From SEO to AEO: How To Win In The Age Of AI with Kasim Aslam and Joe Polish
Kasim Aslam joins Joe to explain why he believes Google—and Gemini—will ultimately dominate the AI race, and what that means for Entrepreneurs competing for traffic and authority.
Here’s a glance at what you’ll discover in this episode:
- From “God” to Google to AI: Why the questions humans once prayed into the sky are now typed into search bars (and what happens when AI starts looking like the new oracle.)
- Clickmageddon Is Here: Data now suggests roughly 65% of searches end in zero clicks, and the surprising opportunities hidden in that collapse.
- Confirmation Bias on Steroids: How AIs don’t just echo your beliefs... they can accelerate echo chambers at light speed.
- Why Gemini Feels Dumb Today (and Why That Could Be the Play): The surprising reason Google appears to be ignoring its own search graph... and how that might position them to reset the board.
- The Citation Secret: Inside the daily experiment Kasim runs with 6 employees, 20 queries, 10 categories, 50 data points per citation... and the unexpected pattern it’s revealing about who AIs really trust.
- The Overlap Gap That Changes Everything: ChatGPT matches Google about half the time. Perplexity 70–80%. Gemini? Sometimes zero. Why that gap could shape who wins the next phase of AI.
- Reddit May Be Running the AI Era: Why a scrappy message board shows up constantly in AI citations... and how its brutal meritocracy helps crown the real experts.
- People Beat Brands by a Landslide: Why AIs often prefer Joe Polish over Genius Network... and how to tilt the odds toward YOU.
- Diversify or Risk Getting Left Behind: Why planting flags across ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity today is like buying Business.com for $12 in 1997.
- Authority Building as a Survival Skill: Why Kasim only lets his kids use their Chromebooks for two things, learning AI and publishing videos that build authority.
- The Hidden Land Grab of AEO: Why a massive shift in SEO value is already underway... and how you can become the “neck” most AI funnels have to pass through.
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Show Notes
Google’s “Fuel” Advantage
Kasim’s core bet: Google/Gemini will become the most powerful AI tool because Google has spent decades capturing and storing the internet’s collective knowledge.
The “space race” analogy: Google has the fuel to go to space; everyone else is borrowing fuel from Google’s ecosystem.
Why Gemini Feels Worse (For Now)
Most AI tools feel “smarter” because they’re effectively mining Google’s mature search forest and returning distilled results.
Gemini often feels weaker because it’s not leaning on Google’s legacy search graph the same way—it's building a new knowledge graph from the ground up.
LLMs, AI Engines, and Confirmation Bias
“LLM” is imperfect terminology—AI tools aren’t all trained on language; they’re pattern-recognition engines trained on massive datasets.
Pattern recognition tends to reinforce consensus, which creates a built-in confirmation bias problem (users can get “proof” for whatever they already believe).
Clickmageddon: The Collapse of Website Traffic
Organic traffic is dropping as search becomes increasingly “zero-click” (answers delivered without website visits).
The business implication: if traffic is the game, the rules are changing fast—visibility will come from being cited and referenced, not just clicked.
The Citation Research: What Kasim’s Team Measures
Kasim built a research engine: employees ask structured queries across industries, across multiple AI tools, then map every citation and analyze dozens of factors per URL.
The goal isn’t just “what answer did it give?”—it’s “why did the AI choose these sources?”
Overlap Rates Reveal How Each AI Tool “Thinks”
ChatGPT shows meaningful overlap with Google results (roughly half), suggesting it’s often using Google’s existing ranking ecosystem as a proxy.
Gemini’s overlap can be near zero in some categories—supporting the thesis that Google is building a separate knowledge graph instead of relying on legacy search.
Why SEO Is Flawed (And Why That Matters for AI)
Ranking #1 on Google doesn’t mean “best,” it often means “best at gaming the system.”
AI tools that inherit Google’s flawed ranking inputs may be building on a ladder propped against a wall Google intends to wreck.
People Beat Brands in the AI Era
Kasim’s key insight: AI engines tend to prefer humans over brands—people can carry durable authority signals (expertise, community, credibility).
This shifts the strategy from “brand SEO” to “personal authority + distributed presence.”
Reddit and YouTube: The Two Power Repositories
Reddit performs unusually well because it contains peer-reviewed signals (upvotes, reputation, thread-level expertise).
YouTube is the most powerful repurposable authority asset: long-form video can become shorts, podcasts, transcripts, posts, and more—plus AI loves multimodal consistency.
AEO vs SEO: The New Optimization Game
This isn’t just search engine optimization anymore—it’s answer engine optimization: becoming the entity that AI engines reference repeatedly.
Kasim frames this as a once-in-a-generation land grab: stake your claim now across AI engines before consolidation happens.
Diversify Across AI Platforms
Don’t optimize for one engine only—today requires multiple “horses on the track” (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini).
The window is open for first-mover advantage: once an AI engine “decides” you’re the authority, confirmation bias can help keep you there.
Authority Building Is the Hedge
The most durable strategy is to become your own traffic repository (like top personal brands who don’t “rent” attention each time).
AI rewards what doesn’t scale: real engagement, replies, discussions, community signals, and consistent niche authority.