Lior Eldan came on The ADOTAT Show to tell CMOs to ask the machine why it ignores them. His company skipped the asking. It wrote the machine a memo.

Every industry eventually gets its funeral guy. The one who walks into the conference ballroom, taps the mic and announces that the thing everyone in the room gets paid for is already dead, and you're all just too polite to mention the smell.

Usually that person is selling the coffin.

Lior Eldan, co-founder of Moburst, sells something more interesting. He sells the afterlife.

I introduced him the way the intro card told me to. SEO is already dead, and most marketers just have not accepted it. The future, per Lior, is AEO and GEO, two acronyms that sound like rejected droids from a Star Wars prequel but describe something very real: getting cited by the AI systems people now ask instead of Google, rather than clawing your way to the blue link at number one.

I also reminded him that a previous guest, Jordan Finger, sat in the very same chair and declared that agencies are dead. Lior runs an agency. One that landed on Adweek's fastest growing list three years running. Somebody in this studio is wrong, and I was hoping it would be someone with a good lawyer.

Lior's opening move was to compliment the intro music. "Love, love the intro music," he said, which is how you can tell a man has done a lot of podcasts. His company owns a podcast booking agency. Hold that thought. It comes back like a boomerang.

I asked about the five stages of grief, specifically the last one, the one where marketers finally accept it. Lior opened with Google's own scoreboard. Google had just announced at I/O that AI Mode crossed one billion monthly users. More and more queries, he said, now return an AI answer sitting exactly where "your traditional sponsored links and then followed by a few organics" used to live.

I pointed out that AI Mode isn't exactly a lifestyle choice. Google parks it on top of the page like a car in your driveway and dares you to walk around it.

"Exactly," he said. And then the funeral guy did something wonderful. He refused to sign the death certificate.

"I don't think so much that SEO is dead as it's being wrapped into a much bigger kind of wide casting, because it isn't about ranking your website, right? It's about what the LLM thinks, how it understands you and your brand, and does it cite you when consumers search your brand."

So SEO isn't dead. It's been swallowed whole, like Jonah, and it's now living inside something much bigger with worse lighting.

The old game was a page, a keyword and a rank. Three pieces, one scoreboard, a whole industry of consultants who could tell you what position you were in on Tuesday. The new game is a reputation, interpreted by a machine, delivered to a consumer who may never click anything at all.

Lior calls it the zero click phenomenon, and he says it the way a weatherman says hurricane. "People don't even enter your website," he said. "Yes, have a website, when consumers search for your brand. But in an increasing number of cases people will get the answer before even visiting your website."

Sit with that. Your homepage, the thing you spent eighteen months and a rebrand agency arguing about, is becoming a reference document for a robot. The robot reads it, summarizes it, and leaves without saying thank you. Like a teenager raiding the fridge.

I asked him to define AEO and GEO for the people who didn't spend the past year watching LinkedIn consultants invent letters faster than a Scrabble cheater.

Lior was gloriously unbothered by the soup. "There's a lot of acronyms being thrown around," he said, cheerfully rattling off AEO, GEO, AI SEO and LLM SEO like a waiter reading specials nobody will order. The job underneath all four is the same. It's about optimizing for "when I ask an LLM about a category, about a brand recommendation, for anything, what comes up, and how can I make sure my brand comes up, my brand is cited, my website, my articles are cited when consumers research a certain topic."

That's it. Not ranking. Being quoted. The difference between being in the phone book and being the name a friend gives you when you ask who to call.

Then I went at the Forbes line, because Lior writes for Forbes and wrote that "the new frontier of GEO demands an integrated approach." Authority signals. AI readable presence. I told him it sounded like the same old content marketing wearing a new jacket and a lanyard.

His answer was the best stretch of the hour. The machine doesn't read your website. It reads your whole life.

"LLMs essentially look at your entire digital footprint. So it is your website, but it's also your earned media, your social, your articles, your podcasts, what kind of external sources wrote about you, and takes all of that into, okay, what do I think of this person or brand?"

