What AEO actually is, and why SEO alone won't save you
Answer Engine Optimisation is not a rebrand of SEO. It is a different surface, a different ranking, and a different unit of traffic. Here is how to think about it.
For twenty years the goal was a blue link near the top of a page of ten. The buyer scanned, clicked, and landed on your site. AEO breaks that loop. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best tool in your category, the model returns a short answer naming two or three brands and a handful of sources. There is no page of ten. There is a paragraph, and you are either in it or you are not.
The unit of traffic changed
In search, the unit was a click. In answer engines, the unit is a mention. A model can recommend you, summarise you, and send a buyer to a decision without ever sending a click you can see in analytics. That is the part most teams miss: you can lose the sale and never see the loss, because the visit never happened.
Why SEO habits transfer only halfway
Some of it carries over. Clear pages, real answers, and structured data still help, because models read the same web crawlers index. But three things are new.
- Ranking is per-answer, not per-keyword. The same brand can be named for one prompt and invisible for the next.
- Sources matter as much as your own site. Models lean on third-party pages, so being cited elsewhere is leverage you do not get from on-page SEO alone.
- There is no rank tracker for a sentence. You have to actually run the prompts and read what comes back.
If your client is not in the shortlist, they are not losing rank. They are absent from the conversation entirely.
Where to start
Pick the ten questions a buyer asks before they choose. Run them through the engines your buyers actually use. Log who gets named, who gets cited, and where you are missing. That baseline is the whole job. Everything after it is closing the gaps you found.