On Accountability and the People Who Will Never Take It

There is something almost disarming about a person who can say it simply and without theatre.

I was wrong. I am sorry. That was my fault.

Not as performance. Not as strategy. Not hedged with qualifications or followed immediately by an explanation of why the circumstances made it inevitable. Just the plain, undefended acknowledgement that they did something that caused harm, and that they own it.

It is one of the rarest things you will encounter in a human being. And the older I get, the more I believe that the capacity for genuine accountability is one of the most meaningful indicators of who a person actually is.

What accountability actually requires

Accountability is not an apology. An apology is easy. Apologies can be deployed strategically, performed convincingly and forgotten by the person delivering them before they have even left the room.

Accountability is something harder. It requires the ability to hold yourself in an uncomfortable truth. To see clearly what you did, to sit with the discomfort of knowing it caused harm, and to resist every impulse to reframe, explain or defend your way out of that discomfort.

That last part is where most people fail.

Because the ego is extraordinarily creative when it comes to self-protection. It will find the angle that makes you the reasonable one. The context that explains why what you did was actually understandable. The version of events in which your behaviour was a response rather than an initiation. Where you were reacting to something they did, and if they had just been different, none of this would have happened.

The ego does not lie deliberately. It rewrites. Gradually, convincingly, often completely unconsciously, until the story it has constructed feels indistinguishable from the truth.

The person who never takes accountability

We have all encountered them. In families. In friendships. In workplaces. In relationships that started with warmth and ended in a confusion of competing narratives where you can no longer quite trust your own memory of what happened.

The person who never takes accountability has a particular quality. They are always, in their own telling, the wronged party. Every conflict has a version in which their behavior was justified. Every failure has a cause that originated outside themselves. Every relationship that ended badly was the other person's fault. And if you listen long enough, the stories start to blur together, the specific details shifting subtly to accommodate whatever the current situation requires.

This is not always cynical. That is the important thing to understand.

Many people who cannot take accountability are not consciously lying. They have simply told their version of events so many times, and reinforced it so completely, that it has become the truth they actually experience. The ego's rewrite is so thorough that the original events are no longer accessible. What remains is a story that keeps them safe from shame, from responsibility, and from the terrifying possibility that they are capable of causing harm.

And that story must be protected at all costs. Because if it cracks, if they allow even a small acknowledgement that they got something wrong, the whole architecture is at risk.

What this does to relationships

In private life, it creates a particular kind of exhaustion. You find yourself taking responsibility for things that were not your fault. Not because you believe it, but because the alternative is an argument that never resolves, a conflict that escalates until someone walks away. You learn to manage around them. To anticipate the defensiveness. To frame things carefully so as not to trigger the rewrite.

Over time you realize that what you are actually managing is their relationship with themselves. Their inability to tolerate their own fallibility. And that is a full-time job that nobody asked for and nobody can sustain indefinitely.

In professional life it is equally corrosive. Teams cannot grow around people who cannot acknowledge mistakes, because mistakes are the primary mechanism through which teams learn. When someone consistently redirects responsibility, the people around them eventually stop trying to address problems honestly and start managing perceptions instead. Trust erodes. Collaboration becomes performance. The culture curdles quietly from the inside.

How to handle people who will never change

The first and most important thing to accept is that you cannot give someone the capacity for accountability they do not have. You cannot reason them into it, love them into it, argue them into it or wait long enough for them to arrive at it on their own.

Some people will do that work. Many will not. And the ones who will not are often the ones most loudly insisting that they have already done it.

So what do you do?

You let them.

Let them have their version of events. Let them rewrite the history. Let them be the hero of a story in which you are the obstacle or the villain or the misunderstanding. Let them carry the narrative they need to carry to get through the day.

And then, deliberately, without drama, without punishment, you decide how much of your life they have access to.

Not as revenge. As self-preservation.

The table of your life has limited seats. Some people belong close at the centre, with full access, trusted with the things that matter. Some people belong further away, present but peripheral, allowed in at a distance that protects you without requiring you to cut them off entirely. And some people belong outside altogether, not because you hate them, but because the cost of keeping them close is too high.

