The difference between SEO and AEO

SEO is the work of getting a page to show up when someone searches. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting your business named when someone asks a question and gets a written answer back instead of a list of links.

The two share most of their raw material. The difference is in what the person sees at the end, and that changes what you are aiming at.

What each one is aiming at

With SEO, the goal is a position. You are one of ten blue links, or one of three businesses on the map, and the searcher chooses between you. Ranking higher means more of them choose you.

With AEO, the goal is a mention. ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Perplexity write a short answer and name a few sources or businesses inside it. There is no page two. You are in the answer or you are not, and the person usually acts on what they were told without opening ten tabs.

Where they overlap

Most of the work is shared:

• A site that is fast, crawlable and says plainly what you do
• Pages that match what people actually search for
• A Google Business Profile that is complete and accurate, for local businesses
• Reviews with real content in them
• The same name, address and description everywhere you are listed
• Mentions of your business on other credible sites

If you have done good SEO, you have done most of the groundwork for AEO. The assistants read the same web that Google does, and several of them lean on Google’s or Bing’s results directly.

Where they differ

Rankings become a sample, not a number. You can check where you rank for a keyword and get the same answer all day. An AI answer is written fresh each time, so the same question can name different businesses on different days. Measuring it means asking the same questions repeatedly and looking at how often you appear.

The page needs sentences a model can lift. For a ranking, a page can be organised around a keyword and still work. For an answer, the page needs to state the thing directly: what you do, who it is for, where, and what to expect. A model summarising your site will use whatever sentence says it most clearly. If none does, it will use someone else’s.

Consistency counts for more. A search engine can shrug off a mismatched phone number on one directory. A model assembling a sentence about your business has to decide which source is right, and when they disagree it often leaves you out for a business whose sources agree.

Clicks are not the only outcome. Some AI answers send a visitor to your site, and some simply tell the person to call you. The second shows up as a phone call or a form submission, not as a session in analytics.

What does not change

Fundamentals still matter, and nobody outside the companies running these systems knows how the weighting works. Anyone offering a secret formula for AEO is guessing. I treat it as an extension of SEO rather than a separate discipline: the same foundations, with more attention to clarity and to whether your sources agree with each other.

I go into how this plays out for local businesses in how ChatGPT decides which local business to recommend, and the practical steps are in AEO for local service businesses.

Should you pay for AEO separately?

Usually not. If your SEO is in good shape, the additions are small: tighten the pages that describe your services, clean up inconsistent listings, and check the assistants monthly to see what they say about you. If your SEO is not in good shape, fix that first, because that is where most of the AEO result comes from too.

That is how I run it for local businesses and for software companies: one engagement, one set of measurements, with the AI answers checked alongside rankings and leads.