Recently, I’ve been hearing the same question more and more often:

“Can you handle both SEO and AIO?”

In many cases, this question comes up at the very start of an SEO project.
SEO is agreed on — and then, almost immediately, the follow-up appears:
“Do you also cover AIO?”

This reflects a broader shift in how companies think about search visibility today.
SEO alone is no longer seen as sufficient.
So the real question is not whether SEO leads should care about AIO, but how they should approach it.

AIO Is Not a Separate Discipline

One important point is worth clarifying upfront:
AIO should not be treated as a completely new, standalone specialization.

AIO is not a replacement for SEO.
Instead, it is an additional layer that only works when solid SEO fundamentals are already in place.

In simple terms:

• SEO is the foundation that allows content to be found through search.

• AIO is the layer that ensures content is used, summarized, and represented correctly by AI-driven systems.

Seen this way, AIO does not sit next to SEO — it sits on top of it.

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The Expanding Role of the SEO Lead

Because of this shift, SEO leads can no longer focus solely on search engines.
AI has become part of the environment in which content is evaluated, interpreted, and surfaced.

This does not mean abandoning traditional SEO practices.
It means expanding the scope of responsibility.

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What Needs to Change in Practice?

One of the biggest changes is how success is measured.

Keyword rankings and sessions alone are no longer sufficient KPIs.

SEO leads now need to ask additional questions, such as:

• Is the brand or product clearly and correctly associated with this page?

• When AI summarizes this content, does the message remain accurate?

• Can the purpose of the page be explained clearly in one or two sentences?

In other words, SEO leads are increasingly responsible for what happens outside the search results, not just within them.

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Why This Matters Especially in the Japanese Market

This shift is particularly important in Japan.

Japanese content often includes:

• inconsistent wording,

• implicit or omitted subjects,

• and intentionally vague expressions.

While these may feel natural to human readers, they can easily cause problems in AI-driven environments.
The result is content that is ignored, misunderstood, or incorrectly summarized by AI systems.

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What Companies Are Really Looking For

What I see more and more is that companies are not simply looking for
“someone who knows SEO and AIO.”

They are looking for someone who can design a single, end-to-end process,
with SEO as the core and AIO as a natural extension of that process.

The role of the SEO lead is no longer just to monitor rankings.

It is to ensure that products and services are correctly understood — by both search engines and AI systems.