Placing someone correctly at your table is not cruelty. It is clarity. It is the adult version of the boundary that should have been taught to you long ago and probably was not.

Forgiving yourself first

There is one more thing. And it is the hardest part.

If you have spent time with someone who consistently refuses accountability, there is a good chance you have absorbed some of their narrative about you. You have been told, directly or indirectly, explicitly or through implication, that you were too much, too sensitive, too demanding, too quick to make things into a problem.

You may have started to believe it.

The forgiveness that matters most in these situations is not the forgiveness you extend to them. It is the forgiveness you extend to yourself. For not seeing it sooner. For trying harder than the situation warranted. For needing something from someone who did not have it to give.

You were not wrong to need what you needed. You were not wrong to want someone to own what they did. That is a reasonable expectation of any adult human being.

The fact that they could not meet it says everything about them and nothing about you.

What it looks like when someone actually does the work

I want to end here, because I do not want this to be only about the people who cannot do it.

When someone takes genuine accountability and sit with what they did, acknowledge it clearly and resist the impulse to explain it away, something remarkable happens in the relationship.

Trust deepens. Not immediately, not without time. But the moment of genuine accountability creates a kind of intimacy that almost nothing else can. It says: I see myself clearly enough to see what I did to you. And that matters to me more than my own comfort.

That is rare. That is worth seeking out. That is the quality to look for in the people you let close.

And it is worth cultivating in yourself. Slowly, imperfectly, with the same patience you would extend to anyone learning something genuinely difficult.

Because accountability is not a character trait you either have or do not have. It is a practice. One that gets easier the more you do it and harder the longer you avoid it.

Start small. Acknowledge the small things. Build the muscle.

The relationships on the other side of that practice are worth everything it costs to get there.

The Quiet Power of Empaths in a World That Rewards Narcissists

Something is wrong with how we define strength.

Not obviously wrong. Not wrong in a way that is easy to name or argue against in a meeting or a pitch deck. Wrong in the way that things are wrong when they have been normalised for so long that the wrongness itself has become invisible.

We have built a world that rewards a very specific set of traits. Confidence without doubt. Certainty without nuance. The ability to speak loudly and move fast and project the kind of authority that makes other people stop asking questions.

And we have called that strength.

I want to suggest that it is not.

The story we are inside

The most powerful people in the world right now are telling a very compelling story. That AI will solve everything. That speed is survival. That efficiency is the highest virtue. That the people who move fastest will inherit the earth and the rest of us should be grateful for the disruption.

It is told with extraordinary confidence. And confidence, as any filmmaker knows, is one of the most persuasive tools in existence. It does not require truth. It only requires that the audience has no compelling alternative narrative to hold onto.

But I notice something about that story. It has no room for doubt. No room for complexity. No room for the kinds of questions that make powerful people uncomfortable. Questions about cost, about consequence, about who is not in the room when these decisions get made.

Those questions require a particular kind of intelligence to ask.

Not the kind that optimises. The kind that feels.

What empathy actually is

Empathy is not weakness. It is not sentimentality or naivety or an inability to make hard decisions.

Empathy is the capacity to hold another person's reality alongside your own. To understand that your experience of the world is not the only valid one, and to let that understanding actually change how you act.

That is an extraordinarily sophisticated cognitive and emotional skill. It requires more processing, more nuance and more genuine courage than the alternative, which is simply to optimise for your own interests, your own vision, your own certainty, and call that leadership.

The world is full of people who have mistaken the absence of empathy for strength. Who have learned to perform confidence so completely that they have forgotten what they do not know. Who have surrounded themselves with people who reflect their certainty back at them and called that consensus.

That is not strength. That is a very elaborate defence mechanism. And it is extraordinarily fragile, because it depends entirely on never being wrong, never being challenged and never having to sit with a reality that does not confirm what you already believe.

What gets built without it

I think about this in the context of the things being built right now.

The technologies deployed at scale with extraordinary speed and almost no accountability. The platforms that have reshaped how billions of people think and relate and understand the world. The AI systems trained on human creativity and released without asking the humans whose work made them possible.

The people building these things believe they are making the world better, but I and many more believe it’s something much more sinister than that. Belief without empathy is dangerous. It allows you to build things that solve your problem without asking whose problem you are creating. It allows you to move fast without looking at what you are breaking. It allows you to call disruption progress without asking who is being disrupted and at what cost.

