BisyriA client asked me last month: "We're already doing SEO. Do we need AEO too?" It's a fair question, and the answer matters more than most people realise.
SEO and AEO share some foundations but they are not the same discipline, they don't measure success the same way, and the tactics that move the needle for one often don't move it for the other. Understanding the difference is the first step to knowing where to invest.
What SEO Is Trying to Do
SEO optimises for a list. The goal is to rank as high as possible in Google's search results so that when someone searches for a relevant term, they see your site, click the link, and arrive on your page. Success is measured in rankings, organic traffic, and ultimately conversions from that traffic.
The levers are authority (links, domain trust), relevance (keyword targeting, content depth), and technical health (crawlability, Core Web Vitals, indexability). These are well-understood signals Google has published and tested over decades.
What AEO Is Trying to Do
AEO optimises to be cited. The goal is to become the source an AI engine quotes when synthesising an answer — whether that's a Google AI Overview at the top of a search page, a ChatGPT response, a Perplexity citation, or a Bing Copilot answer.
The user might never click your link. They read the AI's answer, which quotes you, with your name and URL attached. The success metric is citation frequency, brand recognition, and the quality of inbound leads who already know you're the authority because an AI told them so.
A Concrete Example
Take a small business offering accounting services in Manchester. Traditional SEO success: ranking on page one for "accountant Manchester", driving 200 visits per month from people clicking the result.
AEO success: when someone asks ChatGPT "how do I find a good accountant for my small business in Manchester?", ChatGPT cites this firm by name — their FAQ schema, their clearly stated entity (who they are, where they operate, what they specialise in), their structured content that directly answers the question.
The SEO result gets a click from someone actively looking. The AEO result gets a recommendation from an AI to someone asking for advice — a fundamentally different, often warmer, lead.
Where They Overlap
SEO authority feeds AEO, especially for Google AI Overviews. Google's AI citations heavily weight existing ranking signals — domain trust, backlinks, topical authority. A site with no SEO foundation will struggle to get AI citations from Google regardless of how well its schema is structured.
Content quality matters for both. Direct-answer writing, clear headings, well-structured paragraphs — these improve both readability scores (which correlate with rankings) and AI extractability (which determines citeability).
Technical health overlaps too. A site that's slow, poorly structured, or hard to crawl suffers on both dimensions.
Where They Diverge
Schema markup is almost entirely an AEO lever. Google's ranking algorithm is not materially moved by whether you have FAQPage or Organization JSON-LD. AI engines are heavily influenced by it.
AI crawler access (robots.txt) is purely an AEO factor. Whether GPTBot can read your site has zero effect on Google rankings.
llms.txt, entity clarity for AI cross-referencing, sameAs links — these are AEO specifics that don't appear in any traditional SEO playbook.
Conversely, anchor text distribution, internal linking depth, and Core Web Vitals are primarily SEO levers with limited direct AEO impact.
Which to Prioritise
The answer depends on where you are. If you have zero organic presence, SEO builds the foundation — and many AEO improvements (FAQ content, clear entity signals, technical health) improve SEO rankings as a side effect. Build them together from the start.
If you have reasonable SEO traction but no AI visibility, the AEO gap is likely schema, entity clarity, and crawler access. These are fast fixes relative to building SEO authority from scratch.
If you're choosing one: SEO for year one, AEO layered on from month three onwards.
Check Where You Stand
The free AEO Analyzer scores your site across 10 AEO-specific factors and tells you exactly what's missing. It takes 8 seconds and shows the specific fixes — a useful starting point before deciding where to invest next.