How to Build a Unified Digital Strategy for SEO and AEO

By Dan Duke—SEO is still important, essential even. But the content marketing playbook has evolved dramatically.

Building online visibility now requires a unified digital strategy that integrates traditional search engine optimization with answer engine optimization (AEO). It's the best approach for online marketers who seek to capture demand across all the places your audience searches for answers.

Peter Kraus, CEO of Rellify, put it this way: "You don’t ‘do SEO’ anymore—you leverage AI to create trustworthy content that deserves discovery.”

Key takeaways

• SEO remains essential in 2025 but requires integration with answer engine optimization into a unified digital strategy. Success now includes traditional search results plus AI-generated answers, featured snippets, voice search, and social platforms.
• The modern search landscape prioritizes topical authority and genuine expertise over content volume. Search engines and answer engines favor brands with strong entity signals, first-hand experience, and comprehensive coverage of problem spaces.
• Measuring success requires moving beyond individual keyword rankings to track impression share across SERP features, visibility in AI-generated summaries, assisted conversions, and branded search growth.

Does search optimization still matter?

Despite dramatic shifts in how people find information online, organic search remains one of the highest-ROI channels in digital marketing for three compelling reasons:

1. It captures high-intent demand with compounding returns. Unlike paid advertising where visibility stops the moment you pause spending, SEO builds assets that continue driving organic traffic months and years after publication. Yes, evergreen content still has long-term value. The customer acquisition cost (CAC) decreases over time as your content ranks for multiple search queries and your topical authority grows.
2. It builds brand visibility across search results and AI-generated answers. Your brand no longer competes just for blue links on the SERP. Today's unified strategy positions you to appear in featured snippets, AI overviews, voice search results, and answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok—wherever your potential customers look for solutions.
3. It improves foundational site quality that lifts all channels. The technical foundation required for SEO—fast page speed, clean site architecture, mobile optimization, and excellent user experience—directly improves your success with answer engines.

What has changed in the search landscape?

The evolution from pure search engine optimization to a unified digital strategy reflects fundamental shifts in how people discover and consume information.

Zero-click searches and AI-generated answers have reduced the website traffic that you once built by ranking well. Google now answers many queries directly in the SERP through featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI overviews. To win in this environment, you need content worth citing and strong entity signals that help algorithms understand your brand authority.

Topical authority and first-hand expertise—reflected in Google's E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness standards—can be more important than sheer content volume. Search engines and answer engines prioritize voices that demonstrate genuine expertise through original research, case studies, and practical examples over generic content creation at scale.

Diversified content formats dominate search results for many queries. Video results from YouTube and TikTok, community discussions from Reddit, and visual content from Instagram may outrank traditional web pages. A unified strategy accounts for this content rather than focusing exclusively on traditional on-page optimization.

What should my unified strategy focus on?

Effective SEO and AEO integration requires focusing resources on building credibility across all discovery surfaces.

“Every technological shift in search has favored those who invest in clarity and credibility," Kraus says. "This time is no different.”

Give your site a strong technical foundation

Search engines can't rank what they can't efficiently crawl and understand. Answer engines also reward websites whose structure makes it easy to find their content and assess it. You need to build your site on a strong foundation, including:

• Easy crawlability
• Solid site architecture
• Strong Core Web Vitals
• Logical and thorough internal linking structure

Make sure your structured data uses schema.org markup to help both traditional search engines and AI answer engines extract and attribute your information accurately. Clean meta tags, optimized page speed, and mobile-first design have not become optional—their value remains.

How do I build topical authority?

“If your content can’t teach, prove, or demonstrate, it won’t earn citations from AI," Kraus says, "It's just generative slop.”

Your content strategy should map to user intent at every stage of the journey. Create pillar pages that go deep on key topics and  include links to supporting content. Include first-hand examples, original data, expert opinions, and practical implementations that generic AI-generated content cannot replicate.

Effective keyword research now extends beyond search volume to understanding the full context around how people express needs. Build content around conversational queries that are typical in voice search as well as long-tail keywords that appear in AI chat interfaces.

Use entity SEO and brand signals

You can help algorithms understand your brand and recognize and reward key in-house experts. These techniques can help:

• Maintain clear About and Author pages.
• Use consistent name-address-phone (NAP) formatting for local SEO.
• Earn mentions and links from authoritative sources through off-page optimization.
• Make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and regularly updated.

Strong entity signals help you appear in AI-generated answers even when you don't rank at the top of traditional results.

How do I boost AI answerability and AEO?

If you have not started doing this already, it's time to structure content specifically for extraction by AI systems. Here are some valuable techniques:

• Create concise answer blocks that directly address common questions.
• Implement FAQ schema for featured snippets.
• Present statistics and facts with clear citations, and keep information current.
• Use visuals, tables, and lists that can be pulled into rich results.

This is one of the areas where AEO and SEO converge; these steps can help boost search engine rankings and appearances in AI-generated summaries.

Diversify your presence across search surfaces

A truly unified digital strategy extends beyond Google.com.

If you sell products, master the use of marketplace search on Amazon, Etsy, and industry-specific platforms. If you serve geographic markets, track local SEO signals.

Optimize YouTube videos for how-to queries where video answers dominate. Maintain active, helpful presences in communities where your audience gathers. Monitor your visibility across the expanded SERP that includes images, videos, news, and shopping results.

What should I measure instead of ranking positions?

Stop obsessing over ranking position for individual keywords. Instead, focus on more meaningful metrics by:

• Tracking impression share across SERP features and AI answers.
• Monitoring assisted conversions where organic search plays a role in multi-touch journeys.
• Measuring branded search growth as an indicator of awareness.
• Evaluating the quality of organic traffic through engagement metrics and conversion rate.