The environmental cost of the data centres running AI at scale. The displacement of workers who cannot retrain fast enough. The erosion of trust in images, in language, in the basic shared reality that makes human communication possible.

These are not abstractions. They are consequences felt by real people in real bodies living real lives on a planet that is running out of time.

Empathy is what allows you to care about that. And caring about it is not an obstacle to progress. It is the only thing that makes progress worth having.

The competitive advantage nobody wants to talk about

Here is the paradox that the current moment has created: in a world optimized for narcissism, empathy is the rarest and most valuable resource available.

The ability to genuinely understand another person. What they fear, what they need, what they would never say out loud but desperately want someone to notice, is something no AI can replicate and no algorithm can generate. It requires being human in the fullest possible sense of the word.

In communication and marketing, empathy is the difference between content that fills space and content that changes minds. In leadership, it is the difference between compliance and genuine commitment. In any creative work such as film, writing, strategy, design, it is the difference between something technically correct and something that stays with you long after you have encountered it.

The empaths are not behind. They are not naive or slow or insufficiently ambitious.

They are carrying something the world is about to need very badly.

What this moment actually requires

I am not optimistic by default. I have seen enough of how power works, both privately and professionally, to know that the people with the loudest voices and the most capital do not always lead us somewhere worth going.

But I am not pessimistic either. Because I have also seen what happens when people with genuine emotional intelligence decide to stop apologizing for it. When they stop performing the confidence of people they are not and start using the actual advantage they have. The ability to see clearly, to feel accurately and to act from a place of genuine understanding rather than performed certainty.

The future will not be built by the people who moved fastest. It will be shaped by the people who understood what it means to be human. What we need. What we are losing. What is worth protecting even when it is inconvenient. Even when it is expensive. Even when the people with the loudest voices are telling you it is already too late to care.

Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It is the hardest and most important skill there is.

And in a world that is trying very hard to convince you otherwise, holding onto it is a radical act.

AI Can Write Your Copy. It Can't Write Your Character.

Let me say something that might sound strange coming from someone who uses AI everyday.

I use AI in my work constantly to pressure test ideas, to structure thinking, to move faster than I could alone. But there is something AI cannot do. And right now, in a marketing landscape where everyone has access to the same tools producing the same output, that something is the only thing that actually matters.

AI cannot write your character.

What character actually means

In film, character is not personality. It is not tone of voice or a list of adjectives on a creative brief. Character is the specific set of beliefs, contradictions, fears and commitments that make a person, or a brand, fundamentally themselves.

You know a great film character not because they are consistent. You know them because they are specific. Because there is a way they see the world that could belong to no one else. Because when they speak, you recognise something true. Something that couldn't have been invented, only discovered.

That is what the best brands have always had. And it is exactly what AI cannot generate.

AI is trained on everything. That is its power and its fundamental limitation. It produces the most statistically likely version of any given thing. The average of all the voices it has absorbed. It optimizes toward what has worked before.

Character, by definition, is not the average. It is the specific. The unexpected. The thing that makes you unmistakably you.

What is actually happening right now

I read a lot of brand content. It is part of my job. And the pattern I see emerging is this: as more companies hand their content over to AI, the output becomes more technically correct and less worth reading.

The sentences are cleaner. The structure is tighter. The keywords are in the right places. And there is nothing in any of it that you would remember tomorrow.

Because memory requires specificity. And specificity requires someone, a real person with a real perspective, to have been brave enough to say something specific.

The brands disappearing into the noise are not disappearing because they are using AI. They are disappearing because they have outsourced the one thing that could never be outsourced. The decision about who they actually are.

What I learned from directing actors

When I directed films, the hardest part was never the technical execution. The hardest part was helping an actor find the specific truth of a character. The thing underneath the lines that made everything they said feel inevitable rather than performed.

You cannot tell an actor to be more authentic. Authenticity is not a direction. It is a result. It comes from specificity. From knowing exactly what this character believes, fears, wants and is unwilling to give up.

