What Michelin-Star Cake Has to do with SEO, AEO, and GEO

 What can your B2B digital marketing program learn from world-class chefs?

Oil, water, eggs, pour out the contents, and voila, an edible boxed cake brought to life. Take it a step further, ditch the boxed cake and build your own cake mix from scratch –an even tastier homemade cake. One step above this, you dine at a restaurant with a Michelin-star chef making dessert where every ingredient, from the water to the eggs, oil, cocoa, and flour, is expertly acquired from the finest sources available on the planet. 

These three stages are a solid comparison of how marketing agencies and businesses from every industry have approached SEO. The boxed cake is basic SEO — just enough to look good online. The homemade cake is strategic SEO — the kind that balances flavor, texture, and intent. But the Michelin-star cake? That’s SEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) working together — where every ingredient, from keywords to schema, is sourced, plated, and optimized to own every possible avenue online where a potential customer could discover their business.

Just like I could follow a recipe book to make an awesome homemade cake, many businesses have stage 2 down pat. However, if you ask me to weave together the perfect, highest-quality ingredients to create my own Michelin-star-worthy cake, that’s not so easy. 

This is exactly where most businesses find themselves trying to make sense of SEO, AEO, GEO, or any other term representing how to have a meaningful online presence with the entrance of GenAI engines and AI search offerings. No two Michelin-star cakes taste the same, and no two SEO/AEO/GEO strategies should be the same because they need the right human touch that knows the business and customers intimately.

At Workamajig, our approach to this constantly evolving space is to focus on elevating our content in our company blog and other channels to ensure we are laser-focused on creating high-value content that serves agencies and project managers. 

Workamajig has been honing our content development style like a Michelin chef for two decades. However, just like a world-class chef who found a new novel means to perform his profession better, with GenAI, we are evolving. This early in the game, there is no definite, bullet-proof means to perfect AEO/GEO with SEO. However, the good thing is that just like a Michelin chef uses the same categories of ingredients to deliver memories on a plate, the foundations that made stage 2 of expertly built SEO programs a success are the categories that should be focused on right now when incorporating efforts to refine AEO/GEO. 

The following are some basic best practices that we employ as a company that are worth considering for agencies. 

1. Use thoughtful, user-friendly adjustments to our content structure to improve readability for both humans and LLMs.

2. Clear, logical headers - guiding readers and algorithms through our content. 

3. Employ comprehensive tables of contents -enhancing navigation and understanding. 

4. Include dedicated FAQ sections with articles -directly addressing common queries, a boon for answer engines.

Our core belief is that content structured for human readability and comprehension naturally performs well across all platforms. As the experts at Grow and Convert aptly put it, "SEO still works. I know it’s not cool to say right now, but it’s the truth." LLMs frequently "ground" their answers by searching the web, meaning that strong traditional SEO performance through human-generated content remains foundational for visibility in AI responses.

We advocate for businesses to double down on creating better quality content that can break through the noise of a much more crowded online space due to AI-generated content that is missing the human element. As with most technological innovations, the best results come when we do not remove the human element. 

Every quarter or so, I’ll update you on Scale on how our efforts in these areas are progressing.

Now that you’re hungry, here’s a directory of Michelin-star restaurants!