AEO

AEO vs SEO: What's the Difference and Do You Need Both?

Quick answer

SEO and AEO both make your business easier to find, but they are judged by different systems and reward different things. SEO earns you a high position in a list of search results a person then scans and clicks. AEO earns you a direct, name-checked mention inside an AI answer, from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews, where there is no list to scan, just a name.

Most Australian small businesses need both, not one instead of the other. SEO still drives the bulk of clicks, page views and phone calls that come from search today. AEO decides whether an AI assistant recommends you by name when a customer asks it a question in plain English instead of typing a search term into Google. Around 70 people a month in Australia search the exact phrase "aeo vs seo", which tells you this confusion is common enough to be worth clearing up properly.

What is the actual difference between AEO and SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the work of ranking higher in a search engine's results page for a given query, so a human sees your listing among several others and chooses to click it. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the work of being the specific business an AI system names when it answers a question in natural language, with no list of alternatives shown alongside it.

In practice the two disciplines share a lot of raw material, a fast and crawlable site, content that genuinely answers what people are asking, and trust signals like reviews and consistent business details. But they are scored differently. A page can sit at position three in Google and never once get quoted by ChatGPT. A business can be named by an AI answer engine without ranking on page one of Google for the matching term. Treating AEO as "SEO but for AI" and assuming good SEO automatically produces good AEO is the single most common mistake we see small businesses make.

What does SEO actually optimise for?

SEO optimises for relevance and authority signals a search engine's ranking algorithm can measure, so your page climbs as high as possible in a results list that a human then scans before clicking. Three groups of signals matter most.

• Technical health. A site that loads fast, works on mobile, and lets Google's crawler read every important page without errors.
• Content relevance. Pages that match what people actually type, using the real words and phrases customers search, not just the words your business prefers internally.
• Trust and authority. Other reputable sites linking to you, reviews, and a Google Business Profile with consistent, accurate details.

A tool like Ubersuggest is useful here because it shows you the real search volume and difficulty behind a keyword, rather than a guess. That is how we know "aeo vs seo" gets meaningfully more searches in Australia than most businesses assume, and why it is worth a dedicated page rather than a paragraph buried in a services page.

What does AEO actually optimise for?

AEO optimises for extractability and trust, the qualities that let an AI model lift a clear, self-contained answer from your content and feel confident enough to attach your business name to it, instead of giving a generic, brand-free response.

The signals that matter most for AEO are different in emphasis, even where they overlap with SEO basics.

• Direct answers. Content that states the answer to a specific question in the first sentence or two, then expands. AI models favour pages that do not bury the answer under three paragraphs of preamble.
• Structured data. FAQ schema, Article schema and clear headings that mark up your content so a machine can parse it without guessing at meaning.
• Consistency across the web. Your business name, services, location and claims need to say the same thing everywhere, your website, directories, Google Business Profile and social profiles. Contradictions make AI models hedge and stay generic rather than naming you.
• Being cited elsewhere. Mentions and links from other reputable sites act as a trust signal that tells the model your business is real, notable and worth naming.

This is also where an llms.txt file earns its place, a simple, plain-text summary of who you are and what you offer, placed where AI crawlers can find it, so the model has a clean, unambiguous source instead of having to infer facts from marketing copy.

How do AEO and SEO actually compare, side by side?

The table below is the fastest way to see where the two disciplines overlap and where they genuinely diverge. Use it to check whether a tactic you are already running is actually pulling its weight for both, or only one.

Do you need to choose between SEO and AEO, or can you skip straight to AEO?

No, you do not need to choose, and no, you cannot skip straight to AEO. AEO builds on top of the same foundation SEO needs, a real, crawlable, trustworthy website, so trying to do AEO without that foundation gives an AI model nothing solid to cite.

Think of it as sequencing rather than substitution. A business with a slow, thin, inconsistent website will struggle to get named by an AI assistant no matter how well-crafted its FAQ schema is, because the model has no reason to trust what it finds. Get the SEO basics right first, a fast site, clear service pages, consistent Google Business Profile, then layer AEO-specific work on top, direct answers, FAQ schema, and consistency across every place your business is mentioned online.

What actually happens when someone asks an AI assistant instead of Googling it?

When someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of searching Google, the model does not return a ranked list, it returns a short, confident answer and usually names one to three businesses at most. That is a fundamentally different competitive dynamic to a search results page with ten spots.

On a traditional search results page, being third or fourth still gets you seen and clicked. Inside an AI answer, there is no equivalent of position four, either you are named or you are invisible, replaced by a generic response with no brand attached. This is why AEO is often described as winner-take-most rather than winner-take-all: a small number of businesses get named repeatedly across many related queries, because the model has learned to trust their information, while everyone else gets left out of the answer entirely.

How should you measure success for SEO versus AEO?

You measure SEO with rankings, organic traffic and click-through rate, all numbers you can pull from Google Search Console or an analytics dashboard. AEO does not yet have an equivalent dashboard, because AI platforms generally do not publish who they named or how often, so measuring it takes a more manual, ongoing approach.

For AEO, the most reliable method right now is direct testing: write down the real questions your customers ask, run them through ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every few weeks, and track whether your business gets named, how it is described, and whether that description is accurate. Pair this with referral traffic, most analytics platforms will now show visits arriving from chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai or similar, a growing signal even while it is still a small share of total traffic for most small businesses. Watching both together, rankings for SEO and manual prompt testing for AEO, gives a fuller picture than either one alone.

What's a realistic 90-day plan that covers both SEO and AEO?

A realistic plan treats SEO and AEO as parallel tracks that reinforce each other rather than sequential projects. The table below breaks a 90-day window into the priorities that matter for each discipline at each stage.

Running this consistently is easier with a workflow system behind it rather than doing it ad hoc, which is where a platform like GoHighLevel tends to help agencies and busy business owners keep publishing and follow-up on track.

What mistakes commonly hurt both SEO and AEO at the same time?

The mistakes that hurt SEO and AEO together are almost always about inconsistency and vagueness, not a lack of effort. Fixing them tends to move both metrics at once.

• Inconsistent business details. A different phone number or address on your website versus your Google Business Profile confuses both search rankings and AI trust signals.
• No real FAQ content. Generic "About Us" copy with no direct answers gives neither a search engine nor an AI model anything specific to latch onto.
• Keyword stuffing. Repeating a phrase unnaturally reads as spam to search algorithms and produces awkward, unquotable sentences an AI model will not lift.
• Ignoring reviews. Reviews are a trust signal for both rankings and AI confidence in naming you, leaving them unmanaged wastes a dual-purpose asset.
• Slow or broken pages. If a crawler cannot read the page cleanly, neither Google's ranking algorithm nor an AI model's retrieval system can use it, regardless of how good the writing is.
• Missing structured data. Skipping schema markup means you are relying on a machine to correctly infer meaning from prose, when you could have told it directly.

How does Intrigue Digital approach SEO and AEO together?

We treat SEO and AEO as one connected system rather than two separate services, because in practice fixing the same handful of underlying issues, consistency, clarity and structure, moves both at once. Our process starts with the SEO foundation, technical health, real keyword targeting and a Google Business Profile that matches everywhere else your business is listed.

From there we layer in AEO-specific work: direct-answer content, FAQ schema, and consistency checks across every place an AI model might encounter your business online. We work one brand per industry per postcode, so the visibility we build for a client is not being split with a direct competitor we also represent in the same area.

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