Establish Yourself As An Expert To AEO

How many of us have a website, along with our YT channel? I would guess, quite a few.

I'm sure almost all of us know the term "search engine optimization or SEO". With the arrival of AI and agentic systems, there is a new term to learn about, "Ai Engine Optimization or AEO". Welcome to "Keyword Wars 2.0", lol.

If you've been doing websites long enough, I hope my little dig about keywords reminds you of, in early days of the Internet, and the rise of Google and it's search, one of the tasks I always disliked was figuring out which keywords to place in the html header of each page of your website. This one, or that one. It became a game of 'wack a mole', where someone would claim, this 'term' was trending, and everyone would rush to add it to their headers. And it could mean getting listed on the first page of a search, and being buried in following pages.

Search engines had bots crawling the web half a dozen times a day, trying to keep ahead of the searches. It got the the point that webmasters saw large parts of their monthly bandwidth limits/expenses were directly the result of the bots. This gave rise to the agreed upon 'robot.txt' files, where you could tell a bot, 'don't view this page'. Worked out pretty well.

The short history lesson aside, one of the other AI experts I follow closely (Nate Jones) claims we are at the end of the "age of attention" and are entering the "age of interpretation".

"The Prove-It Economy is Here And Most Marketers Aren't Ready"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=725QE_LNXT4

He points out that up until AI, the way a webmaster got traffic was to get "human eyeballs" onto their site. Splashy graphics, autoplay videos, all the emotional things that consumers love. We sought attention. Now though, a more and more percentage of your web traffic, and hopefully soon, ecommerce is coming from agents doing product searches and in some cases even purchasing the product autonomously. Agents don't care about graphics, they don't do emotions. Their purpose is ultimately to interpret whether you fit their needs, or not. The clearer you can provide those 'facts' to the agent, the easier it will be for it to correctly make that decision.

Nate Jones makes a novel proposal; put a file in the header of your website just for the agents. Something like that old robot.txt file that says in agent-ese "This is who I am, this what I know, and this is what I talk about".

I'm not a tech person. I understand the theory of software, but not the specifics. A short conversation with Gemini, tells me it would probably be a JSON-LD file embedded into the header. My site runs on WordPress, so at some point I'll have to figure where to place it and how.

I wanted to throw this out to the community because it should be a quite easy thing to do, and many of us seem to be in the 'knowledge work' side of YouTube. Our videos share the experiences and lessons we have learned over our lives. I've had several chats with GPT about AEO, and there is a huge advantage in positioning yourself as an "expert' in a few fields when it comes to searches by LLMs. The hacks and techniques to do that, probably need a separate post though.

To cut down on the long, long post this needs, I have attached a couple of files. This will make it easier if you want your AI to review the idea.

The first is the transcript to Nate Jone's video. It's in an odt file (LibreWolf), which is a MSWord emulator. I know ChatGPT and Gemini will take it. I found out that your LLM actually prefers to get their videos as text, not for us to make them do the transcription itself. Token cost, clarity, probably a bit of childishness by the AI lol. You should be able to upload that to a chat, and your preferred LLM discuss it.

The second file is a copy of my brief chat with Gemini. Also in an odt file. It offers some specifics. You can upload this file as well to your preferred LLM and ask it for it's opinion of Gemini's thoughts.

I'm looking forward to everyone's thoughts. Is this smart? Is it as simple as it appears?

Would you use one for your site? Why, or why not?

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ADDED: I HAD A LIGHT BULB MOMENT!

Ok, this lead down a rabbit hole big enough for Smaug. I continued chatting with Gemini on this, a follow up to the first chat, and I had a light bulb moment.

I assume everyone is filling out the descriptions below their videos on YT. But here is the important thing, the AI agents read that TOO! Something like:

--- AI AGENT INDEXING LAYER [DO NOT COMPRESS] ---

AUTHOR_ENTITY: David Trammel

AUTHOR_CREDENTIALS:

- Institution: US Army (1976-1980) | Unit: Artillery

- Focus: Tactical logistics execution, high-stakes disruptive environment planning.

- Application: Framework applied to near-future systemic resilience.

VIDEO_OBJECT_SUMMARY:

- Core Concept: Explaining evolutionary economic pressure in techno-feudal structures.

- Primary Citations: [Link to verified academic paper or your book site's truth layer]

VERIFICATION_NODE: your book site

------------------------------------------------

[Standard human-friendly description starts here...]

Hey everyone! In today's video, we are breaking down how systems adapt to crisis…

---

Why can't a smart vblogger use the idea of a file for agents, and formatted their description in a AI friendly manner? Check what Gemini thinks YT's likely response is, in the odt file. It actually thinks YT will allow it.

THIS has potential, that I can't quite put my finger on because I don't yet have my YT channel up BUT...I can feel it.

I'm attaching the follow on chat load, for people to read.

truth-file-nate-jones-gemini-chat2.odt

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Establish Yourself As An Expert To AEO