The same is true for brands. You cannot brief your way to character. You cannot A/B test your way to a soul. You have to do the harder work of actually knowing who you are, and then having the courage to say it out loud, consistently, even when it means not sounding like everyone else.

The competitive advantage nobody is talking about

In a world where every company has access to the same AI tools producing the same quality of technically correct content, character is the only differentiator left that cannot be replicated.

You can replicate a tone of voice. You can replicate a content format. You can replicate a posting frequency. You cannot replicate the specific accumulation of decisions, failures, beliefs and commitments that make a brand genuinely itself.

That is your moat. Not your product features. Not your SEO strategy. Not your content calendar.

Your character. The thing AI can describe but never become.

Where I come in

Helping brands find and hold onto what makes them specific is the work I care about most. If your content is starting to sound like everyone else's; technically fine, strategically sound and somehow forgettable, I am happy to have that conversation.

The Death of Brand Voice - And Why Storytelling is the Only Antidote

Something is disappearing from the internet. You can feel it before you can name it.

You open a company's homepage or LinkedIn page and the copy feels familiar. Not because you've read it before, but because you've read something exactly like it a hundred times. The sentence rhythm is the same. The enthusiasm is the same. The carefully placed em dashes, the "we're passionate about" and the "in today's fast-paced landscape" are all the same.

You're not reading a brand. You're reading a template wearing a logo.

What brand voice actually is

I spent years in the film industry before I ever wrote a line of marketing copy. And the thing that film teaches you is that voice is not style. Voice is not tone of voice guidelines or a list of adjectives on a brand deck.

Voice is what's left when you strip away everything a brand is trying to sound like and find what it actually is.

A great film character doesn't have a consistent tone. They have a consistent truth. You know them not because they always speak in the same register but because there is something irreducibly specific about them. A way of seeing the world that couldn't belong to anyone else.

That's what brand voice is supposed to be. Not a style guide. A soul.

What is killing it

I'm not going to pretend the problem started with AI. Brands have been retreating from specificity for decades - flattening themselves into the safest, most broadly appealing version of themselves, terrified of alienating anyone and ending up alienating everyone by being interesting to no one.

AI accelerated something that was already in motion. It handed the fear of specificity a tool that could produce infinite amounts of inoffensive, structurally correct, algorithmically optimised content at zero marginal cost.

The result is what you see now. An internet where everything is technically fine and nothing is memorable. Where every company in the same sector sounds like a slightly different version of the same company. Where the brand voice guidelines say "bold and human" and the output says "leveraging synergies to drive meaningful outcomes."

The irony is that the brands leaning hardest into AI-generated content are also the ones most loudly claiming to be authentic.

What storytelling actually does

Here's what I learned from making short films that had to work in ten minutes or less: you cannot fake specificity. You can fake polish. You can fake professionalism. You can fake enthusiasm. But the moment an audience, any audience, senses that nothing specific is at stake, they leave.

Specificity is what creates trust. Not broad claims about values. Not mission statements. The specific detail that could only come from someone who actually lived this, built this, failed at this, cared about this.

A brand that says "we're committed to quality" is saying nothing. A brand that says "we threw away three years of work because it wasn't good enough yet" is saying everything.

The difference between those two sentences is the difference between content and story. Content fills space. Story creates meaning.

The brands that survive this moment

They will not be the ones that automated the fastest. They will be the ones that held on to something irreducible. A perspective, a way of seeing, a reason for existing that couldn't be generated by a model trained on everyone else's content.

They will be the ones that understood that their voice was not a liability to be smoothed away in the name of consistency. It was the only thing that made them worth listening to.

Storytelling is not a content format. It is not a strategy or a framework or a growth hack. It is the oldest and most reliable way human beings have ever communicated what actually matters to them.

And right now, in a landscape drowning in content that matters to no one, it might be the most powerful competitive advantage a brand can have.

Where I come in

This is the work I care about most. Helping brands find and hold onto what makes them specific, and translating that into content that earns genuine attention rather than just filling a publishing calendar.

If your brand is starting to sound like everyone else and you know it, I am happy to have that honest conversation.

What writing for Reddit taught me about human psychology

Before I started writing for Reddit professionally, I thought I understood audiences. I had spent years in the film industry studying how stories move people. How a single scene can make a stranger cry, laugh or feel seen. I thought that translated directly.

