AEO vs SEO: what stays, what changes, and what to do first
SEO and AEO share a foundation — crawlable, trusted, useful pages — but they aim at different results. SEO wins a position in a list of links. AEO wins a mention inside an answer, and that answer is assembled from many sources, most of which are not your site. You still need SEO; it is no longer enough.
The short answer
SEO makes your pages rank in a list of links. AEO makes AI assistants name and recommend you inside their answer. AEO depends on SEO — engines that search the web still crawl, index and trust pages — but it adds work SEO never covered: answering sub-questions directly, keeping your facts consistent, and being present on the third-party pages AI reads. Keep doing SEO; stop expecting it to cover AI on its own.
Why it is worth the effort: visitors who arrive from an AI answer have usually compared options already. Webflow reported a 24% signup rate from LLM referrals against 4% from non-brand Google search (via Graphite, 2025). Fewer visits, much warmer ones.
What stays the same
- Crawling and indexing. Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini use Google's index; Copilot and much of ChatGPT's search use Bing's; engines also run their own crawlers. A page that cannot be crawled cannot be cited.
- Usefulness and trust. Pages that answer well, come from credible sites and are kept current are cited more.
- Technical hygiene. Fast, stable pages, clean canonical URLs, sitemaps and structured data help both.
Five things that change
1. The result is a mention, not a position
In search, being fourth still gets some clicks. In an answer, you are either one of the three to eight products named, or you are absent. How you are described matters as much as whether you appear: "a cheaper option with fewer integrations" and "the best choice for teams" are both mentions.
2. Keywords become questions, and questions become fan-out
Buyers type longer, more specific questions into AI — "best CRM for a 10-person agency that already uses Gmail" — and the engine splits each into many sub-searches. Ranking for the head keyword does not secure the sub-searches: an analysis of 173,902 URLs by Surfer found 68% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews were not in the top 10 for the query. The unit of work becomes the sub-question, and the right page answers it in its first lines.
3. Most of the sources are not your site
SEO concentrates on your own pages. AI answers are assembled mostly from other people's pages. In our measurements across 80 buyer questions on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, a company's own site supplied 1–5% of cited sources until the buyer named the brand; roundups, publications, review sites, directories and communities supplied the rest (details). Off-site presence becomes core work, not a link-building side project.
4. Facts and consistency become ranking factors
An engine that finds three different prices for your product repeats one of them, or none. Consistent facts across your site, review profiles, directories and press are what let an engine describe you confidently.
5. Measurement is sampling, across engines
There is no stable position to track. Answers vary by engine, model version and hour, and engines disagree: in Rankability's study of 596,723 prompts answered by two or more engines, only 10.2% of cited URLs appeared on more than one engine. AEO is measured by asking a fixed set of buyer questions on several engines repeatedly and tracking how often, where and how you are named.
AEO vs SEO, task by task
| Task | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Keywords, volumes, difficulty | Buyer questions per stage; the sub-searches engines run for them; who is named and cited |
| On-page | Target keyword in title, headings, copy | The direct answer in the first lines; specifics, numbers and comparisons a model can quote |
| Page types | Landing pages, blog posts | Comparisons, alternatives, "best X for Y", use cases, integrations, pricing explained |
| Technical | Crawl budget, speed, Core Web Vitals | Plus: AI crawlers allowed (OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), text in HTML not only in JS, llms.txt |
| Off-site | Backlinks | Mentions: review sites, directories, roundups, communities — linked or not |
| Facts | Rarely a concern | One source of truth, kept consistent everywhere |
| Tracking | Rank tracker, Search Console | Repeated answer sampling on several engines; AI referral traffic in analytics |
| Time to effect | Weeks to months | Days for live-search engines after a page is crawled; months for what models know without searching |
How an SEO team's week changes
The on-site half of AEO fits an SEO team well: technical access, answer-first rewrites, comparison pages, structured data. What usually needs new hands:
- Outreach to the authors of the roundups engines cite for your category;
- Profiles on review sites and directories, filled in properly and kept current;
- Community answers from real people on your team, disclosed;
- Answer sampling every week, across engines, with someone reading the answers rather than only counting mentions.
This is the part we do for clients: see how a project runs.
What to do first
- Check access. Make sure robots.txt and your CDN or firewall do not block AI crawlers, and that your product, pricing and comparison pages show their text without JavaScript.
- Sample the answers. Ask ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode ten questions a new buyer would ask. Record who is named and which pages are cited. The free check does this automatically.
- Fix the facts. Write your facts down once; correct every page and profile that disagrees.
- Answer the sub-questions. For your three best questions, publish the comparison and alternatives pages the engines are looking for, with the answer first.
- Go where you are cited. List the third-party pages behind those answers and work on being named there.
Frequently asked questions
Is AEO replacing SEO?
No. Engines that search the web use search indexes — Google's for Gemini and AI Overviews, Bing and their own crawlers for others — so pages that cannot be crawled or trusted are not cited. AEO builds on SEO and adds work SEO never covered.
If I rank #1 on Google, will ChatGPT recommend me?
Not necessarily. Engines split a question into many sub-queries and pick the best passage for each. A study by Surfer of 173,902 URLs found 68% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews were not in the top 10 for the main keyword.
Do backlinks matter for AEO?
Links still help pages get crawled and trusted. What matters more is being mentioned — named, described, compared — on the pages AI reads for your category, whether or not they link to you.
Should my SEO team do AEO?
They can do the on-site half: technical access for AI crawlers, answer-shaped pages, structured data. The off-site half — review sites, directories, roundups, communities — is closer to PR and partnerships and needs people who do outreach.
Free check: the questions your buyers ask, who AI recommends, and what to fix first.
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