AEO vs SEO: What Actually Changes?

AEO vs SEO is mostly a false choice. Answer engine optimisation is SEO with more attention on two things: passages that an AI system can quote directly, and the crawlers that feed AI products other than Google. Everything else — being indexed, being relevant, being trusted, being useful — is shared. Google's own AI optimisation guide says that optimising for generative AI search is still SEO, and I agree with it.

That does not mean nothing changes. Here is what does, what does not, and what that means for how you spend money. For the definition of AEO itself, the existing guide to what AEO is covers it; for the whole picture, see the AI search optimisation guide.

AEO vs SEO side by side

What stays exactly the same

Indexing. Google's AI features use its Search index; a page has to be indexed and snippet-eligible to appear. ChatGPT and Perplexity search before answering. An unindexed page is invisible to all of them.

Relevance and intent. A page has to be the right kind of answer for the question. Search intent decides this in AI answers as much as in rankings.

Quality. Google's guidance for AI features asks for the same thing as its guidance for Search: original, helpful, people-first content.

Authority and trust. AI systems choose between sources. Sites with a track record on a topic, consistent facts and real reviews are better candidates. That is the same signal set SEO has always worked on.

What genuinely changes

1. The passage matters more than the page

A ranking rewards a page. An AI answer usually uses a passage — a paragraph, a list, a table row. So a page that is strong overall but never states its answer cleanly can lose to a weaker page that does. The fix is not to fragment content; Google explicitly says chunking is unnecessary. It is to make sure each section states its point plainly near its start. How to structure content for AI answers covers how.

2. More crawlers to think about

SEO has historically meant Googlebot and Bingbot. AEO adds the search crawlers run by OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic, each with its own robots.txt token. Blocking them by accident is the most common technical AEO failure, and it is invisible unless you look. How to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity has the checks.

3. Specificity is worth more

When ten pages say the same thing, an AI summary can cite any of them, or none. The research behind generative engine optimisation found that adding real quotations, statistics and source citations made content more visible in its tests. Generic copy was always weak; in AI answers it is close to useless.

4. Measurement is different and patchier

A ranking is a number you can track. An AI citation varies by user, wording and day. At the time of writing (October 2026), Google's generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions by page but no clicks or queries, and Bing's AI Performance report shows citations for Copilot. You will be working from samples and trends, not positions.

5. Clicks are less certain

If an AI answer resolves a simple question, fewer people need to visit. That changes which content is worth writing. Simple definitional pages may earn citations but few visits. Pages that help with decisions — costs, comparisons, how to choose — still give people a reason to click through.

What used to be AEO and no longer applies

Some AEO advice is out of date. Featured-snippet era tactics leaned heavily on FAQ schema; Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, and it says no special structured data is needed for its AI features. Writing pages as stacks of question-and-answer pairs for the sake of it is also unnecessary — Google says its systems understand pages covering several sub-topics.

Clear answers to real questions are still good practice. Markup used as a shortcut to AI visibility is not supported by anything Google has published.

Known vs claimed: the AEO advice you will hear

What changes on the page: a before and after

Take a hypothetical heading and paragraph from a web designer's pricing page.

Before: "Investment. Every project is unique, and we tailor our pricing to your specific needs and goals. Get in touch for a no-obligation chat."

That reads acceptably to a person who has already decided to enquire. For SEO it targets nothing. For AEO there is nothing to extract.

After: "How much does a small business website cost? Most of our five-to-ten page business sites fall within a set price band, with the final figure driven by the number of page templates, whether you supply the copy, and any integrations such as booking or payments. The table below shows what each band includes."

The second version targets a real search, states its answer first, and names the factors. On a real page the band would be the designer's actual prices. That single change serves SEO and AEO at once — which is the argument of this whole article.

Do you need a separate AEO service?

My view: no, not as a separate retainer. A worked example shows why.

Say a small accountancy firm pays one provider for SEO and another for AEO. The SEO provider rewrites service pages to target "accountant in Maidstone". The AEO provider rewrites the same pages into question-and-answer format. Both edit the same headings, argue about the same structured data, and report different metrics for the same pages. The firm pays twice for one job done inconsistently.

What to ask your existing SEO provider instead:

1. Have you checked robots.txt and our firewall for AI search crawlers?
2. Are we indexed in Bing as well as Google?
3. Which of our pages show in the Search Console generative AI report?
4. Do our key pages state their answers clearly in the first paragraph of each section?
5. Is our business information consistent across our site, Business Profile and directories?

If they cannot answer, that tells you something about the SEO too. How much SEO costs in the UK covers what a sensible engagement looks like.

Next step

Take one important service page and read only the first sentence under each heading. If those sentences alone would not tell a stranger what you do, what it costs and who it is for, that page needs work for SEO and AEO alike. The SEO service treats them as one job.