#SEOisAEO: Episode 1 - Getting to Grips with AEO: Answer Engines Are Here to Stay - Jason Barnard with Andy Drinkwater, Barry Schwartz & Craig Campbell
Published by: Semrush. Host: Jason Barnard. Guests: Andy Drinkwater, Barry Schwartz, Craig Campbell. September 4, 2018
Search was changing.
In 2018, search engines were still dominated by the familiar model of ten blue links: type a query, receive a ranked list, and choose the result that best answers your need. But a new kind of search experience was emerging. Google Assistant, Alexa, and other conversational interfaces were increasingly designed to give users an answer rather than simply present them with a list of webpages.
That was the starting point for the first episode of the #SEOisAEO series, where Jason Barnard was joined by Andy Drinkwater, Barry Schwartz, and Craig Campbell to explore a question that would shape the entire series: what happens to SEO when search engines become answer engines?
Jason introduced the episode as the beginning of a series examining how Search Engine Optimization was evolving into Answer Engine Optimization. Rather than treating AEO as a replacement for SEO, the discussion positioned it as an expansion into a broader search ecosystem involving more platforms, devices, formats, and ways for users to receive information.
Search Engines Give Choices. Answer Engines Give Answers.
Jason’s starting point was a simple distinction.
Traditional search engines were built around choice.
A user types a query and receives a list of possible results. The user can scroll, compare, and decide which result is most appropriate.
Answer engines introduce a different model.
When a user asks a question through a voice assistant or another answer-oriented interface, the system may need to provide one direct answer rather than a list of ten competing pages.
That difference fundamentally changes the optimisation challenge.
As Jason explained during the episode, search engines can be thought of as vertical, while answer engines are more horizontal. Traditional SEO focuses heavily on winning positions within one type of result. AEO requires businesses to think across multiple formats, platforms, devices, and presentations.
The distinction is not about abandoning traditional search.
It is about recognising that the search ecosystem was expanding.
AEO Expands SEO Into a Bigger World
The emergence of answer engines did not mean that the familiar search results page would suddenly disappear.
Instead, SEO and AEO would increasingly coexist.
Jason described the change as SEO expanding into a world with more platforms, more devices, more players, and more opportunities. Traditional links would continue to exist, but they would increasingly coexist with other search experiences, including answer boxes, Knowledge Panels, voice responses, and other machine-generated formats.
This is one of the most important ideas in Episode 1.
AEO isn’t simply:
SEO, but for voice search.
It is a broader way of thinking about how brands can become visible when machines decide what information to present, in what format, and through which interface.
That includes a desktop search result.
It can also include a featured snippet, Knowledge Panel, voice response, or another answer format.
The optimisation target is therefore no longer one fixed search-results layout.
The Three-Step Process Behind an Answer
To explain how answer engines work, Jason introduced a simple three-stage model:
- Understand the question
- Understand the available answers
- Provide the best answer
This framework became one of the central ideas of the episode.
The first stage is understanding the user’s question or intent.
The second involves understanding the information available across the web: crawling, indexing, organising, and interpreting potential answers.
The third is selecting and presenting the answer that best satisfies the user’s need.
For marketers, that creates three corresponding challenges:
Can the machine understand what the user wants?
Can it understand what your business offers?
Can it determine that your answer is the best one to provide?
That is a much broader challenge than simply ranking a webpage for a keyword.
Understanding User Intent Comes First
Andy Drinkwater’s discussion of user intent reinforced the importance of understanding why someone is searching.
A search query isn’t simply a collection of words.
It represents an intention.
Someone searching for “best superzoom camera” is expressing a particular need. Someone searching for a supermarket brand may be looking for the company itself, a nearby branch, or a specific product or service. The words alone don’t necessarily tell the whole story; context matters.
For marketers, this means content cannot simply be created around keywords and left to chance.
Businesses need to understand:
- What is the user trying to accomplish?
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- What information are they looking for?
- What context surrounds the search?
- What answer would actually satisfy their need?
This is why Jason challenged the familiar habit of thinking primarily in terms of keywords.
The real objective is to answer the question behind the search.
Understanding the Available Answers
Once the machine understands the question, it needs to understand the possible answers.
This is where the complexity of the web becomes important.
The web is not organised in one consistent format. Websites structure their information differently, describe entities differently, and communicate relationships in different ways.
Craig Campbell pointed to technologies such as Schema Markup, HTML5, and machine learning as part of the systems that help answer engines make sense of that complexity. He also emphasised the importance of credibility: a potential answer needs to come from a source the machine can trust.
This establishes an important principle for AEO:
Being able to provide an answer is not enough. The machine needs to understand that answer and the entity providing it.
That idea would become increasingly important throughout the #SEOisAEO series.
Credibility Helps the Machine Choose
The third stage is perhaps the most important from a business perspective:
Which answer should the machine choose?
Barry Schwartz discussed the difficulty of identifying a single “best” answer. Some queries have factual answers, while others depend heavily on context. Featured snippets and other search features can change depending on the query and circumstances.
For businesses, this makes credibility essential.
If an answer engine has several possible answers, it needs signals that help it decide which source is trustworthy enough to recommend.
This is where the episode connects with the concept of E-A-T - Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Credibility isn’t simply about claiming to be the expert.
It is about giving the machine evidence that supports that claim.
Communicating Answers to Machines
A business may know exactly what it does and exactly what questions its customers ask.
But that doesn’t automatically mean Google, Bing, Alexa, or another service understands it in the same way.
Craig Campbell’s advice was practical: businesses need to communicate their information clearly through Schema Markup, HTML5, accessibility, structured information, and clear content.
The goal is to make the answer easy for machines to process.