It did, but not in the way I expected.

Reddit is the most honest audience in the world

In film, audiences are passive. They sit in the dark and receive your story. They might love it or hate it but they rarely tell you in real time.

Reddit is the opposite. The feedback is immediate and completely honest. Post something that feels off and the community ignores it. Post something that reads like marketing and you get called out within minutes. Post something that genuinely resonates and it climbs. Not because an algorithm pushed it but because real people chose to upvote it.

That is a different kind of pressure. And a different kind of lesson.

What gets removed teaches you more than what survives

In film school they teach you to study great films. Watch Kubrick. Analyse Bergman. Understand what makes a scene work.

Reddit taught me to study failure. A post that gets removed tells you everything about what a community values, what it protects itself against and where the line is between authentic contribution and unwanted intrusion.

Every removed post is a lesson in human psychology, specifically in how people recognize inauthenticity before they can even articulate why something felt wrong.

The gap between information and connection

One of the clearest patterns I noticed is that posts that lead with information rarely outperform posts that lead with a human moment.

A post that starts with "Here are five tools for X" gets ignored. A post that starts with "I spent three months getting this wrong before I figured out why" earns attention, because it signals that a real person with real experience is about to share something genuinely useful.

This is not manipulation. It is how human communication has always worked. We trust people before we trust information. Reddit just makes that dynamic visible at scale.

The film connection

As a director, one of the first things you learn is that audiences do not connect with characters because of what they do. They connect because of what they feel. The external action is just the surface. The internal truth is what stays with you.

Writing for Reddit works the same way. The topic of a post is the surface. The human truth underneath, as the shared frustration, the genuine curiosity, the moment of recognition, is what makes it survive and spread.

When I write a Reddit post now I ask the same question I used to ask in the edit suite, “does this feel true?” Not accurate. True. There is a difference. Accurate is verifiable. True is felt.

What this means for AEO and GEO

AI systems learn from human behaviour at scale. The content that gets upvoted, shared and cited across Reddit is the content that earned genuine human trust first. That is not a coincidence.

If you want your brand to show up in AI-generated answers, the path runs through human psychology, not through technical optimisation alone. The content that AI cites is the content that real people already validated as trustworthy and useful.

Reddit is the clearest proof of that principle. And my years in film gave me the foundation to understand why.

Where I come in

Helping brands create content that earns genuine trust on Reddit, across the web and in AI-generated answers, is what I do. The strategic thinking behind it is the same whether the output is a Reddit thread, a blog post or an AEO content strategy.

If you want to explore what that looks like for your brand, feel free to reach out.

Why Reddit is the Most Powerful AI Search Signal in 2026

Reddit accounts for a significant portion of the training data behind major language models. The platform's upvote system means that the content AI encounters on Reddit has already been validated by real humans as genuinely useful. That signal of authenticity is exactly what AI systems are designed to seek out and trust.

Beyond training data, Google has a $60 million data partnership with Reddit giving it prioritized access to live Reddit content. ChatGPT has a similar agreement. That means when someone asks these platforms a question, Reddit threads are among the first places they look for answers.

The result: a well-placed Reddit thread can influence thousands of AI-generated answers long after it was originally posted. That compounding effect is unlike almost any other content channel.

What this means for brands

When someone asks ChatGPT "what is the best tool for X" or "how do companies solve Y problem", Reddit threads discussing those exact questions are likely shaping the answer they receive.

If your brand is mentioned positively and consistently in those threads, you increase the likelihood of appearing in that AI-generated answer. If you have no Reddit presence, you are absent from one of the most influential channels in AI search.

Most brands are absent.

The difference between Reddit and every other channel

Most content marketing happens on channels a brand controls, like their own website or their own social media. Reddit is fundamentally different. It is a third-party platform where real people discuss real problems and real solutions in their own words.

That independence is precisely why AI trusts it. A Reddit thread recommending a product carries significantly more weight than a brand's own website claiming it is good. AI systems are specifically designed to prioritise third-party validation over self-promotion.

This is why authentic Reddit presence is one of the highest-leverage moves in any GEO strategy right now.

