When Marketing Becomes Alphabet Soup
Spend enough time in marketing circles and you start to notice a pattern.
Perfectly sensible ideas are discussed almost entirely in acronyms.
SEO becomes SXO.
SXO sits alongside AEO, GEO and now AIO.
Add UX, UI, CX, SERPs, E-E-A-T and CWV, and suddenly it can feel as though marketing has evolved into its own private language.
If you’ve ever found yourself nodding along while quietly thinking “haven’t we always done this?” you’re not alone.
The truth is that marketing hasn’t fundamentally changed overnight. What has changed is the environment it operates in. Platforms evolve, technology shifts, and behaviour follows. New acronyms tend to appear when the industry tries to describe those shifts, often by giving existing principles a new name.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s an observation and, being TLH, an opportunity for us to translate. To strip the language back, connect the dots, and focus on what matters for the people using, funding, and relying on the marketing.
One of the simplest tools we still use is an old one, the “so what?” test. It runs quietly through everything that follows.
The Search Layer: Being Found (and Framed)
Most acronyms originate in search, because discovery is where behaviour changes are felt first.
At its core, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is still about helping the right people find the right information at the right time, usually via the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). In paid channels, familiar terms like CPC (cost per click) describe the cost of earning that visibility.
What’s changed is how and where people search.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) reflects the expectation of direct answers, not just links
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) responds to AI-generated summaries and citations
- AIO (AI Optimisation) acknowledges the growing role of machine interpretation in visibility
These aren’t competing disciplines. They’re different responses to the same underlying question:
How do people discover information now and how do we make sure the right message appears at the right moment?
Search hasn’t disappeared. It’s diversified.
The acronyms simply describe that expansion.
The Experience Layer: What Happens After the Click
This is where things often sound new but feel familiar.
UX (User Experience), UI (User Interface) and CX (Customer Experience) have shaped good marketing and design for years. They’re all rooted in simple, human questions:
- Is this clear?
- Is it easy to use?
- Does it feel coherent and reassuring?
Enter SXO – Search Experience Optimisation.
Despite the newer label, SXO isn’t a reinvention. It’s a reminder.
Being visible is only part of the job. What happens after someone arrives matters just as much.
If SEO helps someone find you, SXO asks whether the experience makes them want to stay, engage and choose you.
The Trust & Quality Layer: Why Some Content Gets Chosen
Some acronyms exist because platforms try to formalise judgement.
E-E-A-T – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust, is one of them.
It doesn’t introduce a new standard. It simply puts a framework around what people have always responded to:
- Clear explanations
- Demonstrated expertise
- Evidence of real-world experience
- Content that feels considered, not manufactured
In other words: reassurance.
The terminology may be technical, but the outcome is deeply human.
The Performance & Practical Layer: Does It Actually Work?
Then there’s the technical foundation, often referenced through Core Web Vitals (CWV).
Metrics such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint, which measures how quickly the main content loads) exist to quantify something users feel instinctively: whether a site is fast, stable and usable.
These aren’t trends. They’re expectations.
No amount of clever messaging compensates for a site that’s slow, confusing or frustrating to use.
Stepping Back from the Marketing Alphabet Soup
When you strip away the terminology, most modern marketing conversations still come back to the same fundamentals:
- Can people find this easily?
- Do they immediately understand it?
- Does it help them do what they came to do?
- Does it build confidence and trust?
One of the simplest tools we still use is an old one: the “so what?” test.
Borrowed from publishing and sales, it’s a way of sense-checking marketing activities by repeatedly putting yourself in the reader’s shoes and asking so what?
What does this mean for them?
Why should they care?
What changes as a result?
You keep asking until you reach the part that matters, the point where the message connects with a real need, decision or action.
When the acronyms are stripped away, the question remains the same:
so what does this change for the person on the other side of the screen?
Acronyms can be useful shorthand within teams. They help frameworks travel faster and ideas scale more easily. But they can also create unnecessary distance, especially when language becomes more complex than the problem it’s trying to solve.
The most effective marketers aren’t the ones who memorise every new label.
They’re the ones who understand what sits beneath them and know how to apply that thinking in practice.
The Last Word
At The Last Hurdle, we pay attention to the evolving landscape, the platforms, the technologies, the frameworks and, yes, the acronyms. But our focus has always been on what sits underneath them. Clear messages. Useful content. Thoughtful experiences. Marketing that helps people understand, decide and act with confidence.
Trends will come and go, and terminology will continue to shift. Our role is to cut through the noise, translate complexity into clarity, and apply the right tools, old or new, in a way that works for our clients.
Because good marketing isn’t about keeping up with the alphabet.
It’s about knowing which letters matter.