Think of the LLM as the world's most thorough background check, run by an investigator who never sleeps, reads everything, and has no idea which sources you paid for.

Here's where it gets genuinely useful, and a little uncomfortable for anyone who has ever sat in a brand positioning offsite.

When a company tells different stories in different places, the machine gets confused. Lior described it precisely. "In one place they're talking about it as, you know, an AI company. Another place, it's more of a tech, and another place," he said. "So companies have different narratives sometimes that live simultaneously. LLMs kind of have a hard time comprehending what's the truth, and usually will just skip on to the next one."

Read that line again if you run comms. The machine doesn't do couples therapy for your brand. It just goes home with your competitor.

For years, a muddled message cost you some efficiency. A confused prospect, a rambling sales deck, a trade show booth nobody understood. Now a muddled message costs you existence. The model doesn't hold three versions of you in its head and pick the most flattering. It shrugs and recommends somebody whose story fits on an index card.

Lior didn't present this as a slide. He said Moburst ran the experiment on its own brand first, and hit the wall face first.

The agency offers over 25 services, and the machine couldn't figure out what Moburst actually was. "One of the things we quickly realized," he said, "we can't be everything. We can't be, you know, the best PR agency, the best digital."

So Moburst rebuilt itself as a house of brands. "We have different brands of mostly agencies we acquired through the years, which each one is good at," he explained. Uproar is best for PR. Kitcaster is best for podcasts. Layer builds websites and apps. Each one gets "a singular narrative that lives across all the different channels."

It's the agency version of a restaurant that used to serve sushi, tacos and pancakes under one roof, and finally split into three storefronts because the food critic, who happens to be a robot, kept writing "unclear concept."

Then he named the real villain in most big companies, and it isn't Google. It's the org chart. "With big brands, there's comms about PR, there's SEO about internal, and social obviously," Lior said, "and they usually don't necessarily work as one."

AEO, in Lior's telling, is what happens when a machine finally notices your departments don't eat lunch together.

He'd told us beforehand that he wanted listeners to walk away with something they could use the next morning. So I asked for three things a CMO should do tomorrow. He delivered, and cheerfully admitted the first one is obvious.

One: ask the machine about yourself. "If you haven't done so," he said, "go and look up your brand on your favorite LLM. Ask a recommendation."

I confessed that when I look myself up, the robot blows smoke like a press agent on commission. It quotes every positive press release ever written about me. I feel amazing every morning. Lior, ever the diplomat, said he hoped that would be the case for most of my listeners too. Then he twisted the knife, gently.

Don't search your name, he said. Search the question your buyer asks. Picture a CMO at a software company: "I'm saying to ChatGPT, hey, I'm a Fortune 1000 CMO looking for the best CRM. If I'm not on that list, then probably that's how most companies today start their short list for an RFP in B2B and enterprise software."

You aren't losing a ranking. You're losing the shortlist before anyone tells you there was one. It's being left off the wedding guest list, and finding out from the photos.

Two: if you're not there, ask the LLM why. This is the one I'm stealing. "It's very, very interesting," he said, "because usually it will say that maybe you don't have enough press, maybe there's that kind of misalignment across what are you actually. Are you a CRM? Are you a project management? Are you a SaaS? What is your business?"

His advice, before you hire anybody, was to "just ask the LLM bluntly: why are you not there?" The machine will tell you. It has the bedside manner of a drill sergeant and the memory of an elephant.

Three: audit the footprint, not just the website. "PR is much more important now than it used to be," Lior said, pointing to his own Forbes column. "I write on Forbes, that gets picked up by the different LLMs, it helps my credibility, it helps Moburst's credibility." Podcasts count. Social counts. And LinkedIn, he said, "is being seeing more and more love from LLMs," because the models have figured out that's where business people actually argue with each other.

The models are also crawling Reddit and social "to find those real user discussions," he said. His closing line on the subject belongs on a T-shirt: "If you're not there, then you're non-existent for the LLMs."

Descartes said I think, therefore I am. The new version is: I am cited, therefore I exist.

The full episode is embedded below.