What authentic Reddit presence actually looks like

It does not mean creating accounts and posting promotional content. That approach gets flagged and removed immediately. Reddit communities are highly sensitive to anything that reads like marketing, and moderators remove it fast.

Authentic Reddit presence means contributing genuinely to communities where your buyers already spend time. Answering questions from real experience. Sharing insights that help people solve problems. Building the kind of credibility that earns upvotes because the content actually deserves them.

The structure matters too. Posts that rank in subreddits and get cited by AI tend to share common characteristics. A clear problem stated upfront, specific details that demonstrate genuine knowledge, and a conclusion that can be easily extracted and referenced. That is not an accident. It is the intersection of good community writing and smart GEO strategy.

The window is still open

Most brands are still treating Reddit as an afterthought or ignoring it entirely. The brands building authentic Reddit presence today are quietly building one of the strongest GEO signals available, one that influences not just the people reading those threads but every AI-generated answer that cites them afterward.

That window will not stay open forever. As more brands wake up to the opportunity, the communities will become more crowded and the bar for earning genuine engagement will rise.

The best time to start was six months ago. The second best time is now.

Where I come in

Helping brands build authentic visibility in Reddit and across AI-powered search is exactly what I do. Whether that means developing a Reddit content strategy, auditing where your brand currently appears in AI-generated answers, or building a GEO approach that works across all the channels AI looks at, I am happy to help.

The brands that figure this out early will have an advantage that compounds over time. Feel free to reach out if you want to explore what that looks like for your brand.

What is GEO & Why It's the Next Step After AEO

Most marketers have just started hearing about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). But there's already a next step. It's called GEO, and understanding the difference between the two is becoming one of the most important distinctions in search strategy.

What is AEO?

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overview and Perplexity cite it when answering user questions. Instead of optimizing to rank in a list of links, you optimize to be the source an AI trusts enough to reference directly.

AEO focuses on your own content: your website, your blog, your structured data. Get those right and AI starts citing you.

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization goes further. Where AEO is primarily about your own content, GEO is about managing how your brand appears across the entire internet, everywhere AI systems gather information to generate their answers.

That includes Reddit threads, news articles, review platforms, LinkedIn posts, third-party mentions and any other source an AI might pull from when building a response about your industry or brand.

GEO recognizes that AI doesn't just read your website. It synthesizes information from hundreds of sources simultaneously. If your brand only appears on your own channels, you are invisible to a significant part of how AI builds its understanding of your space.

The key difference

• AEO asks: is my content structured so AI can cite it?

• GEO asks: does my brand exist credibly across all the places AI looks?

• They are not competing strategies. AEO is the foundation. GEO is the next layer.
  

What GEO looks like in practice

A brand with a strong GEO strategy shows up in Reddit discussions their buyers are having. They get mentioned in industry newsletters. Their founder has a LinkedIn presence that signals expertise. Third-party review sites reference them positively.

When an AI system gets asked about a problem that brand solves, it finds evidence of that brand everywhere it looks, not just on the brand's own website.

That consistency of presence across the web is what GEO builds.

Why this matters now

Most brands are still figuring out basic SEO. A smaller number are starting to think about AEO. Almost no one is thinking strategically about GEO yet.

That gap is the opportunity. The brands that start building cross-web presence now will have a compounding advantage that is very difficult to replicate once the space gets crowded.


Where I come in

This is exactly what I work with. I help brands and agencies build visibility across both traditional search and AI-powered answer engines, combining AEO-optimised content on their own channels with a broader GEO strategy that ensures they show up wherever AI looks.

If you are starting to think about how your brand appears in AI-generated answers, or if you want to understand the gap between where you are now and where you need to be, I am happy to help. Whether that means auditing your current AI visibility, building a content strategy that works for both Google and answer engines, or simply having a conversation about where to start, feel free to reach out.

Why a Film Background Makes You Better at AEO Content

The president of the most valuable AI company in the world studied literature. Not code.

Daniela Amodei, President of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, recently told ABC News:

"In a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important."

Anthropic does not just preach this. They hire for it. They look for great communicators, people with high emotional intelligence, critical thinkers and kind, empathetic humans. As Daniela puts it, humanities skills will be more important than ever.

