Issue No. 03 - June 23, 2026

Last week I went back to a landing page I'd rewritten for AEO about a month ago. I was checking it against something I'd just read on Neil Patel's NPDigital site, which is where I go most often for AEO guidance, and within five minutes I found two things I'd written with confidence that were already outdated.

Not wrong when I wrote them. Outdated. The guidance had moved.

That stopped me for a minute, because it's such a different experience than the rest of my professional life.

I have a degree in accounting, and I'm also an attorney. Both of those fields are built on rules. Real rules, written down, with history behind them. When I draft a contract, I'm still leaning on things I learned in my first year of law school. The core principles don't shift under you. New cases and regulations come along, sure, but the foundation holds. You can build expertise once and keep using it for decades.

AEO is nothing like that. There's no settled body of knowledge. There's no first year course. The people writing about it are figuring it out in public, the same as I am, and what was true a month ago can be partially true now and might be different again next month.

At first this felt like a problem. I kept waiting to get to the point where I "knew" AEO the way I know how to read a balance sheet or structure an indemnification clause. I haven't gotten there, and I've started to think that's not actually the goal.

What I've landed on instead is treating my AEO strategy as something I revisit on purpose, not something I set once and trust. Every few weeks I go back through what I've implemented and ask whether it still holds up. Sometimes it does. Sometimes I find exactly what I found last week, something that was right when I wrote it and isn't anymore.

This is a genuinely different muscle than the one my accounting and legal background built. Those fields rewarded depth in a fixed system. This rewards staying loose enough to update your own conclusions without it feeling like failure. I didn't expect that to be the hard part, but it has been. There's a small ego hit every time I find something I wrote with confidence that's now "wrong", and I'm getting better at not taking it personally.

I don't know if this gets easier or if this is just what it's like to work in a space that's still being invented. Either way, I'd rather know that going in than keep expecting to arrive somewhere solid.

Where this lands in the three buckets:

Immediately actionable: Pick one piece of AEO work you did a month or more ago, a landing page rewrite, a schema markup change, anything, and go check it against current guidance. You're looking for what's drifted, not what you got wrong. For the checking itself, I keep a short rotation of sources, Neil Patel Digital for AEO specifically, TLDR Marketing for a quick daily pulse, and Alex Hormozi for the bigger picture on what's working in marketing right now.

Start thinking about: Build a habit of treating your AEO strategy as a living document rather than a finished one. A recurring review, even informal, beats assuming what you set up once is still working.

Next phase: As your strategy stabilizes in some areas, start noticing which parts of AEO are settling into something more rule-like and which parts are still moving fast. That distinction will help you know where to keep checking versus where you can build with more confidence.

I am glad you are here for the muddy middle.

~meghan