What does SEO do?
SEO (search engine optimisation) works to get your site ranking highly for relevant searches on engines like Google, through technical foundations, speed, page structure, keywords and links from other sites. The goal is for people to click through from the results.
What does AEO do?
AEO aims for the answer to someone's question to come from your content: a featured snippet, a "People also ask" box, a voice assistant's reply or an AI summary. Even if the user doesn't click, you are the source.
The difference in three questions
- What's the goal? SEO: ranking and clicks. AEO: being the direct answer.
- How is the content written? In SEO, a page covers a topic in depth; in AEO, each section opens with a clear question and answers it straight away.
- How is success measured? SEO: rankings and traffic. AEO: how often you appear in featured results, question boxes and assistant answers.
Where does GEO fit in?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) carries the same logic over to generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude: making sure your brand is described accurately, and cited as a source, in their answers. Put simply, SEO is about being found, AEO about being the answer, and GEO about being recommended.
All three draw on clear, accurate, well-structured content; we cover what assistants base their recommendations on in a separate article.
How do you prepare content for AEO?
- Write the headline as a question your customers actually ask.
- Answer it directly in the first two or three sentences, then go into detail.
- Phrase subheadings as questions too, with short paragraphs beneath them.
- Use lists for steps and comparisons.
- Add frequently asked questions and mark them up with schema.org types (Article, FAQPage, Organization).
- Serve all of the text as HTML; text baked into an image is usually invisible to machines.
Which questions should you start with?
The questions your sales team hears in every meeting, the emails that reach customer service and the objections that recur at proposal stage make a good starting list; Google Search Console also shows which queries bring people to your site. We group these questions and write one clear answer to each in one place; different answers to the same question in different places leave both readers and machines unsure.
SEO or AEO first?
If your technical SEO foundation is weak, strengthen that first; a slow or uncrawlable page will neither rank nor become an answer. That's why we treat basic SEO as standard, on company sites and online stores alike.
If the foundation is solid, AEO starts by reshaping existing content into a question-and-answer structure. We can run our SEO, AEO and GEO services together or separately.