How are you speaking with your executive teams about SEO vs. AIO?

I'm curious how you are all handling conversations with upper execs about optimizing for LLMs. I'm in-house, and have an executive team that - in my opinion - is a little too bought into the AI hype despite having no prior experience with search marketing. Their claims are SEO is dead and we need to be running full force at LLM optimization.

My position has maintained that LLM optimization and SEO are virtually synonymous. Yes, I think there's some new tactical nuance with content marketing and off-page that assists with LLM pickup, and yes I believe we will see an exponential increase in usage of LLMs in place of traditional search in the coming years. But LLMs are fundamentally not search engines, and instead outsource the indexing and ranking of web content to search engines in order to synthesize their answers. Thus, SEO best practices still remain highly relevant for LLM optimization. I'm trying to remain inclusive of new ideas and not create an SEO vs. the world dichotomy.

This answer just isn't sexy enough, I guess. My team is considering "rebranding" the way we speak about SEO to be more LLM focused, despite knowing the processes are virtually the same.

At the end of the day, I think the execs just want to rest assured we're anticipating future market opportunity. But is the best way about this to simply trick them into thinking we're doing some new, cutting edge tactics?

Would be interested to hear how your conversations are going related to this.