AEO vs SEO: what is actually different?

The framing that sells conference talks — “SEO is dead, AEO is the future” — is wrong in a way that costs money. Perhaps two thirds of the work is identical. The remaining third is where visibility is now being won and lost, and it is not where a rankings report looks.

Side by side

What the two share

More than the marketing suggests, and you cannot skip any of it:

• Crawlability. A crawler that cannot fetch and read a page brings back nothing from it to quote. Client-side rendering that hides content from a plain fetch is as fatal for an assistant as for a crawler.
• Ranking. Assistants that retrieve from the live web are largely drawing on pages that already rank. Ranking does not guarantee being named, but not ranking usually guarantees not being read.
• Authority and links. The sources an engine trusts are, in large part, the sources search has already learned to trust.
• Information architecture. One clear page per topic beats four overlapping ones, for exactly the same reasons in both disciplines.

SEO + AEO / Shared groundworkBoth

CrawlabilityA page that cannot be fetched brings nothing back to quoteBoth

RankingNot ranking usually means not being readBoth

Authority and linksEngines trust what search already trustsBoth

Information architectureOne clear page per topicBoth

What is genuinely different

1. Quotability, not just relevance

A page can be the most relevant result and still be unquotable. An assistant needs a sentence it can lift. A page titled “Solutions” that takes four paragraphs to say what it does will lose to a page titled with the question and answering it in the first line — even if the first page ranks higher.

A page can be the most relevant result and still be unquotable.

2. Facts in text on your own domain

SEO tolerates a price in an image, because a human will look at it. An assistant cannot. If the specific is not on your page as text, the engine takes it from a review site or a competitor’s comparison page and cites them instead. This is how a brand loses its own pricing question.

3. Third-party corroboration matters more

Assistants rarely cite only the vendor. In our own audit, Perplexity cited 90 sources across eight questions, spread across 74 distinct domains in run A, 65 of which were cited exactly once (run B: 75 and 66).

If your category’s answers keep returning to one review platform, an accurate listing there can be worth more than another page of your own.

4. There is no second page

Position eleven in search still gets some traffic. Being the fourth brand an assistant considered but did not name gets nothing, and leaves no trace anywhere you would look for it. Visibility in answers is closer to binary than ranking is.

5. You cannot see the loss in analytics

An AI answer can end the journey. Your rankings hold, your impressions may hold, and the visit simply never happens — recorded nowhere as anything, because it never was a visit. The only instrument that detects this is asking the engines your buyers’ questions and writing down the answers.

Your rankings hold, your impressions may hold, and the visit simply never happens — recorded nowhere as anything, because it never was a visit.

How the metrics map onto each other

The consequence worth internalising: AEO numbers are only comparable against the same question set. Change the questions and you can manufacture any trend. This is why a credible report prints its prompt list, and why ours is stored verbatim in every run record. The method is on how we measure.

If you can only do one, do SEO

We sell AEO and this is still the right advice. If your site is slow, thin, or invisible to a crawler, AEO has nothing to work with — you would be optimising for quotation a page nobody retrieves. Fix the foundation first.

The honest exception, and it is a common one: a site that already ranks well and is still absent from AI answers. That is not an SEO problem and more SEO will not fix it.

It usually means the facts an assistant needs are not on your pages in text, or your category’s answers are being built from third-party sources that do not mention you. That gap is what AEO is for, and it is exactly what a measurement run exposes in an afternoon.

Who should worry about this first

• Considered purchases with a research step — software, professional services, equipment, clinics. Assistants are already part of that shortlist.
• Categories where comparison queries dominate — “best X for Y”, “X vs Y”, “alternatives to X”. These are the query shapes assistants answer best and the ones where being unnamed costs most.
• Brands whose pricing is not on their own site. You are handing the answer to whoever published a number.

And who should not, yet: impulse and walk-in trade, where reviews and a correct business listing do more for you than anything on this page — though note that those listings are also what the assistants read when they are asked.

Common questions