We are not an SEO company, but we find that our clients are increasingly asking us about this: AEO is not replacing SEO, it is building on top of it. If you are optimising for one and ignoring the other, you are being overtaken.
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines, Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, etc., can pull it directly into a synthesised answer rather than just linking to it [1]. Traditional SEO still works at the page level: titles, keywords, backlinks, getting a page to rank. AEO works closer to the fact level: clear definitions, citable statistics, and sections structured so an AI system can lift them out cleanly and attribute them back to you [2]. This matters because a large and growing share of searches now end without a single click, with AI-generated answers satisfying the query directly on the results page [3].
The practical takeaway is not to abandon your existing SEO work and chase AEO instead. It is to make sure your content is written in a way that both a search engine and an AI system can use: clear structure, direct answers near the top, facts stated plainly enough to be quoted. If your website content still reads like it was written purely to rank rather than to actually answer a question, that is the gap worth closing first.
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