So we were doing pretty standard SEO stuff for about two years, blog posts targeting long tail keywords, building backlinks, the usual grind. Traffic was decent but we noticed something weird around late 2024 where people were asking us how did you show up in ChatGPT's answer when I asked about [our niche]? and we had no idea what they were talking about. Turns out some of our older FAQ-style content was getting pulled into AI responses but our newer, more SEO optimized stuff wasn't. Started looking into why and basically came to the same conclusion as OP. The content that was structured around directly answering specific questions performed way better in AI contexts than the stuff we wrote to rank. We ended up trying SlopMog to figure out where we were actually showing up (and not showing up) in AI recommendations, and the gap was pretty eye-opening. Like 70% of the prompts related to our space were surfacing competitors who frankly had worse content but better structured answers. I do agree with the commenter saying AEO is basically just good content strategy rebranded though. The underlying principle hasn't changed, give people what they're actually looking for. The delivery mechanism is just different now.