The Connection Between AEO and Cognitive Ease

Intro

I recently went through HubSpot’s AEO Fundamentals course to learn about the differences between content strategies for SEO and AEO. Over the last year or so I’ve been involved in a handful of web development projects and ranking well has always been at least a small concern. At the same time, I was reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman as his work was referenced in a couple of other books I read previously.

This isn’t going to be a full-fledged analysis of either piece of content — it won't even reference 100% of Thinking — but I wanted to get my thoughts written out as I’ve started to see some interesting connections between Kahneman’s literature and the AEO lessons.

Perhaps I’ll even revisit this at a later point when I have a more fleshed out understanding of the two systems of thinking.

A Brief Disclaimer

Before going forward, it’s incredibly important for you as a reader to understand a couple of things about this article:

• My background is in computer science — not psychology, biology, or any other study of humans or behavioral science. I’ve only read about a number of these topics and this does not make me a professional or an expert of any kind on them; I’m simply drawing my own connection between points that I believe to be related.
• Whenever I pull details and/or information from Kahneman’s book, it is grossly oversimplified for the sake of brevity. If you’re at all interested in the topics I mention from his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, I highly recommend reading it completely. It covers these subjects in much greater depth while providing examples and research that further illustrate the concepts.

The Two Systems of Thinking

The first major idea that Kahneman introduces is the two distinct types of thinking that dictate how your mind interprets, processes, then reacts to information and stimuli. He refers to them as System 1 and System 2.

System 1 relates to your instinctual reactions and processes. For example, this text. You’re unable to look at these words without processing them as language. Another good one is looking at this simple equation:

2 + 2

You likely calculated its answer instantaneously without needing to think it over. That’s System 1.

System 2 is the part of your thinking that requires more processing power. Kahneman uses a more complicated math equation to demonstrate.

17 × 28

I’m willing to bet that you cannot surmise its answer quite as quickly as your did for 2 + 2. It's true that given a bit of time and whatever method you know best, it’s not unlikely that you can come to the right answer — it’s just not automatic.

Kahneman’s book goes into the behaviors associated with these systems of thinking and how they dictate a person’s responses.

Priming

Kahneman notes that psychologists “think of ideas as nodes in a vast network”, which explains how a person is able to connect one idea to the next without giving it a second thought. If I said the word “apple”, you might immediately think “fruit”, or “red” given that they are closely associated with one another. This linking of one idea to others is called associative memory.

Taking this further brings us to priming which is easily explained by the example in Thinking:

If I told you I’d like to go eat, but first I asked you to fill in the missing letter of this word:

SO_P

What word came to mind? Kahneman says it’s likely “soup”, since you recently read the word “eat”. The same might be true if I instead mentioned needing to wash my hands — you’re more likely to have said “soap”.

This is priming in a tiny little nutshell. It goes much further than this; your memory will start to link to ‘nearby’ related ideas with different strengths of correlation, but again I encourage you to read the full book.

Cognitive Ease

Cognitive ease works like a measure of effort. Think of it like a restaurant and its standard business operations — inventory is accounted for, the building isn’t full beyond capacity, there are no fires; everything is working as expected, so no one area needs additional attention. What happens if the restaurant runs out of steaks? New effort needs to be exerted when considering the menu. Customers need to be spoken to differently, since fewer options are now available. Maybe the kitchen needs to come up with an alternative course; something that wasn’t pre-prepped. This would induce cognitive strain.

The example Kahneman gives can be directly connected to SEO — he writes that this concept “suggests that a sentence that is printed in a clear font, or has been repeated, or has been primed, will be fluently processed with cognitive ease.” This one detail sparked my interest in connecting these two dots, as when you’re primed, you’re more prone to digest.

How it Applies to SEO

A prevalent (and seemingly obvious) detail to include during web development is the legibility of your content. If text doesn’t have a significant amount of contrast between itself and its background, it will have a poor accessibility rating. The main purpose of SEO is to get your website to rank highly by providing the content that a user intends to find, earning you clicks, so of course your content needs to be easy to read. More specifically in AEO, the purpose is to answer a question that a user has, ideally by getting cited through an answer engine as trends point toward zero clicks.

Similarly, you'll want to use simple language. You don't need to act like a simpleton, but it's as George Orwell puts it: "never use a long word where a short one will do". The idea here is to sound conversational; don't sound like a thesaurus just for the sake of showing off big words.

