SEO Is So Last Decade – Welcome to AEO

01 /The Concept

Evertune has built a "brand analytics platform for the AI era" – though "search optimization for the AI era" might be the more honest description.

The shift is already underway: instead of typing "which smartphone has the best camera" into Google, a growing number of users are asking that exact question to ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI assistant. Sometimes the queries get even more specific – "Is the Bosch dishwasher actually worth it?"

How brands improve their standing in traditional search results is well understood: publish more pages with the right keywords and answers, and the algorithm rewards you. That's SEO. What's far less understood is how to influence what AI assistants say about your brand.

Before you can influence it, though, you need to understand it. That's Evertune's first product: an AI Brand Index.

The index tracks brand rankings across AI assistants – currently ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta Llama. Brands can see their overall standing relative to competitors, as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses across specific attributes.

To build the index, Evertune's platform submits "thousands of different questions" about brands across categories to these AI systems, analyzes the responses, and synthesizes them into a unified report. The passenger-car index, for example, shows how a brand ranks differently across each assistant. The CRM platform index does the same for enterprise software.

Beyond aggregate scores, the platform surfaces the attributes AI assistants most frequently associate with each brand – a useful proxy for positioning. Within a category, it maps which characteristics each brand "owns" versus where competitors dominate.

As for influence: the mechanics resemble traditional SEO. Feed more correctly framed content into the text corpora used to train AI systems, and those systems may start reflecting your brand more favorably. Evertune claims its platform can track how much of a brand's owned content (its website, for instance) actually makes it into training datasets.

Evertune launched this year, so what they've built is clearly a first pass. Even so, the startup raised $4M in seed funding just last week.

02 /Why It Matters

AI assistants still reach far fewer people than search engines – that much is clear. ChatGPT sits at roughly 250 million monthly users; Google Search at around 4.35 billion. That's a 17x gap. Still significant, but perhaps less daunting than the raw orders-of-magnitude framing suggests, given Google's multi-decade head start and near-universal brand recognition.

Anecdotal evidence points to faster adoption in purchase-oriented queries. In one informal poll, 62% of respondents said they had used ChatGPT or Gemini to help evaluate a product or service. Casual survey data deserves skepticism, but the direction is plausible. AI assistants deliver compact, authoritative-seeming answers in a way that a list of blue links simply doesn't. Users appear to trust them more, possibly because they require less effort – no clicking through a dozen unfamiliar pages.

Product and service discovery may be where AI assistants gain mainstream traction fastest. The same dynamic is playing out on other non-traditional search surfaces: on average, 41% of internet users report using TikTok as a search engine. Among Gen Z, that figure hits 64%. One in ten Gen Z users says they trust TikTok search results more than Google's – a genuinely disruptive data point.

The most common TikTok searches: recipes, music, DIY advice, fashion, fitness, beauty, health, design, movies, travel, restaurants, books. Somewhere in the middle of that list: product and service recommendations.

For brands, early investment in AI-visibility optimization could mirror the advantage that early SEO adopters built in the 2000s. The window for low-competition positioning in AI-indexed content won't stay open forever.

03 /Opportunities

After search engines went mainstream – and especially once mobile drove the next wave of adoption – a full industry emerged around search optimization: agencies, platforms, and specialized tools. The SEO market was valued at $68.27 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $157.41 billion by 2032.

But search behavior is fragmenting under pressure from both culture and technology. An analogous industry around AI-assistant optimization, TikTok search, and other emerging discovery channels is inevitable – and its early entrants have a durable advantage.

The opportunity is straightforward: build platforms that help brands optimize their presence in AI-native and alternative search environments.

As Evertune demonstrates, you don't need to start with the most sophisticated product to get traction. Even relatively simple brand-monitoring tools can attract paying clients and investor dollars if the timing is right – and both clients and investors are betting on organic growth in the space. The signal is already here: Evertune raised quickly and at a meaningful size. That "early" window is now.