Ads The "free" era of AI is ending as companies like OpenAI and Perplexity seek to monetize the massive compute costs of 2025. - Deep Research: Features like ChatGPT’s "Research Deeply" are the new sales funnels. By asking follow-up questions about budget and specific features, AI is narrowing down options for users in real-time. - The Return of Ads: Expect to see ads integrated throughout AI overviews and AI-first search modes. Google and OpenAI are racing to monetize the "commercial intent" behind every prompt. - The Visibility Strategy: Brands that optimize for these deep research moments will define the next decade of digital competition.

[State of AEO Call Recording] [State of AEO Slide Deck] [The AEO Semantic Entity Guide] In our final session of the year, we pulled back the curtain on the "Web of Trust." We have moved beyond the gates of Indexability and into the realm of Certainty. As search evolves from a list of blue links into a multi-dimensional graph of entities, your business can no longer survive on simple claims. To be recommended by AI, you must build a high-density web of relationships, semantic depth, and validated authority. 1. 🕸️ From Links to Graphs: The Semantic Map AI doesn’t just read your text; it calculates the mathematical distance between concepts. We are moving from a world of "Keywords" to a world of "Objects and Relationships." - The Entity Hierarchy: Using the "Sourdough Bread" analogy, we mapped how AI perceives your business. It’s not just about the product (Primary Entity); it’s about the family it belongs to (Parent Entity: Fermented Foods) and the variations beneath it (Child Entities: Whole Wheat, Rye). - The 10-Element Framework: To achieve true "Topical Authority," your content must cover the full spectrum of an entity: Attributes, Problems, Use Cases, Alternatives, Comparisons, Risks, and Geomodifiers. If you ignore the "Risks" of your service, the AI perceives a gap in your knowledge and will look to a competitor to fill that void. 2. 🏛️ The Architecture of Authority: Hub-and-Spoke To stay visible during massive volatility—like the current "Christmas Google Update"—you must stick to the fundamentals of information hierarchy. - High-Density Graphs: Don't just answer questions in a flat line. Use the Hub-and-Spoke model. Your "Pillar" page provides the visionary, high-level overview, while your "Spoke" pages provide the granular deep dives (e.g., "The Ultimate Guide to Coffee" vs. "The Thermodynamics of Roasting"). - Contextual Anchors: The era of "Click Here" is dead. Your internal links must be self-explanatory anchors that tell AI exactly what entity it will find on the next page. This builds a "high-density graph" that proves you own the topic.