Agentic SEO
Agentic SEO is the label for optimising towards AI agents that search, evaluate and act on a user's behalf, rather than towards a human reading a results page. The record does not support assigning it to a single originator.
What it actually means
If an agent is doing the searching, the audience for your page changes. It is no longer a person deciding in three seconds whether to stay; it is a system deciding in milliseconds whether your content is usable evidence.
That shifts the emphasis away from persuasion and towards legibility: can the claim be extracted cleanly, is it corroborated elsewhere, and can the entity be resolved without ambiguity.
Why the attribution is open
Unlike Assistive Agent Optimization, which Jason Barnard named explicitly, agentic SEO has no dated first use and no clear claimant. It appears to be convergent naming, coined repeatedly as practitioners reached for the obvious compound.
It sits in the awkward middle of this field's vocabulary: widely used, genuinely descriptive of something real, and owned by nobody. Recording it as emerging and unattributed is more useful than inventing a lineage.
Whether it is distinct from AEO
In practice, largely not. The actions that make content usable by an agent are the actions that make it citable by an answer engine, and anyone selling agentic SEO as a separate engagement should be asked what specifically differs.
The one real distinction is transactional. An agent that can book, buy or instruct introduces requirements — availability, pricing, contactability in machine-readable form — that pure citation work does not.