AEO vs SEO: what carries over and what doesn't
Most of the search work you've done still helps when AI assistants answer your customers. A few old habits now work against you.
Published 24 August 2026
At a glance
- Most good SEO carries over, starting with a site crawlers can read.
- Pages built to hold the answer back until the click now work against you.
- Rankings won't show whether assistants name you. That needs a check of its own.
A fast site that crawlers can read, full of useful pages, is what an AI assistant wants to read too, so the SEO you've paid for mostly still earns its keep. The two part company over how a page treats its answer. Search writing often holds it back to win the click, and an assistant needs it up front.
What is the one-sentence difference between AEO and SEO?
A search result has to persuade someone to click through to your page. An AI answer works differently: the assistant reads your page itself and repeats what it found, if it found something worth repeating, and the reader may never visit.
So a lot of classic SEO writing holds something back. The headline opens a question, and the answer waits until the reader has scrolled past the intro. A page that wants to be quoted puts the answer early, in plain words, in a sentence that still makes sense when it's lifted out of the page.
Which of my SEO habits still carry over?
Most of them, more or less untouched.
Technical crawlability
If a search engine can't read your site, an AI assistant can't either. Clean HTML, working sitemaps, sensible canonicals and text rendered on the server all carry straight over. One addition: AI crawlers are separate user agents, and your robots file may cheerfully allow Google while blocking every one of them. It's the most common problem we find, and it usually takes five minutes to fix.
Useful content
Search already rewarded depth and expertise, and answers reward them harder, because a model writing about you needs something concrete to say. Vague pages could still rank on the strength of their links. An assistant writing a recommendation can't do anything with "we deliver tailored solutions".
Being talked about elsewhere
Links mattered for search, and they still do. Assistants care about something closer to corroboration: being described the same way in directories, press, partner sites and industry bodies. If several independent sites describe a business the same way, a model can repeat that description with some confidence.
What changes completely?
Some habits that won rankings now cost you. Here's how they line up against what tends to get a page cited.
| Habits that won rankings | Habits that win citations |
|---|---|
| Keyword-targeted pages, one per phrase | Question-shaped pages, one per real question |
| Headlines built to earn the click | Headlines that state the answer |
| The answer placed below the fold | The answer in the first paragraph |
| Position tracking as the core metric | Being named at all as the core metric |
| Thin pages to cover long-tail variations | Fewer, deeper, more specific pages |
| Content refreshed to keep dates current | Content updated because the facts changed |
Which traps catch people out?
- Writing for a click that won't happen. The "5 things: number 3 will surprise you" structure was built for a reader who scrolls. Bury the answer under a hook and an assistant may find nothing it can quote.
- Vagueness that used to be safe. "Solutions tailored to your needs" got away with it when people skimmed. A model deciding whether to recommend you has nothing to hold on to, so say what you do, for whom, where and at what scale.
- Counting the wrong thing. Your rankings can hold steady while you disappear from AI answers, because the two are recorded in different places and your rank tracker only sees one of them.
An article that properly answers a real buyer's question tends to do well in search too, which is why the overlap is so large.
If you want a first look before changing anything, take the question your best customer asked before they hired you. Put it to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google, and see whose names come back.
Frequently asked questions
Should I stop doing SEO and switch to AEO?
No. The technical groundwork is identical and most of the content work overlaps.
Will my search rankings tell me how I am doing in AI answers?
No. An answer that never mentions you leaves no impression to lose, so neither your rank tracker nor your analytics will show it. The only way to know is to ask the assistants your buyers' questions and record who they name, more than once, since the answers vary from one run to the next.
Does AEO require technical work my team cannot do?
Usually not. Past the robots file, most of it is writing: putting the answer first, and being specific about what you do and who for.
Is it worth writing more pages, or fewer better ones?
Fewer, and better. An answer usually names a handful of companies, so there's no long tail to farm.
Written by Olly Barrett
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