The SEOArmy Blog

Real insights from the field.

Frameworks, case studies, and client data from our work in SEO, AEO, PPC, and paid lead generation. No theoretical fluff, just what actually moves the needle.

Featured Guide · AEO · GEO · SEO ·

The complete guide to hiring an AEO agency (2026)

Your buyers ask ChatGPT to recommend a provider, run comparisons in Perplexity, and read Google's AI Overview before a single organic result loads. It's no longer enough to rank, you have to be the answer. Here's what AEO is, what a great agency does, the questions to ask, and the red flags to avoid.

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YOU
Direct bookings, and the commission you keep.
Vacation Rentals ·

Direct bookings, and the commission you keep.

Every platform booking costs you a commission. The question is not whether direct is better, it is which bookings are realistically winnable.

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Formatting for extraction, not for reading order.
Technical & Content ·

Formatting for extraction, not for reading order.

The difference between content that gets quoted and content that gets skipped is mostly structural, and most of it is fixable in an afternoon.

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Citation analysis, the most useful thing you can measure.
Tools & Measurement ·

Citation analysis, the most useful thing you can measure.

A visibility score tells you that you are invisible. Citation analysis tells you where to go and fix it. That difference is why this is the measurement worth prioritizing.

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Technical & Content ·

Category and product pages, now that AI answers do some of the shopping.

Category pages now have to answer ‘which one should I get’ and product pages ‘is this the right one’, for people and for the systems summarizing them. Here is how we build both.

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Technical & Content ·

Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento: which is best for SEO?

Every one of the four can rank. They differ in how much control they give you and how much they let you break. Here is what actually separates them, and why the platform is rarely the reason a store does not rank.

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Choosing a marketing company, when everyone claims your industry.
Home Services ·

Choosing a marketing company, when everyone claims your industry.

Every home services agency has a garage door page. Few can tell you why spring searches differ from opener searches.

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Getting cited by ChatGPT, and what it responds to.
AI Search & AEO ·

Getting cited by ChatGPT, and what it responds to.

ChatGPT behaves differently from the other assistants in ways that matter for how you prepare content. Here is what is worth knowing.

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ChatGPT integration, and what the phrase actually means.
Tools & Measurement ·

ChatGPT integration, and what the phrase actually means.

The phrase covers three different capabilities, only one of which is about visibility.

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Building your own monitoring, and whether it is worth it.
Tools & Measurement ·

Building your own monitoring, and whether it is worth it.

Building a basic version is a weekend. Keeping it accurate is the part people underestimate.

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Local SEO for behavioral health, where discretion complicates everything.
Healthcare Marketing ·

Local SEO for behavioral health, where discretion complicates everything.

The usual local SEO playbook assumes customers will review you publicly. In behavioral health many will not, and that changes the approach.

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B2B AEO, where the shortlist forms before you know.
Hiring an Agency ·

B2B AEO, where the shortlist forms before you know.

B2B buying was already mostly invisible to vendors. Assistants moved the shortlist formation even further out of view.

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Monitoring from scratch, and keeping it alive.
Tools & Measurement ·

Monitoring from scratch, and keeping it alive.

Setting this up takes an afternoon. Keeping it running is the hard part, and it is where most in-house efforts quietly fail.

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What changes, and what stubbornly does not.
AI Search & AEO ·

What changes, and what stubbornly does not.

Most of what works still works. The changes are narrower than the discourse and more important than the skeptics allow.

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Tools for small businesses, and when to buy nothing.
Tools & Measurement ·

Tools for small businesses, and when to buy nothing.

Most small businesses are sold monitoring they do not need yet, at the expense of fixes they do.

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The technical floor, below which nothing else works.
Technical & Content ·

The technical floor, below which nothing else works.

Most AI visibility problems are content problems. A meaningful minority are a rendering setting nobody checked.

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Video is now part of SEO, not an optional extra.
Technical & Content ·

Video is now part of SEO, not an optional extra.

