Is AEO just SEO with a new name?

Partly, and some of what is sold as AEO is repackaged SEO. The genuinely different parts are real though: optimising for passage extraction rather than page ranking, entity consistency across the web, and structuring content so a model can quote it accurately. The overlap is large but not total.

How do I measure whether AEO is working?

Imperfectly, and honesty about that matters. The practical methods are systematic manual prompt testing against a fixed question set, tracking referral traffic from AI platforms in Analytics, monitoring branded search volume, and watching whether your content is being cited when you check. Nobody has clean attribution yet.

Does llms.txt actually do anything?

It is a proposed convention, not a ratified standard, and adoption across model providers is uneven. It costs very little to implement and keep current, so it is worth doing, but it is not a ranking mechanism and anyone presenting it as one is overstating it.

Should I block AI crawlers?

Only if you have a specific reason, such as licensed content you do not want ingested. For most businesses, blocking them removes any chance of being cited, which is the opposite of what you want. Decide deliberately in robots.txt rather than leaving it to a default.

SEO vs AEO: Do You Need Both?

The short answer

You need both, and they are not separate programmes. AEO is a shift in emphasis within SEO rather than a replacement for it: the same crawlable (authoritative site is the foundation), but content structure, entity consistency and schema carry far more weight, while link volume carries somewhat less. If you are doing SEO properly you are already most of the way there. If you are doing SEO by publishing keyword-stuffed blog posts, neither will work.

What is the difference between SEO and AEO?

SEO optimises to rank a page in a list of links, where the user then clicks through to your site. AEO (answer engine optimisation, also called generative engine optimisation) optimises to be the source an AI system cites when it composes an answer directly, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or similar. In SEO you compete for a position. In AEO you compete to be quoted.

There is a great deal of noise in this area right now, much of it from people selling certainty they do not have. So here is our honest position: the shift is real, the tactics are largely knowable, and the measurement is immature. Anyone offering you guaranteed AI citations, or precise attribution of revenue to answer engines, is overselling.

What is genuinely happening is that a growing share of research-stage queries now resolve inside a generated answer rather than a click. That does not remove the value of being the cited source. It changes it. You get less traffic per query and more influence per citation, and the queries that still produce clicks skew toward transactional intent.

Side by side

Where each one wins

The considerations that actually change the decision, rather than a feature list.

Consideration	SEO	AEO
Competing for	A ranked position in a list	Being the source quoted inside a generated answer
Primary unit	The page	The passage. Models extract sections, not whole documents
Content structure	Matters. Helps users and crawlers	Matters enormously. Question headings and direct answers get extracted
Schema and structured data	Enables rich results. Modest ranking effect	Materially improves how models parse and attribute your content
Links	Still a major authority signal	Less direct weight, but source authority still influences selection
Entity consistency	Helpful	Critical. Inconsistent name, address or positioning fragments your identity
Freshness	Matters in some categories	Matters more. Models favour current, dated, maintained sources
Measurement	Mature. Rankings, impressions, clicks, Search Console	Immature. Manual prompt testing, referral traffic, brand mention tracking
Traffic effect	Clicks to your site	Often no click. Influence without a visit
What breaks it	Thin content, technical debt, no authority	Prose with no structure. Claims with no specifics. Blocking AI crawlers

Deciding

Which one is yours

SEO

Classic SEO still carries the weight when

Your queries are transactional and local, people still click for "dentist near me"
You depend on Google Business Profile and map pack visibility
Your category is served by product and comparison pages rather than explanations
You are competing for terms where the result is a list of options, not an answer

AEO

AEO deserves more weight when

Your customers research extensively before buying and ask explanatory questions
Your category is technical, professional or advisory, where people ask an assistant first
You have genuine expertise nobody else has written down in structured form
You are early in a category and want to be the entity models associate with it
Your traffic from informational queries has fallen while rankings held steady

What to actually do

The work overlaps more than the framing suggests. Fix the technical foundation once, crawlability, speed, clean site architecture, and it serves both. Then adjust how you write and mark up: lead every page with a direct answer to the question in its title, use question-shaped headings, keep entity details identical everywhere they appear, and deploy accurate schema. Publish an llms.txt file, allow the AI crawlers you want citing you, and keep content dated and maintained. None of this is exotic and none of it damages classic SEO. The genuine addition is the discipline of answering first and structuring for extraction, which most sites do not do.

Our take

What we would actually do

Treat AEO as an emphasis within your SEO programme, not a separate line item, and be sceptical of anyone selling it as one. The technical and content foundation is shared; what changes is that structure and entity clarity move up the priority list and pure link volume moves down. The condition that changes the calculation: if your traffic is mostly transactional and local, the shift affects you less and you should keep investing in Google Business Profile and local SEO. The condition that raises the urgency: if you sell something people research by asking questions, being absent from generated answers is already costing you consideration you will never see in an analytics report.

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FAQ

Questions that follow this one

Partly, and some of what is sold as AEO is repackaged SEO. The genuinely different parts are real though: optimising for passage extraction rather than page ranking, entity consistency across the web, and structuring content so a model can quote it accurately. The overlap is large but not total.
Imperfectly, and honesty about that matters. The practical methods are systematic manual prompt testing against a fixed question set, tracking referral traffic from AI platforms in Analytics, monitoring branded search volume, and watching whether your content is being cited when you check. Nobody has clean attribution yet.
It is a proposed convention, not a ratified standard, and adoption across model providers is uneven. It costs very little to implement and keep current, so it is worth doing, but it is not a ranking mechanism and anyone presenting it as one is overstating it.
Only if you have a specific reason, such as licensed content you do not want ingested. For most businesses, blocking them removes any chance of being cited, which is the opposite of what you want. Decide deliberately in robots.txt rather than leaving it to a default.

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