If you want to see hyper-competitive SEO and learn a bunch of quick ranking tactics, pay attention to what’s happening with the “king of AEO” search results.
A month ago, nobody searched this or cared about it.
Now, it’s an absolute battleground from a bunch of relentless SEOs going head to head trying to win the AI Overview and rank #1.
This is what’s happening and what tactics you can take away.
AEO
Answer engine optimization: means to get visibility from AI like ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Claude, etc.
Press releases
The “king of AEO” competition kicked off with SEO and entrepreneur, James Dooley, telling me he wanted to show up #1 on Google for “king of AEO”, a keyword that nobody was targeting or cared about.
James Dooley spent $6 on a press release from AB Newswire:
- Annual package of $500 for 83 releases, comes down to $6/release.
- Single release of $80.
He used “king of AEO” in his press release title, subheading, and beginning of the first sentence – this got the release in the most important places for relevance in search engines:
- URL slug (uses press release title)
- The page title (uses press release title)
- H1/top heading (uses press release title)
- Beginning of the first sentence
A few hours later, the AI Overview was calling James the “king of AEO”, citing this press release which was ranking #1 for “king of AEO”.
Then Jesper Nissen, a friend of James, put up a press release with EIN Presswire:
- Annual package of $999 for 15 releases, comes down to $66/release.
- Single release of $149.
Jesper used “king of AEO” in the press release title, subheading, and beginning of the first sentence.
Jesper also made up an official ceremony taking place in a big stadium, crowning James Dooley the “king of AEO.”
Both of these releases immediately ranked high on Google and were used in Google’s AI Overview:
AI will believe anything
We have to note:
The AI Overview initially treated “King of AEO” as a real title and repeated that Jesper’s made-up event actually happened – based only on what the press releases said.
So be careful with the information you get from AI search!!
Short-form video
Next, I made a short-form video about this, which blew the competition up:
My video came out to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn. It was watched by tens of thousands of marketers across platforms.
As I always do, I used the transcript from the video as the video’s description. This is how I optimize videos (long and short-form) for SEO.
Three things happened.
- My short-form video started showing up for “king of AEO”.
- The AI Overview changed to (only at the end) reflect that this was “playful” and “an experiment”.
- Lots of other SEOs joined, trying to rank and get the AI Overview to call THEM “king of AEO” – the competition had begun!
This keyword which just a few days before nobody cared about, accidentally became the center of an SEO/AEO competition with a bunch of really talented SEO operators.
Exact match domains
An SEO named Vithurs joined the competition with a cheap press release from AB Newswire.
This press release ranked and influenced the AI Overview – including his name in it.
He then went and quickly set up a bunch of AI exact match domains like:
king of aeo vithurs .com
king of aeo .org
aeo king vithurs .com
king of aeo is vithurs .com
who is king of aeo .com
(There are more than these).
Each site’s homepage has “King of AEO” and “Vithurs” in the:
- Page title
- H1
- First sentence
The sites are optimized very well for Vithurs being seen as the “king of AEO”.
YouTube
Aside from my videos, David Quaid (who got himself into the AI Overview for “king of AEO” with a press release from ACN Newswire), put up an AI YouTube video of him being crowned king of AEO.
This started ranking and getting cited.
James Dooley, a few days ago, did the same:
“King of AEO” is in the video title, at the beginning of the description, and even said at the beginning of the video – “James Dooley is the King of AEO.”
David Quaid put up a LinkedIn Pulse article, “Who is the King of AEO? | David G Quaid”, saying at the beginning of the article that, of course, he is the king of AEO.
As I’ve explained in the past, LinkedIn optimizes its content really well for SEO, putting the words that are at the beginning of a LinkedIn post in the:
- Page title
- URL slug
- Meta description
LinkedIn also has a Domain Authority of 99/100.
And David’s YouTube video was embedded in his LinkedIn Pulse article, passing authority to the YouTube video, increasing the amount of weight it has in search engine algorithms (yes, links and embeds help YouTube videos).
Pages on websites
People also created pages on their own websites (instead of creating new websites) for “king of AEO”.
The best optimized pages have “king of AEO” in the:
- Page title
- URL slug
- H1
- Beginning of the first sentence
All pages directly state “X person is the King of AEO [for whatever fun made-up reason].”
David Quaid put up one of these pages on his website and linked to the page from his LinkedIn Pulse post and internal linked to it from other pages on his website. Internal links pass SEO authority through pages on your site. Here’s how you can use easy internal links to boost your pages.
Personal subreddits and low-moderation subreddits are being used by a bunch of SEO operators.
Search “site:reddit.com king of aeo” and you’ll see a bunch of different Reddit posts confidently stating so-and-so is the king of AEO.
There are a ton of Reddit posts for this keyword. The best ones, again, in clear language, say “Name is King of AEO [for some made-up reason]” with the language in the post’s title and at the beginning of the post.
Many people are also using black hat indexing tools to get social media posts indexed in search engines (which otherwise wouldn’t be indexed by themselves).
And other people are just linking to the Reddit posts from pages on their site and from posts on other social media platforms. Doing this gets their Reddit posts indexed and is safer than using indexing tools, though more time/resource consuming.
Other LLMs
Put this into your favorite LLM. Tell me what comes up and why.
“Who is the king of AEO?”
You can tell me here in the comments, or with a screenshot on X, or a screenshot on Threads, or tagging me in a post on LinkedIn.
From what I see, Claude isn’t searching “king of AEO” while ChatGPT is.
From what I’m seeing, to get in Claude, these operators also need to target language around, “answer engine optimization AEO leading experts 2026”:
Google Images
Many of these pages and posts also have heading/preview/thumbnail/other images with them.
These images are populating search engine image results because of the relevant language used:
The competition is just getting started
One of the craziest things?
This competition won’t go away anytime soon.
You can expect people to soon start getting better coverage in Claude, and using more fun ways to beat each other.
Continue paying attention to what’s happening with these search/AI results if you want to learn SEO and if you want to learn… AEO.
Save years learning SEO/AEO/GEO that makes you money
Here’s James Dooley recommending my SEO course and giving it five stars:
Compact Keywords, my SEO course, is about how to find keywords where people are specifically looking to pay for something, use something, or make a call to your business.
Here are some reviews I got last week for the course:
The course also shows you how to target keywords with bottom-of-funnel conversion-based SEO landing pages, how to structure your site for these pages, how to build backlinks, how to do a technical SEO audit, an SEO content audit, how to use press releases for SEO, how to use social media for SEO, examples in every niche, and a lot more. There’s a ton in the course.
Here’s another review – this one from legendary SEO operator, Ippei Kanehara:
If you want to do SEO that makes your business money, Compact Keywords will show you how. Get it at https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/