This is where technical SEO and AEO overlap.
The machine needs to be able to access the information, understand what it represents, and determine how it relates to the question being asked.
As Jason put it during the discussion, the tools themselves are not necessarily complicated. The challenge is knowing what to implement and why.
The Format of the Answer Matters
One of the most important distinctions in the episode is that an answer can be correct and still be unusable if it is presented in the wrong format.
A webpage might contain the perfect answer for a user, but if an answer engine cannot present that information through a particular device or interface, the content may never become the selected response.
Barry discussed how search was already expanding beyond traditional screens into voice assistants, Google Home, Android Auto, smart TVs, smartwatches, and other devices. Different environments create different presentation requirements.
This makes formatting part of the optimisation challenge.
The question isn’t simply:
“Is my answer good?”
It is also:
“Can this machine present my answer in the format this user needs?”
That is a distinctly AEO way of thinking.
AEO Is Multi-Platform and Multi-Device
This leads directly back to Jason’s horizontal model.
Traditional SEO can appear comparatively vertical because a business is competing for positions within a particular search-result format.
AEO spreads the challenge across multiple surfaces.
A business may need to think about:
- Traditional organic results
- Featured snippets
- Knowledge Panels
- Voice answers
- Local platforms
- Smart devices
- In-car experiences
- Structured data
- Other answer formats
The objective becomes presence across the ecosystem, not simply winning one position on one results page.
This is why Jason’s vertical-versus-horizontal metaphor is so useful.
SEO asks: Where do I rank?
AEO asks: In which formats and environments can I become the answer?
Who Will Provide the Answers?
The episode also explored the increasingly complicated ecosystem behind answer delivery.
Google was not the only player.
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and other platforms were developing their own ways of understanding questions and providing answers. The speakers discussed how different platforms could have different strengths and opportunities, particularly across areas such as voice search, local information, and shopping.
This creates an important strategic consideration for businesses:
Where does the information about your business live?
If a platform needs information from a particular source to provide an answer, businesses need to make sure that their information is available and accurate there.
That might mean a website.
It might mean a local business platform.
It might mean a search engine’s own ecosystem.
It might mean another trusted source.
AEO therefore requires marketers to think beyond their own website.
Featured Snippets Were Already Showing the Way
The discussion around featured snippets provided an early example of this change.
Barry explained that featured snippets created an opportunity to appear above the traditional organic results without necessarily holding the conventional number-one position.
The audience Q&A returned to this topic, with Andy recommending a practical approach: research the questions a business can genuinely answer, then provide clear, concise, relevant answers rather than filling content with unnecessary material.
That advice remains remarkably aligned with the broader AEO philosophy.
Don’t create content simply to fill a page.
Find the question. Understand the intent. Give the best answer you can.
Should SEOs Panic?
With such a fundamental change underway, the audience naturally asked whether SEOs should panic.
Barry’s answer was essentially the opposite.
Don’t panic. Experiment.
Answer engines were still relatively new, which meant there were opportunities for marketers willing to test, learn, and adapt. Rather than treating new search features as a threat, SEOs could explore what worked and learn from the changes taking place.
That attitude is particularly important because the episode wasn’t presenting AEO as a finished discipline.
It was introducing a direction.
The search ecosystem was changing, and marketers had an opportunity to understand the change while it was still developing.
The Fundamental AEO Checklist for Marketers
Jason concluded the main discussion by turning the concept into a practical set of questions for businesses and marketers.
Before a machine can select your business as the answer, ask:
- Can you answer the question?
- Is your answer in a suitable format?
- Can you feed that answer to the relevant service or platform?
- Does the service understand who you are?
- Does the service see you as credible?
- Can you provide the content in the format the machine needs?
The underlying logic is straightforward: a business cannot become the best answer if the machine cannot access, understand, trust, or present that answer.
This is where the episode’s three-stage model becomes practical.
Understand the question.
Understand the available answers.
Provide the best answer.
For SEO, Think Vertical. For AEO, Think Horizontal.
Episode 1 established the conceptual foundation for everything that followed in the #SEOisAEO series.
Traditional SEO was built around a relatively simple objective: compete for visibility within a ranked list.
AEO introduced a broader challenge.
The machine could potentially provide information through different formats, devices, and interfaces. The business therefore needed to be understandable and credible across that wider ecosystem - and its information needed to be available in a format the machine could actually use.
That is what Jason meant by thinking vertical for SEO and horizontal for AEO.
The goal is no longer simply to win one position.
It is to build a presence that gives answer engines enough information, context, and confidence to choose your brand when the user asks a relevant question.
Answer Engines Were Here to Stay
Episode 1 was an introduction, but it was also a declaration.
Answer engines were not a temporary curiosity created by voice search. They represented a broader evolution in how machines understood questions and how users received information.
The episode demonstrated that the transition was not about replacing SEO overnight.
It was about expanding the optimisation landscape.
SEO would continue to matter. But alongside traditional rankings, businesses increasingly needed to think about structured data, machine understanding, credibility, answer formats, multiple platforms, and multiple devices.
The fundamental question was changing.
Instead of asking only:
“How do I rank?”
businesses needed to start asking:
“How do I become the answer?”
That was the argument at the beginning of the #SEOisAEO series.
And it became the foundation for everything that followed.
Published by: Semrush
Series: #SEOisAEO
Episode: 1
Host: Jason Barnard
Guests: Andy Drinkwater, Barry Schwartz, Craig Campbell
Original webinar date: September 4, 2018
Topic: Answer Engine Optimization, search engines vs. answer engines, user intent, credibility, structured data, featured snippets, voice search, and multi-platform search
