AEO isn't SEO with a new logo. It's just the next algorithm change.

So what is AEO, really?

Answer Engine Optimisation is making your content the thing an answer engine reaches for when someone asks a question. Think of the answer that sits right at the top of Google now, or the reply ChatGPT gives before you have clicked anything. AEO is earning your place inside that answer.

Its close cousin is GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, which is the same idea aimed at the generative tools specifically, the ChatGPTs and Perplexitys of the world. People love drawing hard lines between the two. Honestly, the line is a convention, not a law. The job is the same: be the answer, not a link near it.

Is AEO actually different from SEO?

Here is my honest answer, and it is not the fashionable one. It is not different. It is an evolution.

There is a whole industry talking about AEO and GEO as if they are brand-new concepts, as if you have to rip up everything you have ever done and stop thinking in any of the old ways. I disagree entirely.

SEO has been changing constantly for twenty years. Every time Google shipped a big algorithm update, everyone had to redo something: the back end, the schema, how content was structured on the page, which citations you needed and from whom, where you shared your information to get the best results. AEO needs exactly the same things. It is just the next one of those.

"AEO isn't a new religion. It's the next big algorithm change, the same kind SEO has been living through for twenty years."

The fundamentals have not moved. Structure your content properly. Build hubs of genuine expertise. Earn citations back to your content and your brand. All still true. They have just got more specific, and there are new places that matter.

Then what has actually changed?

A few things, and they are worth doing well.

Answer up front. Put a real answer at the top of every page and post, a TL;DR or a summary an engine can lift cleanly and use. If your answer is buried in paragraph nine, you have made yourself hard to quote.

Quotes. Give the machines quotable lines, clearly attributed. There is now actual evidence for this: a Princeton study found that adding expert quotations, statistics and citations to sources lifted content's visibility in AI answers by up to 40%, while keyword-stuffing did nothing at all. The old tricks are dead. Real substance wins.

FAQs. Answer the specific, commonly asked questions plainly. Answer engines love an FAQ, because when someone asks a narrow question about your service, the engine can pull the exact answer and lean on the rest of the page for context.

More sources, spoken more broadly. It is not just about backlinks anymore. AI engines lean heavily on places like Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, and for B2B, the likes of G2. Where you show up off your own site now matters more than it did.

One honest caveat, because the internet is full of confident advice that has not aged well: llms.txt, the file everyone insisted you needed, has largely turned out to be decoration. A large study found almost none of them ever get requested. So do not lose sleep over it. Do the fundamentals instead.

How do you know if you have an AEO problem?

Run the uncomfortable test. Open ChatGPT, ask it the question a buyer would ask to find someone like you, and see who it names. If it is not you, that is your gap. It is a very different feeling from checking your Google ranking, because you cannot see it not happening. Nobody sends you a report saying "you weren't mentioned today".

And this matters more every month. By 2026 the majority of Google searches end without a click at all, and AI Overviews now appear on a big share of results. The list of ten blue links is quietly becoming the thing nobody scrolls to.

Where do you start?

Where you always did. Sharpen your content structure, answer real questions properly, put the answer first, get quoted and cited, and show up consistently in the places that feed the engines. It is the next stage of SEO, not the end of it. Same stuff, mostly. Just a new place the answer gets read. If you would rather someone ran it with you, no lock-in and you own everything, request a quote.