AEO vs SEO
AEO vs SEO: same foundation, different finish line.
AEO is not a replacement for SEO and anyone selling it that way is overreaching. It is a second surface with its own requirements sitting on the same technical base.
See where you stand on both
No account needed. We fetch your homepage, robots.txt and sitemap and score how ready your site is for AI search. This measures readiness, not rankings. How we measure
What stays the same
Crawlability, indexability, site speed, clean HTML, internal linking, genuine subject expertise and third-party authority. If your SEO fundamentals are broken, your AEO is broken.
What changes
The unit of success and therefore the shape of the page:
- SEO optimizes for a ranked link; AEO optimizes for an extracted, attributed answer.
- SEO tolerates long preamble; AEO needs the answer in the first two sentences.
- SEO measures position and clicks; AEO measures mentions, citations and share of voice in answers.
- SEO crawler rules are about Googlebot and Bingbot; AEO adds GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
- SEO can live on brand copy; AEO needs checkable facts an assistant is willing to repeat.
How to sequence the work
Fix technical health, then structure the pages for extraction, then build the entity and authority signals that make an assistant comfortable naming you. Re-audit after each stage so you know which change moved the score.
Questions we get
Will AEO work hurt our rankings?
No. Clearer structure, valid schema and factual answers are the same things classic search rewards.
Next steps
Start with the free readiness audit above. When you want a human-reviewed diagnosis or help completing the fixes, there is a step for that too.