Something I noticed at this AEO conference that didn’t make it into the article: the room was almost entirely SEO and content people, not brand people. That is a gap that matters.

SEO teams are already working to figure out citation optimization, domain authority in AI responses, long-tail prompt coverage.

Most brand teams aren’t even tracking what story AI is telling about them yet.

Brand leaders NEED to be in this conversation—not just because AEO is a brand problem (it is), but because brand is the thing that makes the content worth citing in the first place. Nobody’s quoting content that sounds like everyone else.