SEO competes for a position on a page of links and is decided by your pages; AEO competes for a name in a written answer and is decided mostly by other people's pages. The technical work carries over almost whole. The off-site work, being on the review sites, roundups and threads the engines read, is new, and it is most of the job.
The one-line version
SEO gets your page onto a list of ten. AEO gets your company into a sentence. The engines that write the sentence read a few pages to write it, and the work is being on those pages and being readable when they fetch yours.
Side by side
| SEO | AEO / AI visibility | |
|---|---|---|
| The unit | A ranked page of ten links | One answer naming three to six companies |
| What decides it | Links, content, technical signals, across the web | The handful of pages the engine reads for that question |
| Where you are | Position 1 to 10, or not on the page | Named or not; first or fourth; cited or not |
| Your own pages | Rank them | Make them readable and quotable; the engine may cite them |
| Third-party pages | Earn links from them | Be named on them; the engine quotes them |
| Measurement | Rankings, impressions, clicks | Share of answers, position in the list, citations |
| Time to move | Months | Days for your own site; weeks to months for the sources |
What carries over
Most of technical SEO carries over unchanged, and matters more, because an engine that cannot fetch your page cannot quote it: crawlable pages, a sitemap, canonical URLs, titles that say what the page is, structured data that says what the company is. Being written about carries over too: the review profiles and comparison articles that earned links are the pages the engines read.
What does not carry over is the idea of a ranking to climb. There is no position eleven in an answer. You are in it or you are not, and if you are, your position among four names is what a buyer sees.
What is new
Three things. The sources are fewer and more specific: for a given buyer question, an engine might read six pages, and being on two of them is the whole game. Citations are visible: Perplexity and AI Overviews show which pages they used, so you can see exactly whose page decided the answer. And your own pages can be quoted directly: a clear comparison page on your site can be the source for 'A vs B', which no ranking ever gave you.
How to measure each
SEO: Search Console, rank trackers, analytics. AEO: ask the questions and record the answers. There is no console for it; the measurement is the answers themselves, which is why our score is built from recorded answers and nothing else. Run the free check on your site and you have your first AEO measurement in three minutes, next to whatever your SEO tools say.
Questions people ask about this
Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
Half of it is. Crawlable pages, clear titles, structured data and being written about were SEO's job too. The other half is new: the unit is an answer, not a results page; being third in a six-name answer is a result, being eleventh on Google was not; and the sources that decide are a smaller, more specific set.
Which should I do first?
If you sell to buyers who research, both, but measure them separately. A company can rank on page one for its category and be absent from every AI answer about it, because the answer was built from a review site it is not on.
Is GEO different from AEO?
The names are interchangeable in practice. Generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation both mean being named and cited in AI-generated answers. We say AI visibility, because that is the thing measured.
Will AI answers replace search?
For research questions ('which tools should I look at'), for many buyers, they already have. For navigational and transactional searches, no. The report only measures the research questions, which are the ones where a shortlist is formed.
Your first AEO measurement, in three minutes
Which buyer questions name you, which name a competitor instead, and which sources decided it.