AEO vs SEO: What's Different, and Do You Need Both?

SEO gets a page ranked in a list of links a person clicks through. AEO gets a business named or cited directly inside the answer an AI system gives, often with no click and no list involved. They test different things, reward different signals, and most businesses now need both running at the same time, not one instead of the other.

Quick links

• What is SEO, in plain terms?
• What is AEO, in plain terms?
• What’s actually different between AEO and SEO?
• Where do AEO and SEO overlap?
• Do you need both?
• How do you start doing AEO if you’re already doing SEO?
• FAQ

What is SEO, in plain terms?

SEO is the practice of getting a web page to rank highly in the organic results a search engine returns, so a person sees it in a list and clicks through to the site.

It has had over two decades to mature into a fairly settled discipline. The levers are well understood: keyword relevance, backlinks from other credible sites, technical crawlability, page speed, and increasingly structured data that helps Google understand what a page is actually about. None of that has stopped mattering. Most transactional searches, the ones closest to a purchase, still land on a search engine and still end with someone clicking a result.

What SEO was never built to do is get you mentioned inside an answer that a machine writes itself, with no list of links attached. That’s a different job, and it’s the one AEO does.

What is AEO, in plain terms?

AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, is the practice of shaping content and technical signals so an AI system chooses to name, cite or recommend a business directly inside the answer it gives, rather than pointing to it as one option among ten.

The mechanics differ from classic SEO in a specific way: an answer engine reads a page once, extracts what it needs, and synthesises that into a response the user never has to click through to verify. Getting picked for that means being genuinely easy to extract, structured clearly, and backed by consistent signals elsewhere on the web that tell the engine a brand can be trusted. We’ve covered the full mechanics of this separately in what AEO actually involves; this piece is about where it sits next to SEO, not a repeat of how it works.

What’s actually different between AEO and SEO?

The core difference is who, or what, reads your page first, and that single change in audience alters almost everything else about how you optimise.

A few of those rows are worth unpacking. Most AI crawlers, including the ones behind ChatGPT and Perplexity, read the raw HTML a server sends and largely skip JavaScript rendering, so a page that looks fine in a browser can be effectively blank to them. And the feedback loop genuinely is worse: there’s no equivalent of a rank tracker that tells you where you sit in ChatGPT’s answer for a given prompt, so most AEO measurement still means typing the question in yourself and watching what comes back.

The stakes behind the difference are getting harder to ignore, too. An Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords found that pages sitting in position one saw their click-through rate fall by roughly 34.5% once an AI Overview appeared above them on the same search. Ranking well is no longer the same thing as being seen.

Where do AEO and SEO overlap?

More than the comparison table suggests. A site that is fast, crawlable and genuinely well written is most of the way to satisfying both disciplines, because the underlying work is largely shared.

Technical health is the clearest overlap. A page that loads quickly, has clean markup and isn’t blocking crawlers helps a Google ranking and an AI citation equally, since both depend on the content actually being reachable. Structured data is another: schema that clearly labels an organisation, an article or a set of frequently asked questions was originally built for rich results in Google, but Google’s own structured data documentation now includes a section on generative AI features, confirming the same markup feeds both.

Content quality overlaps too, just measured differently. Google rewards depth, originality and demonstrated expertise because it correlates with what searchers actually want. AI engines lean on near-identical signals, real experience, clear sourcing, a named author, because they’re a decent proxy for whether an answer can be trusted enough to repeat. None of that work gets thrown away when a business adds AEO to its SEO. It’s the foundation the AEO work sits on top of.

Do you need both?

Almost certainly, yes. SEO still earns its budget on transactional searches that end in a click, while AEO covers a growing share of research that now happens before a search engine is even involved.

The scale of that shift is no longer marginal. By mid-2026, Similarweb’s clickstream data put the share of Google searches ending without any click at 68%, up from roughly 45% a decade earlier, with AI Overviews doing much of the recent pushing. Pew Research Center tracked real browsing behaviour across 68,879 Google searches and found that users clicked through on just 8% of queries when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it didn’t. That’s a research step quietly disappearing from view, not from existence.

Dropping SEO in favour of AEO would be just as short-sighted as ignoring AEO altogether, though. AI answer engines still draw many of their citations from pages that already rank and already carry authority in classic search, so a business with no SEO foundation has less for AEO to build on, not more room to skip it. The honest read is that these are two workstreams pulling the same lever from different angles, and a business relying on only one is leaving the other half of its audience’s research journey uncovered.

How do you start doing AEO if you’re already doing SEO?

You’re not starting from nothing. Most of the technical SEO work already done, crawlability, page speed, clean markup, carries straight over, and what’s missing is additive rather than a rebuild.

A sensible first pass:

• Ask the engines your own buyer questions. Type the phrases a real customer would use into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and see whether you’re named, whether the details are right, and who gets cited instead.
• Check what crawlers actually see. Look at robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, then view the page source of a key page to confirm the important content is in the raw HTML, not injected by JavaScript.
• Rewrite the top of your highest-intent pages. A real question as the heading, a direct answer in the first sentence or two, then the detail underneath.
• Add the schema you’re missing. Organization, FAQPage and Article markup are the ones most worth having, and they help a Google rich result at the same time.
• Build entity consistency off-site. The same name, address and description everywhere a business is listed, plus genuine third-party mentions, all feed the trust signals AI engines lean on.

None of that requires abandoning the SEO work already under way. It sits alongside it. A walk-through of the full audit is here if it’s worth doing properly rather than piecemeal, and the broader shift both disciplines now sit inside is covered in the AI search optimisation field guide.