We now include a video every month in every SEO plan we run. Video gets indexed faster than text, takes up more of the results page, gets cited in AI answers and makes the written page it sits on rank better. Here is why, and how to do it without becoming a full-time creator.

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Google’s August 2026 spam update, and why unedited AI content lost.
Google Updates ·

Google’s August 2026 spam update, and why unedited AI content lost.

Google's August 2026 spam update pushed an unusually large share of pages out of the top 100. The sites that fell had a lot in common: AI-generated pages published at volume, no human editing, no real author and nothing a reader couldn't get anywhere else.

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Reporting AI search, without implying false precision.
Tools & Measurement ·

Reporting AI search, without implying false precision.

The hardest part of reporting this channel is resisting the urge to make it look more certain than it is.

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Rank tracking AI search, and why the metaphor breaks.
Tools & Measurement ·

Rank tracking AI search, and why the metaphor breaks.

Tools sell “AI rank tracking” because the phrase is familiar. The underlying thing does not exist, and the confusion causes real reporting problems.

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A monthly workflow, that survives a busy month.
AI Search & AEO ·

A monthly workflow, that survives a busy month.

Most AEO programs fail through inconsistency rather than through doing the wrong things. A fixed monthly shape fixes that.

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AI search optimization tools, honestly assessed.
Tools & Measurement ·

AI search optimization tools, honestly assessed.

A whole software category appeared in about eighteen months, most of it measuring the same thing in incompatible ways. Here is what these tools genuinely do, where their numbers come from, and how to buy without paying for a dashboard you will stop opening.

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AI search optimization tools, compared by what they measure.
Tools & Measurement ·

AI search optimization tools, compared by what they measure.

Comparing these tools feature by feature is misleading, because they are not solving the same problem. Sorted by category, the choice gets much simpler.

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The AI search checklist, in priority order.
AI Search & AEO ·

The AI search checklist, in priority order.

Everything worth doing, ordered by what actually moves the needle rather than by what is easiest to start.

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Internal linking, and what it does for machines.
Technical & Content ·

Internal linking, and what it does for machines.

Internal linking still matters, for slightly different reasons than it used to.

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Which AI search tools have real historical data.
Tools & Measurement ·

Which AI search tools have real historical data.

“Years of historical AI visibility data” is a common claim and a mostly impossible one. What the good vendors actually have, and how to check.

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AI search for SaaS, where the comparison happens without you.
AI Search & AEO ·

AI search for SaaS, where the comparison happens without you.

Software is the category assistants handle most confidently, which makes it the one where being absent from the answer costs most.

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AI search for local businesses, where it is easiest to win.
AI Search & AEO ·

AI search for local businesses, where it is easiest to win.

This is the category where a small business can realistically become the named recommendation, because the competition for citation is far thinner than in national markets.

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AI search for ecommerce, where product data becomes the content.
AI Search & AEO ·

AI search for ecommerce, where product data becomes the content.

For product queries the assistant is reading structured data and reviews, not your brand story. That changes where the effort should go.

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Seven strategies, ordered by evidence.
AI Search & AEO ·

Seven strategies, ordered by evidence.

Not all of these are equally supported. They are ordered by how confident anyone can reasonably be that they work.

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Scoping the work, so you can compare proposals.
Hiring an Agency ·

Scoping the work, so you can compare proposals.

Proposals in this category are hard to compare because nobody scopes them the same way. This is a reference to compare against.

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When two tools disagree, which one is wrong?
Technical & Content ·

When two tools disagree, which one is wrong?

Two tools reporting different visibility scores are usually both correct about different questions.

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Refreshing what you have, usually beats publishing more.
Technical & Content ·

Refreshing what you have, usually beats publishing more.

Your existing pages already carry whatever authority you have earned. Restructuring them is cheaper and faster than starting again.

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Eight AI search mistakes, in rough order of cost.
AI Search & AEO ·

Eight AI search mistakes, in rough order of cost.

Most wasted AI search budget goes to a small number of predictable errors. These are the ones we see repeatedly.