Another huge point to consider when trying to bolster SEO comes from the use of keywords. Ensuring your content includes words and concepts all related to your central theme or product is pivotal to a good SERP ranking. This now relates to priming since the actual strategy to include keywords is like creating your own linked nodes of ideas — primarily the ones you want to rank for.

The AEO Difference

SEO and AEO as concepts are incredibly similar — they both are practices that seek to provide value to users through strategic use of keywords, content creation & freshness, and compliance to web development best practices.

When looking at what makes AEO distinct, it’s more specifically about answering questions from users by using real experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT). To have a strong trust signal improves the odds that an AI answer engine will not only incorporate your content in its answer but also cite the page it came from and link back to you.

The broad strategy is this — phrase your top-level headings as questions, since that is likely how they’re going to be searched. The content beneath it should start by immediately answering this question, followed by the information used to reach this conclusion. Keep the answers concise and avoid flooding them with overcomplicated language.

When I heard that the best practice is putting the answer at the start of the text, I immediately had two reactions:

1. That makes sense — so many modern trends point towards successful content having its punchline (or hook) early. It made me think of things like TikToks that put the climax of a joke in the first half-second, to then follow up with the full buildup and payoff. Essentially, instant gratification.
2. If readers get their answers at the top, then what reason would they have for sticking around to read the entire article? They’ve already gotten what they wanted.

According to HubSpot, it turns out that when readers get their answer early, they’re also likely to read how their answer was determined. I considered this and concluded that I would probably behave similarly. Knowing how misinformation can spread like wildfire on the internet, I would probably spend at least a little bit of time digging for justification.

Connecting the Dots

A user heads to their browser or agent, ready to search a question in pursuit of an answer, or to seek further information about a topic they heard about. In this respect, the user is already primed to some extent.

They come across the browser's AI overview since it's the top response and in doing so, they receive the information they were looking for. The answer engine also cites the website where it got the answer, since it's deemed a trustworthy and credible source. Now that the user has their answer, they'd like to find out the supporting details.

They find that the site has an article with a header that almost matches the question as they searched it. Right beneath this, the answer. The dots are starting to connect for the reader, so they spend more time on the website to discover more of the related content as well as the included follow-up questions. The connections made between these related ideas start to flow together — much like how a complex math problem feels easier to work through if you know the final answer ahead of time.

Cognitive ease plays a strong role here; no one wants to put in loads of effort to retrieve what they need — people want answers, fast! The clearly written and cleanly presented content pieces will be the ones that have a stronger trust factor, and eventually, high reliability.

What does this mean?

As soon as I learned what cognitive ease was and how it relates to web development, my mind started racing with what this could mean for the future of SEO and AEO. Human behaviors create the data and trends necessary for the development of these optimizations, so what's the next AEO target? Is it also based in human cognition? It's reasonable that the way people use the internet and spend their time consuming content is the basis for how said content should be presented, but what's really impressive is the speed at which answer engines need to adapt in order to hold attention.

I was somewhat surprised to find just how deliberate this targeting is, and yet, there's a fairness to it. The places where users end up to purchase products or read articles tend to be popular or accurate, so they should end up with better SERP positions. Not only that, but the best of the best are cited by answer engines and voice assistants when they have strong credibility.

The conclusion I'm drawing is that as the human mind and attention span continues to evolve, so too will the optimizations necessary to keep web content relevant.

Final Notes

I'm incredibly fascinated by the link between these subjects and I'm definitely excited to continue exploring this realm of science. Both ends of this discussion are forever subject to change, some in the long term and some short.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a good read and it reminds me of James Clear's Atomic Habits in the sense that it takes a subject you're always somewhat aware of, and turns it into something you know. Thinking is definitely a heavier read, so I'd only recommend it if you have a proper interest in the subject.

I think books like these are very important. They explain the world around us and the minds within us; certain ubiquitous details that seem minor but can carry tremendous impact.

During my research, I found this article called Beyond Rankings: The Behavioral Science of AEO and User Engagement by the author goro on GoriUX that also goes over this topic. It's a great piece that talks more about how flow state relates to all of this as well as more about the approach of applying SEO and AEO through use of recommended tools and strategies. Definitely give this a read.