Just when you cracked SEO: Luke Marthinusen on AEO and AI search

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What this episode is about

Luke Marthinusen runs MO Agency, a HubSpot elite partner with offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town and around thirty-five people. They were early to selling AEO services, and he makes the case for why it matters with a question rather than a statistic: when you plan a trip now, do you start on Google, or do you ask an LLM? We work through what answer engine optimisation actually involves — the on-page half, the off-page half, and why he reckons it is less technical than SEO ever was. Then the conversation widens into AI inside a marketing team: where MO pushed adoption so hard they had to pull it back, what they now ban it from, and how to brief it so the output still sounds like you. We finish on what has not changed — good copy, good design, knowing your audience — and the one trait he hires for above all others.

Three things we took away

• Hand the LLM the answer, then get it corroborated somewhere else. The on-page half is a plain summary at the very top of every page — who you are, who you work with, what results you have had. Processing power is expensive, Luke points out, so the quicker and more easily you can hand an LLM the answer, the better. The off-page half is press releases and editorials that say the same thing your site says. When a model sees the claim corroborated in a second place, you become a source worth citing.
• Backlinks are not the currency any more. The most surprising claim in the episode: LLMs are not weighting backlinks the way search engines did. They look at how things interlink, but what earns weight is two independent sources agreeing — not how many links point at you. That levels a field which used to favour high-authority sites publishing thin work, and it is why Luke compares this moment to the early days of SEO, when a brand-new site with one genuinely good piece could rank.
• Do not ask AI to finish things — ask it to interrogate them. MO gave everyone a Claude licence and told the team to use it, use it, use it. They went too far. Output plugged straight into the marketing tech came back generic — “bringing us down to average as opposed to making us exceptional” — so they banned it for building campaigns and kept it for ideation. The better brief is not “write me a blog post” but “I am writing about this, what should I consider, what should I cut?”, and only then asking for the draft.

Our guest: Luke Marthinusen, CEO and founder, MO Agency. Connect with Luke on LinkedIn.