Chapter 1: A Short History of Renaming Things

Every few years, something changes in search, and before the change is even understood, the industry splits into two groups. The first group quietly tests, measures and updates how they work. The second group invents a name, declares the old thing dead, prints the slide deck and launches the certification.

Here's the track record: inbound marketing was content marketing with a funnel diagram. Semantic SEO was SEO that had finally read Google's own documentation. Every core update spawned a cottage industry of people naming the update's ghost.

The AI era has produced the most spectacular naming land grab yet, because the underlying change is genuinely big, which means the confusion is genuinely monetisable. AEO, GEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO, LLM seeding, answer engine marketing, generative search optimisation. Same clients, same questions, same deliverables, seven names, and every name has a self-appointed founder giving keynotes about the difference between their acronym and the others.

Here's the tell that it's a land grab rather than a taxonomy: nobody can describe a campaign that would be inside one acronym and outside another. Ask a GEO purist what a GEO deliverable includes that an AEO deliverable doesn't, and you get hand-waving about citations versus answers, as if any practitioner on earth would build one without the other. The distinctions exist on conference slides. They do not exist in the work.

None of this means the change isn't real. It is, and the next chapter takes it seriously. The point here is narrower: when the industry offers you a new name, take the change seriously and the name lightly. The people who did that in every previous cycle spent their energy on the work while the namers argued, and they won every time.

This cycle will be no different.