Who’s running this?

I’m Maryam Awodele, an SEO and AEO strategist and the founder of Seemily. I’ve spent six years doing SEO for other people’s businesses.

I didn’t start in marketing. I started as an academic researcher, where I learned to form a clear research question, collect evidence systematically, and report findings.

I moved into SEO by writing blog content, which taught me how to rank a page and not much else. Then I moved to SaaS, and that changed how I think about the job. Nobody cared about a ranking that didn’t produce signups. That’s where I learned to write content that had to get found and convert at the same time. From there I moved into strategy, where the question stopped being how to write a page and started being what the site was for.

Why I started testing

I’ve done SEO long enough to have strong opinions about it. I don’t have all opinions about AEO yet.

There’s a lot of confident advice out there, and I keep reading it without being able to tell if it holds up. I also watch people ask the same questions over and over. Is AEO separate from SEO or just the same thing renamed? Is it worth the time? What actually moves it? I’m not sure either.

So rather than add another opinion, I test it the way I would in research, by writing the question first, collecting the evidence, and publishing what I find. This site is me working it out where you can see it.

What I’m trying to find out

A version of this project is about what gets brands mentioned in ChatGPT and other AI tools, and how they end up cited there. That’s the visible part, but it isn’t the main point.

Two questions sit underneath this site. Is AEO reliable enough to build a strategy on, the way SEO can be when it’s done properly? And does a citation bring in customers, or is it just a mention that looks good in a report?

The first I can test now. The second is harder, because tracing a citation to a customer takes data I don’t have yet, so for now it’s an open question.

Something is clearly happening in AI search. Whether it’s something you can plan around, and whether it produces customers or only visibility, is what I want to know.

What I want out of this

I want to understand AEO properly. Testing something publicly, with a rule I have to hold myself to, forces a quality of thinking that reading about it never does.

What I currently believe, and might be wrong about

Two things I think are true but haven’t proved yet. 

AEO is its own work, not SEO relabeled. I think it takes real effort on top of what we were already doing for search, which makes the job harder than it was two years ago.

A real share of search behavior has moved into AI answers. I think that’s a genuine part of why organic traffic looks the way it does right now for a lot of sites, mine included.

I could be wrong about either. Testing them is the entire point of Seemily existing.

How I test

Every claim here runs against a proper sample, with the grading rule written down before I see any data, and a grade that can’t be adjusted afterward. Results that find nothing get published the same as results that don’t.

[Read the full methodology]

Get in touch

Seen a claim you want tested? Tell me on LinkedIn.