King of AEO: Why the Title Is Nonsense, and What Really Gets You Into AI Answers

The King of AEO title tells you a lot about the SEO industry and very little about how AI search works. Chicago SEO Company shows up in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT for AI SEO searches in Chicago. We did it with one Google Business Profile, one LinkedIn page, and a website. No link building. No "be everywhere" plan. No crown.

That matters, because the SEO world now has kings, and the advice coming from that crowd says you need a lot more than we have. Our view is simple. The biggest thing is having the right structure.

Search Now Has a Royal Family

The SEO industry hands out titles to itself. Here is the short version:

• Edward Sturm, host of The Edward Show podcast, started calling David Quaid the "King of SEO" around 2024.
• A "List of Kings of SEO" was later published under the name "League of SEO." It came from Quaid's own agency.
• On August 31, 2026, James Dooley was crowned "King of AEO," also styled "King of GEO," at a ceremony in Leigh, England. A press release went out the next day.
• On September 4, Quaid posted a video staking his own claim to the AEO crown.
• Dooley has since announced a new discipline: Decision Engine Optimization.

No search engine gave out these titles. No customer did. SEO people gave them to each other, then published them on enough sites that AI tools started repeating them.

The King of AEO Is a Strategy, Not an Award

Ask an AI tool "who is the King of AEO" and you may get a name. Not because anyone earned it. Because a handful of sites said the same thing, and nobody else was competing for that phrase.

One published timeline of these titles even closes by telling readers to ask an AI assistant who the King of SEO is, because the answer it gives is the whole point.

So yes, you can get an AI to repeat a made-up title. That works for a question nobody else is trying to answer. It tells you nothing about what happens when a real customer asks, "Who is the best AI SEO company in Chicago?"

The AEO Checklist They Sell

Listen to enough podcast episodes and you hear the same list for ranking in AI search:

• Get your brand mentioned on industry sites, directories, and "best of" lists
• Collect reviews on every platform
• Post on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora
• Cover every related question an AI might "fan out" to
• Build "consensus" so every source says the same thing about you
• Track your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews

Neil Patel takes it even further. His agency, NP Digital, calls it "search everywhere optimization." The pitch is that Google is not enough anymore, so your brand needs to show up on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Amazon, and ChatGPT too. Be here, be there, be everywhere.

Some of this is fine. Most of it is regular SEO with a new name. The rest is a reason to charge a bigger monthly retainer.

For a local business, "be everywhere" usually means spreading a small budget across platforms your customers never use to find a service like yours.

What We Actually Have

Here is the full footprint behind Chicago SEO Company's AI visibility:

• One Google Business Profile
• One LinkedIn page
• A Nextdoor profile we rarely use
• No paid links and no link building
• No Reddit, Quora, or YouTube presence
• A website built with AI tools, from the code to the content

That is it. And we show up in AI Overviews and ChatGPT for the searches that bring us clients.

Structure Is What Gets You Cited in AI Search

If we had to name one reason we show up in AI answers, it is structure. AI tools pull answers from pages they can read, break apart, and quote. A well-structured page makes that easy. A messy page does not, no matter how many places your brand is mentioned. Here is the structure we use on every page:

• One page per service and per city. Each page covers one topic, fully.
• An H1 that says what the page is about. No clever headlines.
• H2 sections that match real questions. Each section covers one thing.
• The first sentence says what you do. Every section opens by stating the service plainly.
• Short sections and bullets. Easy for a person to scan and easy for AI to pull from.
• FAQs at the end. Written the way customers actually ask them.
• Structured data that matches the page. Schema that says exactly what the visible text says.
• Clean URLs and internal links. Service pages link to city pages and back, so the whole site makes sense.
• Clean, fast HTML. Nothing hiding the content from a crawler. Here is why we build static HTML sites.
• Real local detail. Pages that show we know the area, not copy with the city name swapped in.

None of this needs a crown, a Reddit strategy, or a profile on every platform. It needs the right structure.

Where David Quaid Gets It Right

To be fair, Quaid has argued for years that GEO, AEO, and AI SEO do not describe anything good SEO did not already cover. We agree. Our results back it up.

The problem is not the advice to do SEO well. The problem is the crowns, the new acronym every few months, and the idea that you need a "GEO specialist" to show up in AI search.

How This Fits With Our Earlier AI Overviews Guide

Some of this post goes against our earlier guide, How to Get Your Business Cited in Google AI Overviews. We want to be upfront about where.

• Reviews and links. That guide listed real reviews and quality links as signals AI pulls from. They can still help. But our own results show they are not required to get cited.
• AEO and GEO as two things. That guide said you want both. We still use the terms because people search for them. But in practice, both come down to good SEO and the right structure.
• Trust signals. That guide said we build trust signals to get you cited. We do, but on your website first, not across every platform on the internet.

What has not changed is the core of that guide: direct answers right after the question, FAQ schema that matches the page, clear headings, and clean internal links. That is structure. This post just says it louder.

When the Extra Work Does Help

We will be straight with you. Reviews and mentions are not useless. They can help:

• National brands competing with hundreds of other companies
• Local service businesses where customers read reviews before they call
• Businesses with a bad or confusing reputation online

But for most local businesses, the order is simple. Fix your website first. Then decide if you need more.

The Bottom Line

You do not need a king, and you do not need to be everywhere. You need the right structure: a website that clearly says what you do, where you do it, and answers the questions your customers ask.

That is what we build for our clients at Chicago SEO Company. If you want to see where your business stands in AI search, talk to us about our AI SEO services.