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AI Overviews, and the traffic question underneath.
AI Search & AEO ·

AI Overviews, and the traffic question underneath.

The surface where existing SEO transfers most directly, and the one that most visibly costs clicks.

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AI in search engine optimization, where it genuinely helps.
AI Search & AEO ·

AI in search engine optimization, where it genuinely helps.

The phrase covers two unrelated activities and the confusion costs people money. One is a productivity question, the other is a visibility question.

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AI crawlers and robots.txt, a decision with a trade-off.
Technical & Content ·

AI crawlers and robots.txt, a decision with a trade-off.

Blocking AI crawlers is a real option with a real cost. The decision deserves more thought than it usually gets in either direction.

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One agency or two, and how the work actually splits.
Hiring an Agency ·

One agency or two, and how the work actually splits.

Splitting these across two agencies is usually a way to pay twice for overlapping work and get neither done properly.

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AEO, GEO and SEO, and which distinctions matter.
AI Search & AEO ·

AEO, GEO and SEO, and which distinctions matter.

Much of the distinction between these terms is marketing positioning. One difference is real and worth understanding.

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Adding AEO to an agency offer, without overselling it.
Hiring an Agency ·

Adding AEO to an agency offer, without overselling it.

Written for other agencies. The commercial temptation here is to sell certainty you cannot deliver, and it does not end well.

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Consultant or agency, and which stage you are at.
Hiring an Agency ·

Consultant or agency, and which stage you are at.

The choice is less about budget than about whether your problem is knowing what to do or having it done.

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Nine red flags, in a category with no track records.
Hiring an Agency ·

Nine red flags, in a category with no track records.

Because nobody has a five-year track record in this, the usual proxies for competence do not work. These signals do.

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What AEO costs, and what actually drives the number.
Hiring an Agency ·

What AEO costs, and what actually drives the number.

The price range in this category is unusually wide because the work varies enormously. Here is what actually drives it.

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Accurate data in AI search tools, and how to get it.
Tools & Measurement ·

Accurate data in AI search tools, and how to get it.

Accuracy in this category is not a feature you buy, it is a sampling discipline you impose. The difference between a useful number and a misleading one is mostly in how you set it up.

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AI search optimization services, explained properly.
Hiring an Agency ·

AI search optimization services, explained properly.

Every agency now sells “AI search optimization”. Very few can tell you what they would actually do on Monday morning. This is the honest version: the work, the sequence, what it costs, and how to spot a provider who is improvising.

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AI search engine optimization, without the hype.
AI Search & AEO ·

AI search engine optimization, without the hype.

Search did not get replaced, it got a second layer. This is what that layer rewards, what it ignores, and which of your existing SEO work still carries over — which is more of it than the panic suggests.

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Vacation rental SEO and marketing: the 2026 guide to more direct bookings
Vacation Rentals ·

Vacation rental SEO and marketing: the 2026 guide to more direct bookings

How in-depth travel guides, AI search, and pay-per-booking marketing drive direct bookings and cut the OTA commission tax for short-term rentals.

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Local SEO and AEO for home services: the 2026 playbook
Home Services ·

Local SEO and AEO for home services: the 2026 playbook

Home services customers used to start in Google. Now half start in ChatGPT. Here's how we run local SEO and AEO together for HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical.

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SEO for drug rehab: the 2026 playbook
Healthcare Marketing ·

SEO for drug rehab: the 2026 playbook

How addiction treatment centers win Google's map pack and get cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews - the compliant, E-E-A-T-driven local SEO and AEO playbook.

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SEO vs GEO: Why you don't have to choose sides
AI Search & AEO ·

SEO vs GEO: Why you don't have to choose sides

Traditional SEO isn't dying. AI search isn't a replacement. They're complementary, and the brands winning in 2026 are the ones using both.

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The complete guide to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for 2026
AI Search & AEO ·

The complete guide to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for 2026

A 360° breakdown: what GEO is, why it matters, how to implement it, and how it fits alongside SEO and AEO in a modern growth stack.

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