How is AEO different from SEO?

The fundamental difference

Classic SEO optimises a page to rank in a list of links on a search results page. The user sees the result, clicks through, and lands on your site. Success is measured in clicks, rankings, and impressions.

AEO optimises a page (and the wider site) to be quoted inside an AI-generated answer. The user sees the answer in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overviews — often with your business named and your URL linked, but without necessarily clicking through. Success is measured in citation rate, in mentions of your brand, and in the qualified traffic that does click through.

What’s the same

The technical foundations overlap heavily:

• Page speed. Both classic and AI engines deprioritise slow sites. AI engines particularly so, because they’re spending tokens to retrieve and parse your content.
• Crawlability. Both need clean HTML, sensible URL structure, working internal links, and no rendering tricks that hide content from bots.
• Schema.org coverage. Both engines use structured data to understand your pages. AEO weights this even more heavily than SEO does.
• Authority and trust. Both reward sites with real authorship, external citations, and a track record of accuracy. Both penalise spammy or low-quality content.
• Content quality. Both reward content that genuinely answers user intent. Neither rewards keyword stuffing or thin content.

If you’re doing modern SEO well, you’re already 60% of the way to AEO.

What’s different

Content style

SEO content optimises for relevance to a query and clarity to a human skimming a search result. It often leads with context-setting paragraphs (“In this article we’ll explore…”) before getting to the answer.

AEO content leads with the answer, immediately. Each H2 is phrased as a real question. The first paragraph after each H2 is a direct, citable answer in 50–100 words. Supporting detail follows. Paragraphs are short and self-contained so an LLM can quote one without losing meaning. Bullet points are used sparingly because they don’t quote as cleanly.

Schema priorities

SEO benefits from schema but most ranking signals come from links, content, and engagement. AEO is much more schema-dependent. Specifically, FAQPage, Article with explicit Person author, Organization or LocalBusiness, and Service with Offer pricing all matter substantially more for AEO than for SEO.

The Person schema for authors is probably the single biggest schema delta. Google can rank an article without knowing who wrote it. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity actively use authorship signals to decide whether to cite a source.

File-level conventions

SEO has sitemap.xml and robots.txt. AEO adds llms.txt (a markdown summary of your site for LLM consumption) and llms-full.txt (the full content dump). It also requires robots.txt to explicitly allow AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot) which many sites accidentally block.

Measurement

SEO success is measured via Google Search Console: impressions, clicks, ranking positions, average click-through rate. The data is rich, automated, and tightly coupled to outcomes.

AEO measurement is harder. Citations are tracked manually — pick a set of target queries, run them weekly across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, screenshot the answers, log which sources are named. Tools to automate this are emerging (HubSpot, Profound, AthenaHQ, others) but none are yet definitive. Most professional AEO work still uses manual tracking augmented by tools.

How they work together

The honest answer: AEO and SEO should be done together. AI search engines pull heavily from Google’s index, so a site that ranks well in classic Google is overwhelmingly more likely to be cited by AI engines. Conversely, AEO-optimised content (question-led structure, FAQPage schema, llms.txt, strong authorship) tends to lift classic search rankings as a side effect.

Doing them separately means doing them twice, badly. Doing them together — in the same content, with the same schema, on the same fast and crawlable site — is faster, cheaper, and more durable as both classic search and AI search continue to evolve.

When AEO matters more than SEO

For most businesses, AEO and SEO matter roughly equally — but for some, AEO is now the more important investment:

• B2B businesses with technical buyers. B2B technical buyers increasingly start research with ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Being cited there matters more than ranking #5 in Google.
• Service businesses where buyers ask “how” questions. “How do I…”, “What’s the best way to…”, and “Should I…” queries get answered by AI engines more often than by Google links.
• Categories where Google AI Overviews are dominant. Some queries (medical, legal, financial, technical how-to) are increasingly answered above-the-fold by AI Overviews. SEO traffic in these categories is shrinking; AEO citations are rising.

If you’re in one of these, weight AEO accordingly.