Key facts
- SEO wins a position in a list. AEO wins a place inside the answer.
- Both depend on crawlable, helpful, well structured pages.
- AEO also depends on what other sites say about you, not only your own pages.
- AEO is measured by visibility, position, sentiment and citations in AI answers.
Side by side
- Goal. SEO: rank your page high in search results. AEO: be named, recommended or cited in the AI answer.
- Where it shows. SEO: Google and Bing results pages. AEO: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Unit of work. SEO: keywords and pages. AEO: questions and answers.
- What decides it. SEO: relevance, quality and links to your page. AEO: those, plus how clearly and often trusted sources describe your brand.
- How you measure it. SEO: rankings, clicks and traffic. AEO: share of answers naming you, position, sentiment, citations and AI referred traffic.
What stays the same
- Search engines and AI crawlers must be able to read your pages.
- Helpful, accurate, well organised content wins in both.
- Structured data makes facts clear to both.
- Authority built over time, through mentions and links, helps both.
What to do differently for AEO
- 1Start from the questions buyers ask AI, including long, conversational ones.
- 2Open each key page with a direct answer that can stand on its own.
- 3Work on the third party sources AI cites, such as review sites, lists and forums.
- 4Correct wrong facts about your brand wherever they appear.
- 5Track answers across several AI engines and markets, every week.
Put this into practice with Variask Content studio, Variask AI visibility and the free AI prompt idea generator. See Variask pricing or read the Variask FAQ.