AEO vs SEO: what actually changes
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — gets talked about as though it replaces SEO. It does not. It sits alongside it, aimed at a different target: not where your page ranks, but whether your business gets named when someone asks an AI assistant a question.
Two acronyms, one shift
AEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation) all name the same discipline. Different people reached for different words at the same time; the underlying work is identical, and you'll see all three used more or less interchangeably. SEO optimises your position in a list of links. AEO optimises your presence in an answer — a short, synthesised response that names a handful of sources instead of ten. The goal isn't to rank; it's to be one of the small number of brands the assistant chooses to mention.
What stays the same
Most of what makes a page rank well is also what makes it citable. Engines still favour pages with good content, clear structure, and real authority behind them. Technical hygiene — a page that loads, that search engines can crawl, that says what it's about — still matters, because a page an engine can't crawl or parse is a page it can't cite either. In practice, generative engines tend to cite pages that would have ranked well anyway: the two lists of "pages worth trusting" overlap heavily. AEO is not a separate content strategy grafted on top of SEO; it's largely the same groundwork, read by a different kind of reader who is looking to extract an answer rather than present a list.
What changes
The differences show up in how the answer gets used, not in how the page gets built.
- Zero-click answers. The engine gives a complete answer inline. Many searchers never click through to any source at all.
- A small, fixed number of mentions. Instead of ten blue links, the answer names a small handful of brands. There is no page two.
- Sources beyond your own site carry more weight. Reviews, Reddit threads, press coverage and third-party comparisons often shape what the engine says about you as much as your own website does. A page you don't control can still be the reason you get named, or the reason a competitor does instead.
Ranking well used to be close to the whole job. Now it's the entry ticket — necessary, but not what decides whether you actually get mentioned.
How measurement changes
A ranking is a position you can check: search the term, see where you land, done. A mention only exists inside an answer, and the answer changes depending on exactly how the question was asked and when it was asked. There is no stable position to look up, and no single search tells you much on its own. Measuring AEO means asking engines the same questions repeatedly and sampling what comes back, then looking at the pattern rather than any individual response — tracking visibility and share of voice over time rather than a single checkable rank.
Do you need both?
Yes. AI Overviews sit on top of classic Google results rather than replacing them, and most people still click through to normal search for plenty of queries, particularly transactional ones. SEO keeps you visible in the results underneath; AEO is what determines whether you're also named in the answer above them. Dropping either one leaves a gap the other doesn't cover — see what GEO actually involves for the fuller picture of the work itself.