One question comes up more than any other right now: should a business stop doing SEO and start doing AEO? Our answer is no, and also a little bit yes. The work overlaps far more than the acronyms suggest. But a few things genuinely change when the reader is a system that summarizes you instead of a person who clicks through.
What we mean by an answer engine
An answer engine is anything that responds to a question with a written answer rather than a list of links. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT with search turned on, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and the assistants built into phones and browsers all qualify. Most of them still retrieve pages from a web index, pick out passages, and compose a reply. Some cite their sources clearly. Some barely do.
That retrieval step is the part people skip over. If your page isn't crawlable, indexed, and judged relevant to the question, nothing that happens afterwards can rescue it. That's why ordinary technical SEO is the floor for AEO, not a separate discipline.
What carries over unchanged
- Crawling and indexing. Blocked resources, broken canonicals, and pages buried six clicks deep hurt you in both worlds.
- Topical depth. Sites that cover a subject thoroughly, with internal links tying it together, get retrieved more often.
- Links and mentions. Being referenced by reputable sites still signals that you're worth citing. If anything, being named on trusted sites seems to matter more when the goal is appearing in a generated answer.
- Page experience. A slow page buried under pop-ups is a poor candidate for anything.
What actually changes
Answers have to be easy to lift
A generated response pulls a sentence or a short passage. If your answer to "how long does a kitchen remodel take" is spread across four paragraphs of warm-up, the system has to work harder to use you, and it usually picks someone else. We now write the direct answer first, in one or two plain sentences, and put the nuance after it.
Questions become the unit of planning
Keyword research still matters, but we spend more time mapping the follow-up questions a person asks after the first one. Answer engines are conversational. A page that anticipates the second and third question tends to keep getting pulled in as the conversation goes on.
Who you are matters as much as what you wrote
Answer engines lean on knowing what your business is, where it operates, and what it's known for. Consistent business details across your site, your Google Business Profile, directories, and social profiles help them connect the dots. So does structured data that describes your organization, services, and authors accurately.
Specifics beat summaries
A page that restates what everyone else says gives a model nothing new to cite. Original numbers, real process details, price ranges, local knowledge: these earn a mention, because the model can't get them anywhere else.
Measurement gets messier
Clicks from AI answers are hard to isolate, and many answers produce no click at all. We track a fixed set of target questions, note whether a client is cited or named, and watch branded search and direct traffic for the lift that often follows. It's imperfect. Anyone promising a clean AEO dashboard is overselling.
Things we'd skip
Some tactics are being pushed hard with very little evidence behind them: stuffing pages with FAQ blocks nobody reads, rewriting every page into bullet lists, publishing hundreds of near-identical "what is X" pages to catch every phrasing, and paying for spots in "best of" lists on sites that exist only to sell those spots. They might move a number for a while. They're also the kind of thing search engines eventually discount, and they make your site worse for the people who do arrive.
Files like llms.txt sit in a gray area. They're cheap to add and probably harmless, but so far there's no strong sign the major answer engines rely on them. We'll add one if a client wants it. We don't sell it as a strategy.
A practical place to start
If you want a feel for where you stand, try this:
- Write down ten questions your best customers ask before they hire someone like you.
- Ask them in two or three answer engines, and note who gets cited or named.
- Read the pages that do get cited. How quickly do they answer? What do they include that yours don't?
- Rewrite your most relevant page so the answer comes first, the details are specific, and it links to related pages on your site.
- Check again in a few weeks. Answers shift often, so look for a trend rather than a single result.
That exercise won't make you an AEO specialist, but it will tell you more about your position than most audits do. If you'd like us to run it properly, across more questions and more engines, get in touch.