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What replaces SEO in the LLM era?

Search & GEOE-commerce

Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

Strategies for being discoverable to AI assistants.

But based on research I conducted with Cornell Master’s students, that shift is happening much faster. LLM-driven traffic is already starting to outperform traditional search — not in volume, but in value. Traffic from LLMs converts at nearly 9x higher rates than traditional search. This is the biggest disruption to search since the dawn of the internet.

Study Shows LLM Conversion Rate Is 9x Better — AEO Is Coming · Forbes

And that memory shapes future recommendations. Monitoring any LLM answers misses the point. To fully understand how your brand is being represented, you’d have to know the personalized memory of every single user — an impossible task for any dashboard. Best Measurement Of LLM Traffic: just watch your traffic.

Answer Engine Optimization — What Brands Need To Know · Forbes


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