I spent years in the film industry before I ever wrote a single piece of SEO copy. And reading that quote, something clicked.

What film school actually teaches you

Studying film science and working as a director and screenwriter teaches you things that no marketing course covers.

You learn how to build tension before a payoff. How to earn an audience's trust before you ask for their attention. How to structure a story so that each beat leads naturally to the next, without the audience noticing the architecture underneath.

You learn to ask: why would someone care about this? What do they already believe, and how does this story connect to that? What needs to be shown versus what needs to be said?

These are not soft skills. They are precision instruments for communication.

Why this matters for AEO and GEO

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of creating content that gets cited by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview. When someone asks an AI a question, it pulls from sources it trusts. Your content either earns that citation or it does not.

What determines whether it does? Not keyword density. Not technical optimisation alone. Trust signals. Clarity. Structure. And above all, whether it reads like a real person with genuine experience actually wrote it.

AI can generate words at scale. What it cannot generate is judgment. The instinct to know when a paragraph rings false. The ability to feel the moment when a story earns belief rather than demands it. The understanding of when to slow down, when to be direct, and when a single specific detail does more work than three generic sentences.

That is a film education. That is what years of storytelling actually builds.

The content that gets cited is the most human content

In my work helping brands build visibility in AI-generated answers, the pattern is consistent. The content that earns citations is not the most optimised. It is the most trustworthy. The most specific. The most clearly written by someone who actually understands what they are talking about and cares whether the reader understands it too.

Creative professionals such as writers, directors, journalists, designers, have been told for years that their backgrounds are not practical enough for the digital world. That they need to become more technical. More data-driven. More algorithmic.

What Daniela Amodei is saying, and what I see in the data every day, is the opposite.

The next era of search visibility will not be won by people who know how to game an algorithm. It will be won by people who know how to communicate like humans, because that is exactly what AI is learning to reward.

SEO vs AEO

The Difference Between SEO and AEO - Why It Matters in 2026

Search is changing faster than most brands realise. For the past two decades, SEO has been the dominant framework for online visibility. But a new discipline is emerging alongside it. One that operates by entirely different rules.

This is the difference between SEO and AEO, and why understanding both is no longer optional.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimising your content so it ranks highly in search engine results pages, primarily Google. When someone types a query, Google returns a list of links. SEO determines which links appear at the top.

The core mechanics of SEO include keyword research, backlinks, technical site health, and content quality. Success is measured in rankings and organic traffic.

What is AEO?

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of optimising your content to appear in AI-generated answers. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, or Perplexity a question, they receive a direct, synthesised answer - not a list of links.

AEO determines whether your brand is cited as a source in that answer.

The core mechanics of AEO include content structure, topical authority, third-party citations, and making your content easy for AI systems to extract and reference. Success is measured in brand mentions, citations, and share of voice across AI platforms.

The key differences

SEO optimises for clicks. AEO optimises for citations.

In SEO, the goal is to get a user to visit your website. In AEO, the goal is to be the source an AI system trusts enough to reference when answering a question, even if the user never visits your site at all.

This shift is significant. Studies suggest that Google AI Overviews now appear in approximately 84% of searches. When an AI overview appears, click-through rates on organic results drop sharply. Traffic is no longer a reliable indicator of visibility.

Do they work together?

Yes, and this is important. SEO and AEO are not competing disciplines. Strong SEO remains the foundation. A technically sound, well-structured website with high-quality content is still the starting point for both.

But AEO extends beyond your website. It requires managing how your brand appears across the entire web - on Reddit, in news articles, on review platforms, and anywhere else AI systems gather information.

The brands winning in 2026 are not choosing between SEO and AEO. They are building for both simultaneously.

What this means for your content strategy

If you are still measuring success purely in rankings and traffic, you are missing a growing share of your actual visibility. The questions your customers are asking AI right now may already be influencing their decisions, and your brand may or may not be part of those answers.

AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It is the natural next step for any brand serious about being found in a search landscape that has fundamentally changed.

Myself, André Havéus, is an SEO and AEO Copywriter and AI Search Strategist helping brands build visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search. Based between Karlshamn, Sweden and Cape Town, South Africa.