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What does an SEO/AEO/GEO strategist actually do?
Short answer
An SEO/AEO/GEO strategist architects the full stack of search visibility across traditional search engines, AI answer engines, and generative AI recommendation systems. That means technical audits, structured data deployment, content strategy for citation extraction, entity clarity across platforms, and measurement infrastructure that tracks both organic rankings and AI citation share.
The role blends three overlapping disciplines into one strategic function. Traditional SEO handles the technical and content foundations that still drive most organic traffic. AEO layers on the structured content and schema work that makes pages citable by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. GEO builds the cross-platform entity signals that get a brand recommended by name inside generative responses.
On a typical week I audit sites for technical health (Core Web Vitals, indexability, crawl budget, canonical hygiene), architect content plans that target real user queries, deploy Schema.org structured data across page templates, review AI citation performance in Profound or an equivalent tool, and coordinate with paid media and analytics leads to keep attribution honest across all channels.
At the enterprise level, the role expands to include vendor platform evaluation (which SEO tools, AI visibility tools, and CDPs to bring in), reporting infrastructure design so leadership can actually see performance across every location or brand, and cross-team content standards so hundreds of pages produced by dozens of contributors do not drift from the strategy.
The role exists as a distinct function because AI search represents a channel shift that most existing SEO teams were not built for. Traditional SEO teams are good at backlinks and keyword targeting. AEO and GEO require structured data expertise, entity modeling, LLM-friendly content design, and measurement that most SEO teams have never operated. Businesses that want to compete in AI search hire strategists who can build both the traditional and the new stack in parallel.
In my own work, this looks like architecting the SEO/AEO/GEO strategy across 175+ franchise dealerships at Asbury Automotive Group, standing up the reporting infrastructure that gives leadership visibility into organic and AI performance rooftop by rooftop, and deploying the AI-ready schema framework that replaced legacy markup across every dealership site in the network.
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