∪ of Target Audiences (Accessibility, SEO, AEO/GEO)

Adrian Roselli criticizes the trend of companies bundling accessibility with SEO and AI-ready services, arguing that accessibility should focus on human outcomes rather than serving search engines or large language models. He warns that such marketing signals a lack of commitment to genuine accessibility and may prioritize corporate interests over people.

∪ of Target Audiences Accessibility, SEO, AEO/GEO Using SEO search engine optimization to justify accessibility was only ever a technique for bosses or clients or stakeholders who see accessibility as a cost center and are typically driven more by dashboards or money. Ideally, you want to get past that ASAP to drive better outcomes for humans, not SERPs search engine results pages . I get it as a foot-in-the-door tactic — hopefully it goes no further. But SEO also drove bad accessibility practices, such as alt text keyword stuffing, low-contrast text, verbose headings, link text built around keywords, gratuitous landing pages, and more. Karl does a good job of demonstrating how little SEO and accessibility are connected https://afixt.com/seo-is-not-accessibility-and-we-have-the-data-to-prove-it/ . As such, I’ve always been wary of companies pitching accessibility and SEO in their marketing. Now I see companies pitching accessible & “AI-ready” or “agent friendly” work, often still including SEO. I’m calling foul. We’ve already seen anti-user guidance from LLM companies asking for their notion of accessible sites /2025/10/openai-aria-and-seo-making-the-web-worse.html . Never mind that these PhD-level genius LLM tools can’t handle a general site most kids navigate with ease. Let’s ignore the failure of that technology and instead start slapping misunderstood ARIA attributes on all our pages instead. Sure, there’s overlap between SEO and LLM-thieving. SEO and accessibility even have slight overlap. But accessibility is about people /2023/06/no-ai-will-not-fix-accessibility.html Because . Twisting a human affordance to feed these corporate efforts to make humans redundant among all the other harms is a signal. Different people will read that signal in different ways. If it sells work and you still focus on humans first, cool. But to me that signal says you aren’t serious about the work. That your TESCREAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL patch is just waiting to get sewn on. I’m trying to be less absolutist, less black-and-white. But boy is it hard given what I see every time I peel back the veneer. I made a thing based on an old experiment /2018/12/a-css-venn-diagram.html to better illustrate where I see the overlaps. See the Pen Accessibility + SEO + AEO https://codepen.io/aardrian/pen/NPdrONq/db6c7cd28f6f797f46e5a32d0320c86d by Adrian Roselli @aardrian https://codepen.io/aardrian on CodePen https://codepen.io .