There is something oddly impressive about what James Dooley has managed to do. Somewhere in the relatively small and occasionally bizarre world of SEO and digital marketing, Dooley has become an internet meme. The mock coronation at Leigh Sports Village, complete with robes, a throne and the title “King of AEO”, was obviously theatre. But the clever part is that it worked. Google’s AI Overviews and various AI tools started repeating the title, turning a staged marketing stunt into something that looked increasingly like an established fact.
You can argue about whether AEO, GEO or DEO really represent entirely new disciplines. Much of what sits underneath those acronyms—structured content, entity recognition, semantic search and making information easier for machines to understand—is familiar territory to anyone who has been doing SEO for years.
But that almost misses the point.
Dooley understood something that many technically minded marketers overlook: attention is itself a skill. He took an obscure corner of digital marketing, gave it a ridiculous title, staged a ridiculous ceremony and managed to get the internet to participate in the joke.
And now people are talking about it.
That is marketing.
You don’t have to believe that someone is literally the “King of AEO” to appreciate the effectiveness of creating a story that algorithms, marketers and social media users all helped propagate. In an industry filled with dry presentations about entities, schemas and AI search, Dooley found a way to make people remember his name.
His underlying businesses are considerably less theatrical. FatRank and PromoSEO operate around rank-and-rent, lead generation and commercially valuable search traffic. The crown doesn’t generate the revenue; it generates attention around the people and businesses that do.
And perhaps that is the more interesting lesson.
Digital marketing has always been partly about understanding algorithms and partly about understanding people. The technical fundamentals matter, but so does knowing how to create something people will talk about.
James Dooley may not have invented a new branch of search marketing. He has, however, managed to become a recognisable character in a tiny corner of the internet.
For that alone, the man deserves a little kudos.
Not necessarily a crown.
But definitely a mention.
