What is the difference between AEO and SEO?

The outcome is different

SEO succeeds when your link appears high enough to be clicked. Success is a position, and there is a second page for the also-rans.

AEO succeeds when the engine names you in a paragraph that recommends two or three businesses. There is no second page. You are in the answer or you are absent from the decision entirely.

What carries over

A great deal, which is why AEO is an extension rather than a replacement.

• •Crawlability and clean site structure
• •Accurate, consistent business information
• •Genuine subject-matter depth
• •Page speed and technical health
• •Third-party corroboration - the same signal SEO calls authority

What is genuinely new

The additions are all about being machine-quotable rather than merely findable.

• •llms.txt - a curated factual map written for language models
• •Answer-first page structure - the complete answer in the first two sentences
• •Extensive JSON-LD - Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, DefinedTerm
• •AI crawler access management in robots.txt
• •Entity consistency across your site and every major listing platform
• •Share of voice measurement instead of keyword rank

The metric changes too

Keyword rank does not exist in an answer engine, so it cannot be your KPI. The equivalent is share of voice: across the buyer questions that matter, what percentage of answers name you versus each competitor.

That is a harder number to game and a more honest one. It maps directly to how often you enter a buyer consideration set.

Should you stop doing SEO

No. Classic search still drives a large share of traffic, and most SEO fundamentals are also AEO inputs. The mistake is assuming SEO alone gets you into AI answers - it does not, because it never had to produce machine-readable facts or answer-shaped content.