Joey Sendz started in traditional SEO. For years he ran technical audits, built link graphs, and chased Google rankings for small and mid-sized clients. The work paid well enough, but the rules kept shifting and the ceiling felt low.
Then November 2022 hit. ChatGPT launched. Within weeks, Joey watched beta users replace Google searches with LLM prompts for everything from product research to medical questions. The signal was hard to ignore: search was about to split in two.
He made the call before the market caught up. Instant Press was built around a single thesis, that brands would soon need to rank inside AI answers, not just Google's blue links. We called the service Answer Engine Optimization and started testing it on real clients in early 2023, two years before the acronym "AEO" hit industry press.
Four years and 80+ clients later, that thesis sits at the center of every engagement we run.