What is the difference between SEO and AEO?

Two goals, one foundation

SEO measures success by rankings and clicks. AEO measures it by whether your content becomes the answer: quoted in a featured snippet, summarised in an AI Overview or cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Both depend on the same things. Your site must be crawlable and indexed, your content must be relevant and trustworthy, and search systems must understand who you are. If your SEO basics are broken, AEO has nothing to stand on.

Where AEO asks for something extra

• Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first sentence or two under a question-style heading, then expand.
• Self-contained passages. Each section should make sense if lifted out on its own.
• Entity clarity. Consistent facts about your business across the web, supported by structured data.
• Citations as a metric. Tracking whether AI tools mention or link to you, not just where you rank.

You may also hear GEO, generative engine optimization. The terms overlap and people use them loosely.

Which to prioritise

For most small businesses, there’s no real choice to make. The work that makes a page rank well, answering a real question clearly with trustworthy detail, is also what gets it cited.

Where they differ is mostly in writing habits and measurement. If your pages are vague brochure copy, rewriting them to answer specific questions helps both. If you already rank well but AI tools never mention you, look at consistency across listings and third-party mentions.

I don’t sell SEO and AEO as separate things, because the work is mostly the same. When I write a page, the heading is the question, the first line is the answer, and the rest is the evidence. The technical side, prerendered HTML, schema and a clean sitemap, serves both.

What I do add for AEO is testing. I check how AI tools describe the business and which sources they lean on, and I fix gaps there.