In recent months, the world of search optimisation has been flooded with new terms. AI SEO, AEO, GEO, LLM optimisation, and many other labels are being promoted as the next essential step for online success. For many website owners, marketers, and businesses, this constant flow of new language has created confusion and anxiety. There is a growing fear that traditional SEO is no longer enough and that without adopting new AI-focused tools or strategies, visibility in search results will disappear.
Let’s go back to the early days of the internet. It wasn’t that difficult to get your website to appear on Google. You only really needed a few technical gimmicks to beat the search engines, a collection of backlinks, even if they were from dubious online directories, and the appropriate keywords. It reminded me a lot of the Wild West. The few rules that did exist were surprisingly flexible and easy to violate.
The traffic chart looks like an electrocardiogram during a heart attack. Your top keywords have evaporated from page one. A Google core update has just rolled through, and your site was in its path.
The notification hits your inbox or your social feed: “Google is rolling out a new core algorithm update.” For many site owners, those words trigger a wave of anxiety. It’s time to compulsively check analytics, brace for volatility, and pray the traffic chart doesn’t nosedive.
The “cha-ching” of a new sale is a great sound. It’s a sign that your marketing is working, your product is appealing, and your business is growing. But once that initial excitement fades, a critical question hangs in the air: What happens now?
Let’s be real for a second. We live in a world of spreadsheets. We track everything—clicks, conversions, cost-per-acquisition. So when someone starts talking about the “power of relationships” and “building connections,” it’s easy for the cynical part of our brain to ask, “That’s nice, but what’s the ROI? Show me the money.”
Customer engagement is a term you’ll hear in almost every conversation about modern marketing. It sounds impressive—but what does it really mean?
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