What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
AI & Answer Engines — answered straight, by an operator who builds these systems rather than an agency selling them.
SEO earns a ranking position so someone clicks through to your site. AEO earns a citation inside an answer someone reads without clicking anything. The underlying work overlaps heavily — same crawlability, same authority, same accurate business data — but AEO adds structure, directness, and schema aimed at extraction.
The longer version
They are not competing budgets. Nearly everything that makes a page rank also makes it citable, and answer engines lean on search indexes to find candidate sources in the first place. A site with no search visibility is rarely cited by an assistant, because the assistant never encountered it.
What changes is the writing. SEO tolerates a page that builds to its point; AEO rewards a page that leads with it. The practical fix is putting a direct two-sentence answer at the top of every page, then expanding underneath — which also happens to be what human readers on phones prefer.
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