The honest answer is that AEO is about eighty percent SEO. Answer engines retrieve from search indexes, so everything that gets you ranked still gets you considered. The remaining twenty percent is real, though, and it changes how you write and what you measure.
What stays the same
Crawlability, site speed, clean titles, sitemaps, internal linking, and content that genuinely answers the query: all of it carries over unchanged, because retrieval starts with ordinary search. A site with technical SEO problems has AEO problems by definition. If you have to choose where to spend the next month, fixing crawl issues beats rewriting headings.
What changes in writing
- The unit shrinks. SEO optimizes pages; AEO optimizes passages. Each section must answer its heading's question in the first sentence and survive being quoted alone.
- Questions replace keywords. People type fragments into Google and full questions into ChatGPT. Content organized as questions and direct answers matches how retrieval now happens.
- Commitment beats coverage. A page that takes a clear position gives the model something to quote. Hedged, exhaustive content reads as noise to an extractor.
What changes in operations
Two new decisions appear. First, crawler policy: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot each need explicit robots.txt consideration, covered in our ChatGPT guide. Second, measurement: rankings no longer tell the whole story, so you track citations and AI referrals as described in Measuring AI search traffic.
What stops mattering
Position two versus position five matters less when both pages are in the retrieval pool and the citation goes to whichever has the cleaner passage. Chasing marginal ranking gains on a page that already ranks is now usually worth less than restructuring that page's sections to be quotable.
Treat AEO as a writing and measurement layer on top of SEO you were already doing, not a replacement discipline. Start with the plain-English AEO guide if you want the full foundation.