What are the benefits of integrating SEO and AEO?

When businesses create a unified SEO and AEO strategy rather than treating them as separate initiatives, they unlock compounding advantages:

• Broader visibility across the discovery spectrum. Your content works harder by appearing in traditional search results, featured snippets, AI chat responses, voice search answers, and social platform discovery—all from a single content asset optimized for multiple surfaces.
• Future-proofed against algorithm updates. By focusing on genuine expertise, user experience, and comprehensive topic coverage rather than gaming specific ranking factors, your unified strategy remains resilient as search engines and answer engines evolve their algorithms.
• Improved efficiency in content creation. Rather than creating separate content for SEO, social media, and sales enablement, your content strategy produces assets designed from inception to work across channels—reducing duplication while increasing impact.
• Better understanding of user intent across contexts. The market research required for effective AEO—understanding exactly what questions people ask and what constitutes a satisfying answer—makes your traditional SEO stronger by grounding it in real user needs rather than just search volume data.

How can businesses create a unified SEO and AEO strategy?

Building an integrated approach to SEO and AEO requires rethinking your workflow:

• Start with intent mapping, not keywords. Identify the problems your audience needs solved, the questions they ask at each stage, and where they go for answers. Then determine which content formats and platforms best serve each intent—sometimes that's a detailed blog post, sometimes a YouTube tutorial, sometimes a concise answer block.
• Build content that serves humans and machines. Write naturally for your audience first, then add structure that helps extraction: clear headings, FAQ sections with schema markup, data tables, bullet lists for key points, and meta descriptions that work as standalone summaries.
• Invest in genuine differentiation. Both search engines and answer engines increasingly favor content that offers unique value—original research, proprietary data, expert commentary, case studies, or implementation details that AI cannot generate from existing web content.
• Create feedback loops between channels. Use search query reports from SEO tools to inform content topics, monitor social media and community platforms to understand how people naturally phrase questions, track which content gets cited in AI answers, and let these signals guide your content strategy evolution.
• Maintain entity consistency. Ensure your brand, key personnel, locations, and products have consistent information across your website, social profiles, directory listings, and major platforms. This unified presence strengthens entity signals that feed both traditional search and AI knowledge bases.

FAQ

How does AEO differ from traditional SEO?

Answer engine optimization focuses specifically on making your content extractable and citable by AI systems like ChatGPT, Grok, and Google's AI Overviews. While SEO aims to rank your pages in search results, the goal of AEO is to see that your information appears within AI-generated answers even when users never click through to your site. This requires structured data, concise answer blocks, clear attribution signals, and content formatted for machine extraction—complementing rather than replacing traditional content optimization techniques.

What is entity SEO and why does it matter?

Entity SEO helps search engines and AI systems understand your brand, people, locations, and products as distinct, recognizable entities rather than just keywords. By maintaining consistent information across your website, social profiles, directories, and authoritative sources, you strengthen the signals that algorithms use to determine expertise and trustworthiness. Strong entity recognition increases your chances of appearing in knowledge panels, AI answers, and rich results regardless of specific keyword rankings.

What tools should I use to track rankings and AI answer visibility?

Traditional SEO tools like Google Search Console, Semrush, and Ahrefs remain essential for tracking keyword rankings, backlinks, and technical issues. For AEO and AI answer visibility, you'll need to add tools like BrightEdge's generative AI tracking, Authoritas' AI Overviews monitoring, or manual tracking of where your brand appears in ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, and Google's AI-generated summaries. Combine these with analytics that show assisted conversions and impression share across SERP features to get a complete picture of your unified strategy's performance.

How often should I update content to maintain rankings and AI answer visibility?

Content freshness matters more for time-sensitive topics than evergreen resources. For news, trends, and rapidly evolving subjects, update at least quarterly with new data, examples, and statistics. Evergreen content benefits from annual reviews to refresh outdated examples, add new insights from experience, and incorporate recent algorithm updates and best practices. Set up monitoring alerts for when competitors update similar topics or when your rankings drop, signaling a need for content refreshment to maintain authority and citability in AI systems.

Should I optimize separately for voice search and traditional search?

A unified digital strategy naturally addresses both by focusing on user intent and conversational query patterns. Voice searches tend to be longer, more question-based, and locally focused, but the fundamentals remain consistent: comprehensive answers to real questions, strong local SEO signals, featured snippet optimization, and fast page speed. Rather than creating separate content for voice versus text search, structure your existing content to address the natural language questions people ask regardless of input method.

Let Rellify help you build your unified strategy

The integration of SEO and AEO into a cohesive unified digital strategy isn't just about following algorithm updates—it's about building online visibility that works regardless of where your audience searches for answers. By focusing on topical authority, technical excellence, entity strength, and multi-surface presence, you create a foundation for sustainable organic traffic growth.

We can provide expert AI agents trained on competitive market data to find opportunities, get winning ideas, and create relevant content — all in one platform.

• A Relliverse™ is a proprietary AI semantic topic model that we build for clients to compile and analyze competition-specific data sets and then generate market insights and content intelligence.
• Rex™ is an expert AI multi-agent system that transforms market and proprietary data sets into actionable strategies and briefs for multi-agent and human workflows.
• Relay is our AI-powered content management platform with full human-in-the-loop editorial workflows for ideation, planning, copywriting, reviewing, and publishing relevant expert content.

The question isn't whether SEO still matters. It's whether you're ready to evolve your approach into a unified digital strategy that captures opportunity across the full spectrum of search, answer engines, and AI-powered discovery. Contact us today to get started.