AEO vs SEO: what's the difference?
SEO aims to rank your pages in search results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) aims to get your business named inside the answer an AI assistant writes. They share foundations — crawlable pages, clear content, trust — but AEO measures mentions in answers, not positions in a list of links.
What they share
Both need pages crawlers can fetch, accurate structured data, helpful content written for people, and signals that a real business stands behind it.
What's different in AEO
The result is a sentence, not a link. You win by being the business the answer names — so clear one-line descriptions, direct answers to buyer questions and mentions on cited third-party pages matter more.
Measurement changes too: track how often and where you're named across assistants for a fixed set of buyer questions.
Where to start
Run a free check to see what AI says about you today, fix readability first (crawlers, llms.txt, schema), then publish answer pages for the questions you're losing.
Sources
See what ChatGPT says about your business
Run a free check