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As a user, do you still use search engines or have completely defaulted to AI? How will this shift reshape the agency world? How will ads work when people are only getting the one answer they need? Most agency owners are still treating SEO like it's 2012 — optimizing keywords, buying backlinks, and praying to the Google gods. But search has already changed.

People are asking AI for answers, not Googling for links. And if you want your agency or your personal brand to stay visible in this new era, the rules are completely different. Today's featured guest will unpack the shift from SEO to AEO and why most businesses are invisible to AI without even realizing it.

Kasim Aslam is one of the world's leading voices on Answer Engine Optimization. He runs one of the largest AEO communities and leads a six person research team that has analyzed millions of AI citations to understand how large language models choose their sources.

He is also the author of The AEO Blueprint and the founder of multiple companies, including a staffing agency, a mastermind, and AEO.co. Kasim has spent the past year deep in the trenches studying how AI crawlers gather, filter, and prioritize information. When it comes to AEO, nobody has more real data.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

SEO is over. Understanding AEO.
Why brands may get lost in LLMs.
The quiet Google change that just changed everything in AI citations.
The future of ads.

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

Why SEO Is No Longer Enough: The Rise of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

To understand Answer Engine Optimization, we must first understand that, despite what some agencies may be saying, it is not the same as SEO. Traditional search engines prioritize links. That is why entire industries exist around buying them. In the world of LLMs, backlinks barely matter. The number one ranking factor for AI citations is schema markup. And only 12.4% of websites have clean, validated schema. In other words, nearly 90% of brands are invisible to AI crawlers, regardless of how strong their SEO is.

Schema isn't just another optimization tactic. It is the visibility layer. It is the metadata that helps LLMs understand and categorize your content. If your schema is broken or missing, AI cannot reference you even if your content is excellent. This is the equivalent of having a beautiful storefront on a street no one can find.

The second key is social mentions. In the same way SEO relied on links, AEO relies on people talking about you. For instance, a TikTok comment from someone in the agency industry saying Jason Swenk is their go-to agency guy counts as an authority signal. LLMs weigh these human mentions heavily.

Finally, a lot of the nuances on AEO are changing every day, but Kasim has learned that the real key is building authority, long-form content. That along with clear schema and personal brand is the future of staying in the conversation.

Why Personal Authority Beats Brand Authority in AI Search

One of the biggest shifts Kasim highlights is that answer engines prefer individuals. A person can write a book, earn a PhD, share opinions, create content, develop mastery, and build authority in a way brands cannot. That means generalists are in trouble. If your expertise is scattered, AI won't know how to classify you and won't choose you as an authoritative answer. Meanwhile, someone who goes deep in a single topic becomes the preferred answer. It is a shift away from corporate brand authority and toward personal authority.

Authority is not spread across a company anymore. It sits with people. Agencies that hide behind a brand name will lose visibility. Personal brands that plant a flag will win.

For agency owners, this is huge. You do not need a bigger brand. You need clear expertise tied to a real person. This is exactly why Jason positions all the Agency Mastery content around him. Personalities thrive. Brands get lost.

Where LLMs Get Their Data (and Why That Just Changed Overnight)

Kasim's research revealed that 21 percent of all AI citations once came from Reddit. YouTube followed at 18.8 percent. These platforms had deep context and raw human conversation, which LLMs love.

Then Google quietly changed everything.

Twenty two days before the interview, Google cut off 90% of the internet from AI crawlers by reducing search results from hundreds to ten. Because LLMs rely on deep search results (not the top ten), reducing the searchable depth limits the information AI can access - removing platforms like Reddit from the AI training pipeline. AI tools rely heavily on these deeper results for nuance. By limiting access, Google essentially removed Reddit and other community based sites from the AI food chain.

This change sent shockwaves through stock prices and visibility, and most people never noticed. Google is protecting the content needed to train AI because only two organizations truly own the global knowledge graph: Google and Amazon. OpenAI and the rest are crawling, not casing, the internet, which means they operate at a major disadvantage.

Google is playing statecraft. And according to Kasim, Google will win the AI race.

The Rise of Screenless Search and Voice-Driven Results

According to Kasim, we are quickly moving toward a screenless world. Eric Schmidt has said the screenless future is years away, not decades. And the younger generation is already there. Over 55 percent of people under 25 use voice instead of text. Voice queries require different markup, structure, and formatting, and only 0.3 percent of websites use voice schema.

Meanwhile, 65 percent of all searches end in zero clicks. People are asking, getting an answer, and moving on. That number does not even include the people who have stopped using search altogether and have already shifted to answer engines.

This means your future website is not for your audience. It is for AI. Kasim is rebuilding his personal site in Notion because he believes CSS-light, simple, stripped down sites will perform better for AI ingestion. We are entering a world where content is created for machines first and humans last.

How Google Gemini Is Rewriting the Future of Advertising

Here is a wild data point. When Kasim set up new Chromebooks for his kids, he discovered the default search engine was not Google. It was Gemini. Google owns Chrome. Google owns Chromebooks. Yet they replaced its primary revenue driver on its own device with a product that currently has no ads.

This tells you where the company is headed. They are rebuilding a new knowledge graph optimized for answer engines, while competitors still reply on the old search-oriented graph. And the future ad model will be nothing like what agencies grew up on.

If one answer becomes the default experience, where do ads go? How are they shown? What are users willing to tolerate? And will businesses have to give away deep content to earn visibility the same way early YouTubers and bloggers did?

These questions will reshape the entire lead generation ecosystem.

Data, Moats, and the K-Shaped Economy

The people who win in this new world are those who own data. Not tool access or workflows. Data. Custom GPTs, custom models, and proprietary knowledge bases become your moat.

We are entering a K-shaped economy. Twenty percent of people and businesses will become unstoppable because their productivity will outpace demand. Eighty percent will fall to zero. The middle disappears. That means agency owners must adapt, evolve, and lean into deep expertise.

Vibe coding (the rapid, exploratory use of AI tools) and no code platforms are accelerating this divide. Kasim's team recreated a software that normally costs ten thousand a year in a weekend. Entire SaaS categories are about to be wiped out.

Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?

Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

SEO Is Over. AEO Is Here: How Agencies Stay Visible When AI Chooses the Answers with Kasim Aslam | Ep #863

Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies