Entering Halloweentown SEO’s Magical New Rules for AI Search

In 1998, Disney released the iconic movie Halloweentown, introducing a generation of kids to a world hidden just on the other side of a magical portal (including yours truly). 

One minute, Marnie Piper is living in the Mortal World. The next, she’s in a town filled with witches, ghosts, werewolves and other magical creatures — and suddenly the rules she thought she understood don’t quite apply anymore.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit like Marnie, because the rules of SEO have changed too. But the creatures in my new world go by the names AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). And don’t worry, their bark is worse than their bite.

The familiar world of rankings, keywords and blue links hasn’t vanished. But now it’s sharing the portal with AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other research systems that don’t simply return a list of pages. They interpret questions, synthesize information and construct answers.

Now, we have to balance the foundational techniques of traditional SEO with a sometimes unpredictable, but extremely powerful, generative AI world. The trick isn’t abandoning SEO for AI. It’s understanding what SEO was really trying to accomplish all along: helping machines understand who you are, what you know and why they should trust you.

The Mortal World (Traditional SEO)

For a long time, traditional SEO and its core tenets were pretty straightforward.

The rules were familiar. Keep your site technically sound. Be a trusted website that people want to point back to. Write clear, helpful content for users. Map your keywords and pages to search intent. Don’t be spammy. (Just to name a few.)

Life in the Mortal World was good. We knew the rules, and we knew how to play by them.

Then Grandma Aggie showed up on a magical bus with a carpet bag full of candy, skeletons and a whole new world of possibilities.

But like Marnie says, “How are we supposed to grow up if we're not allowed to go into the world, try new things and take some risks?"

Take a deep breath. It’s time to step through the portal. 

The Magic of Halloweentown: The Generative AI World

Once you enter Halloweentown, you find yourself in a wackier world than the one you left behind. Skeleton cab drivers crack terrible jokes while navigating the town (without eyes). Ghosts enjoy a good sauna session. Werewolves run the local hair salon.
But beneath all that weirdness, there’s a different kind of logic at work. 

The magic of Halloweentown is rooted in desire and intent. As Aggie Cromwell explains to Marnie, magic is about knowing what you want and allowing yourself to have it.

Generative AI tools and platforms operate on a similar principle, minus the spells and broomsticks. Rather than simply matching keywords to webpages, AI-powered search systems interpret the intent behind a question, consider its context and pull together information to deliver a more tailored answer.

It's less about finding the exact words someone typed and more about reading the room and adapting based on who is asking and what surrounds them. And just like Marnie, we’re learning there’s a lot more to this world than meets the eye. 

Entity Mapping and Semantic Relationships: The Citizens of Halloweentown

Modern search and AI systems don’t understand brands as isolated keywords. Instead, they build increasingly sophisticated maps of entities, topics and relationships from information available across the web. 

They process words, yes, but they also process the context surrounding those words. Depending on the system, an LLM may draw from its underlying training data, retrieved web content, structured data, other knowledge sources or some combination of these.

Think of it like Halloweentown. The town isn't defined by just one witch or one talking skeleton with questionable driving credentials. It's an entire community of interconnected characters, places and stories that make the world what it is. 

The citizens are like an entity map, and they each hold a bit of magic. Your brand’s online presence works the same way. 

Every mention, review, directory listing, social conversation or piece of earned media adds another connection to your brand's larger identity. And your brand doesn't solely live on your website anymore.

Search engines, LLMs and people encounter your brand through third-party reviews, directories, social mentions, PR mentions, videos and forum discussions. When these sources tell inconsistent, incomplete or conflicting stories, it can make it harder for AI systems to accurately understand and represent your brand.

In other words: your brand isn’t just what you say about yourself. It’s also what the web says about you.

So look out for your community of spooky creatures. Keep those connections strong and authentic. After all, Halloweentown wouldn't be nearly as magical without its colorful cast of characters. (Just ask anyone who fell victim to Kal’s Gray Spell in Halloweentown II.)

SEOs as Marnie Piper: Harnessing the Magic

Marnie doesn't leave her mortal life behind when she discovers she's a witch. She learns to embrace her magical abilities while holding on to everything that makes her human.

And that's a pretty good lesson for today's SEO experts, too.

We're not throwing out everything we know about traditional SEO. We're learning how to apply those same fundamentals in a world where discovery looks a little different.

Much of that comes down to actions that build trust and nurture those E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) that are at the core of “traditional SEO.”

Here’s how to put that magic to work:

• Consistent Brand Messaging: Maintain cohesive messaging across your owned channels and build a positive, accurate presence in the other places your brand is discussed online.

• Offer Original Insights: Publish content with unique value, proprietary data and original perspectives that models cannot easily synthesize from existing sources.

• Intent-Aligned Content Mapping: Structure content around your audiences' actual questions, needs and stages of the customer journey, not just individual keywords.

• Strong Internal Linking and Schema Markup: Use clear, contextual internal links and schema markup to help LLM crawlers understand your content and the relationships between concepts.

• Deliver Multimodal Content: Create useful content in multiple formats (video, audio, diagrams, etc.) to extend the reach of your brand and make it more accessible across the web. 

Balancing the Two Worlds

The way we search for information online has permanently shifted. AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. But it’s still SEO, and it’s alive and well. 

All the foundational principles still apply, but the experience looks a little different now. 

The Mortal World of 10 blue links now coexists with the generative world. And just like Marnie, we don't have to choose one over the other.

To thrive in this dual reality, keep your website's mortal foundation rock-solid and step through the portal to embrace the new ways AI systems discover, understand and recommend your brand.

Because as Grandma Aggie would say, being normal is vastly overrated.