AEO vs SEO: what's actually different, and why you need both
Search volume for this exact question has grown 140% in a year. Here's what AEO actually is, and what it means for a business getting found online.
SEO gets your website ranked in a list of links. AEO, answer engine optimisation, gets your business mentioned inside the actual answer an AI tool gives someone, whether that's a Google AI Overview, a ChatGPT response, or a Perplexity summary. The goal shifts from earning a click to earning a citation.
The overlap is real, a technically sound, fast, well-structured website still matters for both. But the specific things that move the needle are different. SEO rewards backlinks, keyword targeting, and content depth built up over time. AEO rewards clear, direct, factual answers to specific questions, consistent business information across every platform, and content structured so an AI system can lift a clean answer out of it without needing to interpret marketing language.
This is why a page written to persuade a human reader can perform worse in AI answers than a page written to simply state facts. AI systems extracting an answer favour a direct sentence like "we serve Yorkshire and the surrounding area" over a paragraph of brand voice that says the same thing in a more roundabout way.
Google Business Profile, structured data (schema markup), and third-party citations carry more weight in AEO than they historically did in pure SEO, because these are the sources AI systems pull from most reliably when assembling an answer about a local business. A profile that's incomplete or inconsistent isn't just a missed opportunity, it can mean an AI system skips your business entirely in favour of a competitor with cleaner data.
None of this replaces SEO, it sits alongside it. A business that only does one is leaving the other half of how people now find things on the table. The businesses adapting to this early have a real, if temporary, advantage, because most local competitors haven't touched any of it yet.
If you're only going to do one thing this month: check that your business name, address, phone number, and service list are word-for-word identical across your website, your Google Business Profile, and every directory you're listed on. That single fix affects both SEO and AEO at once.
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