you got it perfectly. Taking scraped results and presenting the data to customers. Based on these results, SEO/AEO experts then make suggestions like "write about X" to help you "improve" in the results. Is it part dark magic part truth? probably, but that's the SEO industry

I think the biggest issue in the industry is there's no way to defintiely tell how useful are these converted users or whether performance is drastically better by showing up in chatgpt. Although attribution itself is a difficult issue in the online marketing industry