AEO vs SEO: what is different, and what still works

SEO is aimed at a results page: you want your URL high in a list a person will scan. AEO is aimed at a sentence: you want your business name inside a short list of firms the assistant hands over. Counted from 5,174 AI answers stored in our database on 4 October 2026, the typical answer named 3 businesses.

The difference shows up in what success looks like. In SEO you have a position and a click, and a number in your analytics to argue about. In AEO you have a rate: named in X of 48 questions, with no click and no trace of the buyers who asked and never saw you.

No, and the reason is mechanical. Assistants read the web to answer questions about local businesses. Perplexity and ChatGPT cite their sources, and those sources are ordinary web pages: your site, directory listings, roundup articles, forum threads. Work that makes those pages findable and clear still counts.

What has changed is that ranking is no longer the finish line. A page can rank third for your service and still be absent from the answer, because the assistant needed a page that answered the specific question and yours answered a different one.

Treat SEO as the floor rather than the ceiling. A site nobody can crawl, with no pages on the topics you sell, will not be named by an assistant either.

Most of the groundwork is shared, so years of SEO work is not wasted here.

• A crawlable site with a clear structure, titles that say what each page is about, and your city on the page.
• A complete Google Business Profile with recent reviews.
• Listings on the directories your industry uses, with consistent details across them.
• Pages that answer real buyer questions rather than pages built around a keyword.
• Mentions on sites other than your own: roundups, local press, chamber pages, forum threads.

Four things make AEO its own job rather than a rebrand of your SEO retainer.

• An assistant assembles an answer from several sources, so we weight being confirmed on sites you do not own above one strong page you do.
• Four audiences, not one. On 4 October 2026, across 16,428 cases where a business was named for a question all four assistants had been asked, only one of the four had named it 91% of the time. All four agreed 0.3% of the time.
• Machine-readable extras matter: FAQ and LocalBusiness structured data, an llms.txt file at your site root, and robots.txt rules that allow AI crawlers rather than blocking them.
• Measurement is different work. There is no rank tracker. You have to ask the assistants the questions buyers ask, repeatedly, and count how often your name appears.

You need to know where you stand, which is a smaller commitment than a second retainer. Ranking well and being named are not the same thing, and the only way to see the gap is to measure both.

The two outcomes come from different signals. Ranking rewards one strong page against a query; a recommendation rewards a business several independent sources agree on, and the assistant is reading listings, roundups and forum threads alongside your site. Nothing says a firm that does the first well has done the second. In Richardson, TX on 7 September 2026 we tracked 375 accounting firms by name and only 152 were named even once by any of the four assistants.

Check before you decide. If you are already named in a fair share of the 48 questions, your existing work is carrying you and the job is to hold it. If you are at zero, the fixes are specific and several of them sit outside a standard SEO scope.

Keep the SEO work and bolt on the parts that assistants reward. None of this competes with ranking, and most of it helps both.

• Read the citations in AI answers for your city and claim your entry on every site that appears.
• Rewrite service pages so each one answers the question a buyer asks, with the answer in the first two sentences.
• Add FAQ and LocalBusiness structured data, and publish an llms.txt file at your site root.
• Check robots.txt for blocked AI user agents, and claim Bing Places, since ChatGPT's web search draws on Bing's index.
• Get into the best-in-city roundups and be present in the forum threads where people ask for names.
• Report on mentions in AI answers alongside rankings, so the two sit side by side every month.

Count mentions over time, across many questions and all four assistants. Answers vary between runs, so the trend across several checks is the only honest read on whether a change helped.

A free check from AI Mention Score counts your name across 48 buyer questions in all four assistants, so AI mentions can sit next to your rankings in the same monthly report. Starter at $29 a month checks weekly and unlocks the full fix plan. Pro at $49 a month adds up to 5 pages a month written for the questions you are losing, structured data and llms.txt, 3 competitors side by side, up to 10 of your own questions, listing checks, and a monthly PDF.