Katie Lawrence
Marketing and Growth Director, d&f
Insights | Business
What the dickens is NWO? A short guide to the AI buzz words
23 May 2025
Ermm, hold up, AI what?
Maybe it is me, but the amount of noise around AI at the moment is wild. And I’m here for it. I mean, ChatGPT helps me with everything from writing content and giving me ideas on what to do this weekend with a pre-schooler in the rain, to helping decide on what meals to cook this week, (saving me from eating the same four things I can actually cook)!
But as AI, LLMs and GPTs transform EVERYTHING, a few new buzzwords are popping up.
Some of them are helpful, some just confusing, but if you’re running a business or responsible for marketing, it’s worth getting your head around what these terms mean, and why they matter.
So here’s a quick look at the new language of AI-powered search to go wow your friends with!
Neural Web Optimisation (NWO)
Neural Web Optimisation, (or NWO, if you're feeling cool), is the term that the team at d&f are using for this new way of shaping web content. NWO is the way information is presented behind the scenes so it’s understood and trusted by AI tools and their web-searching bots - going way beyond just being ranked highly by old-school search engines.
In simple terms, it’s about making your content easy for AI to read, learn from, and confidently serve up as answers to its users. It’s still about clarity, structure and authority, but now, it’s got to work for both humans and machines in a whole new way.
Think of it as SEO’s evolved cousin. Less keyword stuffing, more natural language. Less chasing clicks, more creating content that’s genuinely helpful and AI-ready. Brilliant!
Zero-Click Search
This term refers to when users get their answers straight from their AI tool, without ever clicking through to a website. It’s one of the side effects of AI search, where answers are generated instantly and are now even served at the top of the page on some conventional search engines. Think ‘Google Gemini’.
For businesses, this means fewer people landing on your site (boo!), even if you’re the original source of the information. Optimising for visibility within these answers is now just as important as ranking highly in traditional search, and is set to become the most important thing in discoverability as we move forward.
AISO (AI Search Optimisation)
AISO is another name doing the rounds, standing for AI Search Optimisation. It’s very similar to NWO in principle, it’s all about preparing content for the AI-powered search experience. Some people also refer to it as “Generative Engine Optimisation” (GEO), though that one hasn’t caught on as much in the UK.
‘AI is changing how people find answers online, and your website needs to keep up.’
TL;DR: New names, same goal
We prefer NWO because it better reflects the bigger shift: not just a tweak to SEO, but a new kind of thinking for how web content is discovered, interpreted, and delivered by AI systems, and how we need to separate the delivery of information from the action we want a user to take.
But whatever you call it - NWO, AISO, GEO, or just “the future of search” the idea is the same. AI is changing how people find answers online, and your website needs to keep up.
If you’re creating content that’s helpful, well-structured and trustworthy, you’re already on the right track. But now’s the time to double down, stay visible, and be part of the conversation because this topic is going faster than Katy Perry in orbit.
I’m off to ask the bots what I can make for dinner with bread, courgettes and raisins - in the bots I trust!
Introducing the Neural Web Optimisation (NWO) tool, by d&f
The team at d&f have created a Neural Web Optimisation tool to give you an idea of where your website ranks for the key measurements that AI bots look for when ‘reading your content.'
Click here to find out if your website will stand-up to the AI bot revolution.