Most AI SEO advice is just SEO with a new name

Every week there’s a new acronym. AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI SEO. Each one comes with a checklist, and when you read the checklist, most of it is stuff we’ve been doing for fifteen years. Write clear headings. Answer the question. Add schema. Get mentioned on good sites.

That’s fine. Good SEO advice doesn’t stop being good because there’s a chatbot now. What bothers me is that the new label makes old advice sound urgent and new, and the parts that actually changed get lost in the noise.

So here’s how I split it when I look at a SaaS site.

What didn’t change

AI assistants still need to find your pages, read them and decide whether to trust them. That’s crawling, content and authority. Same three things as before.

Google’s AI Overviews pull from pages Google has already indexed. ChatGPT’s search features rely on search indexes and OpenAI’s own crawler to find pages. If your site is a mess for Google, it’s very unlikely to be clean for anything else.

So the boring work still comes first:

• Pages that can be crawled and indexed
• A clear structure, so it’s obvious what each page is about
• Content that answers a real question better than the page ranking above it
• Other sites talking about you

If someone sells you “AI SEO” and skips these, they’re selling you the icing without the cake.

What did change

Three things, in my view. They matter more for SaaS than for almost anyone else.

1. The shortlist happens before the click

A buyer used to search “best onboarding software”, open five tabs and compare. Now a lot of them ask ChatGPT or Perplexity, get three or four names with a sentence each, and only then visit websites.

That means the page that wins is often not your homepage. It’s whatever the assistant read about your category: a comparison page, a review site, a Reddit thread, a competitor’s “alternatives” page that mentions you in one unflattering line.

Old SEO was about ranking your page. Now a big part of the job is shaping what gets said about you on pages you don’t own, and publishing pages of your own that are fair enough to be quoted.

2. JavaScript matters again

Google renders JavaScript. Several AI crawlers don’t. Analysis published by Vercel in late 2024 found that OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s crawlers fetch the raw HTML but don’t run JavaScript the way a browser does.

Plenty of SaaS marketing sites are built as single-page apps, or load pricing tables and feature lists from scripts. To those crawlers, the page can look almost empty. You won’t see this in a normal SEO tool, because those tools render the page like Chrome does.

This one is easy to check and often easy to fix, which is why it’s near the top of every audit I do.

If your pricing page is blank without JavaScript, some AI assistants have never really seen your pricing.

3. Consistency counts more than it used to

An assistant pieces together an answer from many sources. If your homepage says you’re a “customer success platform”, G2 lists you under “digital adoption”, your LinkedIn says “onboarding software” and your docs call it something else again, the model has to guess. It tends to guess cautiously, or skip you.

Pick the words you want to be known for, and use them everywhere you control. It sounds like branding advice. In practice it’s one of the cheapest visibility wins there is.

What I’d ignore for now

Some of the new advice is mostly noise:

• llms.txt files. The idea is fine, but none of the big AI companies have said they use it to rank or cite anything. Add one if it takes ten minutes. Don’t pay for it.
• Rewriting every page as Q&A. Clear answers help. Turning your whole site into an FAQ makes it worse for humans, and humans are still the ones buying.
• Prompt-tracking dashboards with daily scores. AI answers change from one run to the next. Weekly trends on a fixed set of questions tell you more than a daily number that jumps around.

So what should a SaaS team do?

Start with the boring checks, because they still decide most of it. Then look at the three things that did change: what gets said about you on pages you don’t own, whether crawlers can read your pages without JavaScript, and whether you describe yourself the same way everywhere.

None of that needs a new acronym. It just needs someone to look properly.