AEO is the new SEO, baby

Want Your Business to Be Gemini's #1 Cited Source in Google's New "AI-Search Mode"?

Your customers can now tell Google they trust your site

Each customer picks their own favorite sites. Since May 27, when one of those picks shows up in their AI Overviews or AI Mode answers, Google labels it "Preferred" so it stands out.

Google calls the feature Preferred Sources. On some searches about a developing story, it also highlights those picks in a carousel of links.

Why it matters

Your customers are getting answers now, not just lists of links. Getting your business named in those answers is AEO.

AEO is the new SEO, baby.

The numbers show where search is heading

1. AI answers are on most buying searches AI Overviews showed up on 86.7% of tracked Google searches in April 2026. Google keeps putting its Gemini summary above even the top organic link. Even with a killer SEO strategy, fewer people click through to your site.
2. Most searches never leave Google 68% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026. Two out of three searchers were satisfied with Google's answer and never clicked through.
3. People Read AI's Sources ChatGPT's referral traffic to websites tripled in the US from January 2025 to January 2026. Meaning three times as many people in 2026 will actually leave ChatGPT (after it has compiled sources for them) to read the primary sources. AI's sources are the only bibliography anyone has ever actually read. What's wrong, you don't trust me?

What to do

1. Get your site ready Our guide walks you through embedding an easy button on your site so customers can add you in one click.

   Here's ours, live. Click it to add athenaautomate.ai as a Preferred Source on Google. Consider it a test drive.

   Google lists sites on its own schedule, so if you see "No results," we're not listed yet. Until then, the subscribe box at the end of this post is the other way to keep up.

2. Ask your customers to add you Then ask your customers to add your site as a Preferred Source. People have picked more than 345,000 sources since the feature launched last August.

Between the lines

Think of this as a hard reset on SEO. You've got a competitor you've been trying to take the #1 Google spot from for years? Well, this is your chance to take the number one spot in the new thing, and our bet is it ends up even bigger than Search.

Dive deeper

• New ways to find your favorite sources and original content in AI Search, from Google
• Our AEO guide: how to get your business named in AI answers, from Athena
• Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, from Pew Research Center

Quick hits

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8

It came out May 28. Early testers say it's more likely to flag what it's unsure of and less likely to make claims it can't back up. Pricing for regular usage is unchanged from Opus 4.7: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.

Two models are catching the last bus out of ChatGPT

GPT-4.5 goes away June 27, and o3 on August 26. Both are only on paid plans, so free users won't notice a thing.

Last August, GPT-4o disappeared when GPT-5 arrived, people grieved, and within days OpenAI had it back for paying customers. Say your goodbyes to 4.5 by June 27. If you need a shoulder to cry on, don't ask my sister Artemis. She'll just tell you to go hunt for a new one.

Tip of the week

Ask Google's AI who it recommends in your town

Best practice

Save your prompts, not your model

Your prompts are the playlist. The model is just the speakers.

Keep your best prompts in a plain document, not tied to one model's name.

Models get retired. Two are leaving ChatGPT this summer. When yours goes, paste the prompt into the replacement and check the first answer before you trust it.

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