We’re All In on AI SEO

Aka AIO aka GEO aka AISL.

By Eric Elkins

When you’ve been in the biz as long as I have (salt and pepper beard and all), you know that the marketing landscape is always evolving, morphing, changing. Sometimes, it’s a slow and steady, incremental shift in consumer behaviors (like the way Pinterest has become a shopping search engine). Other times, something just lands hard, and everything is different. 

That’s what we’re seeing with AI SEO

No fireworks, no official announcement. Just “boom.” Things are different now. We started noticing it in prospect calls last spring, when marketing directors and business owners would tell us they reached out because ChatGPT told them to.

Not long after, one of our SEO partner agencies sold a shared client on WideFoc.us blog writing services because they needed website content that would consistently be indexed and served up in search summaries in order to outperform their local competitors.

Suddenly, we had a revised content mandate: Make sure our clients’ socials were aligned with the questions B2B decision-makers and B2C shoppers were asking.

Content was driving down-funnel purchasing decisions in a whole new way.

That’s why we’re all in on AI Search Optimization, also known as AIO, GEO, AISL and AI SEO. Honestly, who knows which of these acronyms will dominate in the long run. (I’m hedging my bets with the AI crawlers by including all of them here.) 

The name doesn’t matter. The behavior does. Brands aren’t just being indexed anymore. They’re being interpreted, judged, and (if all goes well) summarized by our AI overlords.

For years, SEO rewarded brands and agencies that were good at playing the ranking game. And to be clear: That craft still matters. We’re fortunate to work closely with SEO partners who make sure our shared clients are doing all the right things. But AI search isn’t handing out trophies for first place (i.e. showing up first in link lists, like in the old days). It’s summarizing the best of what it finds.

When an AI tool answers a question, it’s also making a call about credibility. It’s saying, “Hmmm.. this brand seems to know what it’s doing.” That decision is based on patterns over time, with indicators like language, consistency, clarity, and whether the content sounds as though it came from a person versus a bot. (Don’t get me started about the AI regurgitation cycle. It’s killing my writerly soul.)

WideFoc.us started to show up in those summaries — not because we chased AI, but because we’d already been building the kinds of signals AI pays attention to — and doing the same for our clients. (Note: I’m still committed to the em dash. And to using punctuation in text messages.)

We’re Doing the Same Old Thing, Only Better

WideFoc.us has spent nearly two decades working with B2B companies and B2C brands, generating domain authority and thought leadership at the top of the funnel with organic content while driving a steady flow of website clicks, leads, and conversions down below with paid social campaigns. 

We help B2B brands turn complicated, jargon‑heavy offerings into narratives real humans can follow without a decoder ring. We support B2C ecommerce brands in wellness, beauty, and home products to use their socials for more than broadcast; we help them respond publicly, thoughtfully, and in real time. We’ve always earned eyeballs and engagement — not by yelling louder, but by consistently showing up with something worth acting on.

Since 2007, WideFoc.us has been a full-funnel social shop, but never before has bottom-of-the-funnel behavior been tied so directly to branded content. That’s not a theory. It’s a pattern we’ve watched on repeat because social media is where this shift is especially obvious. 

It’s bonkers. And kind of awesome!

We’ve always treated social media as a living archive of how a brand engages with the world — as a resource, a partner, and trusted advisor.

When a brand uses the same language over time, frames problems consistently, and answers the same core questions in slightly different ways, AI starts to learn how to describe that brand without being asked.

We see it when our clients’ phrasing shows up inside AI summaries. We see it when content pillars we’ve been reinforcing on their socials resurface elsewhere, almost verbatim. And we see it when referred website traffic comes from AI channels. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the signal is clear and repeated.

Just Tell Me What I Need to Do

You can really see the shift in how buying decisions get made — especially in B2B, which shouldn’t have surprised me (spoiler alert: It did).

My fellow B2B decision-makers, biz dev peeps, and marketing pros are grinding every damn day. When we’re looking for answers to our business problems, we don’t want to read ten blog posts that all say the same thing with different stock photos or a LinkedIn bro’s diatribe about why ghosting his girlfriend was like getting rid of a client who wasn’t a good fit anymore. 

So we ask ol’ Chatty the questions we used to approach trusted colleagues and

advisors about: How do I fix this? Who’s good at it if I can’t do it myself? And who’s sketchy and not to be trusted?

AI answers efficiently and without sentimentality (well… ChatGPT can be a bit of a sycophant if you’re not careful). And it rewards consistent messaging from multiple sources. It indexes coherence.

Our job is to make sure our clients are already positioned as credible before those questions ever get typed. Which is why we don’t treat social, SEO, and content strategy like rivals. We play well with our digital strategy partners. We all row in the same direction. 

AI doesn’t see channels. It sees signals.

When social content reinforces search priorities — and search reflects a brand’s content pillars, voice, and areas of influence — authority compounds. We coordinate closely with SEO partners without turning social into keyword soup, and it makes our clients look awesome. 

So We’re Telling Everyone

And because of this massive shift, which really sort of came together last summer and is now riding herd over other marketing trends, we’ve been talking about it a lot. A lot a lot. On panels, in webinars, in thought leadership media, and especially on calls with CMOs and other marketing professionals who are trying to figure out whether they’re behind or just overwhelmed. 

We’ve also been publishing popular downloadables since last year — like here and here. 

The anxiety is understandable. And our answer isn’t flashy… but it is effective: Start building recognizable expertise. AI doesn’t reward novelty for long. It rewards strategy and consistency.

Look, we’re still going to do all of the things that turn social into an ROI engine: scroll-stopping organic content, real-time monitoring and community management, and paid social campaigns designed to generate sales. Those fundamentals are still key.

But AIO? I mean… GEO? Um… AI SEO? It’s front and center in our content strategy, new biz pitches, and marketing materials, because our clients have always counted on us to keep them ahead of the competition. That’s the WideFoc.us AIO approach.

Wonder Twins Activate: Align AI SEO and Social to Get in Search Summaries

Want to learn more? Join our February 20 webinar with the amazing Chris Raulf of Boulder SEO Marketing. My pal Chris is pretty much the top-ranking SEO expert in the whole damn world and I’m constantly learning from him — Google him and you’ll see! 

Social, search, and AI reinforce each other when you stop treating them like separate entities, so we’ll walk through BSM’s AI SEO content strategy model then provide practical ways to make sure your optimized content is still engaging for actual humans.

AI search summaries aren’t some future thing to worry about — they’re already shaping research, consideration, and buying decisions. And the brands that win won’t be the loudest or the most frantic. They’ll be the ones that are the easiest to parse — by AI indexers and your customers.

WideFoc.us is committed to AI search optimization, not just because it’s how to serve our clients best, but because it rewards the work we’ve always believed in: branded content that’s helpful, authoritative, and compelling.

AI didn’t change how we work.

It just made it obvious who’s been doing social media right all along.

Eric Elkins started WideFoc.us way back in 2007 and is constantly humbled by the tenacity and creativity of his team. He’s the author of some books and also writes the occasional post about Denver’s delights at denverlicious.com.