This is a retrospective on the beginnings of AIEO, written in September 2026. The timeline date marks the registration of AIEO.fyi on 26 May 2026; the meeting and early work described below led towards that milestone, but their exact dates are not recorded here.
The idea came out of an agency meeting
I met with an agency that had around a dozen paid tools supporting its work. I already had security automation that I had built and worked with, and the meeting got me thinking about how I could adapt it to SEO and AEO.
I felt there was an opportunity to rework what I had, applying that automation to a different set of questions about websites. That became the starting point for AIEO.
A subject that was easier to talk about
Part of the excitement was how accessible the subject felt. Helping people understand whether their website could be found was easier to discuss with most people than the details of security automation.
That mattered to me. It was a way to take technical work I enjoyed and apply it to something people could more readily understand and talk about.
The first part of the timeline
- Before AIEO: existing work on security automation.
- The agency meeting: seeing the collection of paid tools prompted the idea of adapting that work to SEO and AEO.
- Early work: reworking parts of the security automation for that purpose.
- 26 May 2026: registering AIEO.fyi, giving the project a name and a home to build towards.
The domain registration is recorded in the public domain registry. The earlier stages are my recollection of how the project began.
This entry captures that starting point. Later experiments and additions belong in their own chapters of the journal.