AEO vs SEO: what is the difference, and do you need both?

What is the difference between AEO and SEO?

The difference is what each one competes for. SEO competes for a position on a results page, where a reader scans ten options and picks one. AEO competes for a mention inside one answer, where there is no list and no page two. A business is either part of that answer or invisible to that buyer.

That single distinction cascades into different work. SEO thinks in keywords, rankings and accumulated authority built over years. AEO thinks in questions, extractable answers and entities, which means whether a machine can lift a correct, attributable statement about you straight off the page.

Can a page rank well and still be invisible in AI answers?

Yes, and this is the part that surprises people who have invested in search for years. A page can sit at position one for a keyword and never appear in an AI answer, because it was never structured so an answer could be extracted from it.

There is a second, subtler failure beyond that. Semrush and the researcher Kevin Indig measured 3,981 domain appearances across four AI engines in June 2026 and found 61.7% were what they call ghost citations: the engine used the page as a source and linked to it, but never said the brand name in the answer the buyer actually read. Your content can be doing the work while a competitor gets the credit.

Where do the two overlap?

More than the contrast above suggests, which is why this is not a question of replacing one with the other. Both need a fast site that loads properly, content that can be crawled, and a business that looks trustworthy to a machine assessing it.

Anyone who tells you that AEO makes SEO obsolete is overselling. The foundations are shared, and a business with genuinely good SEO has already done a meaningful part of the groundwork without calling it that.

What does the work actually look like side by side?

The clearest way to see the difference is in what each one asks you to change.

• Page titles. SEO optimises them for a keyword and a click. AEO writes them as the question a buyer would actually ask, because that is what gets matched.
• Headings. SEO uses them for structure and keyword placement. AEO makes each one a question and answers it directly in the two or three sentences underneath, so the answer can be lifted whole.
• Authorship. SEO is largely indifferent to who wrote a page. AEO treats a named author with visible, relevant credentials as a trust signal, and anonymous corporate copy as a weaker one.
• Claims. SEO does not much care whether a statistic is sourced. AEO does, because a model weighing whether to repeat a claim is more willing when the claim traces to somewhere checkable.
• Timescale. SEO rewards authority accumulated over years. AEO rewards specificity and structure over a much shorter horizon, which cuts both ways: quicker to gain, quicker to lose.

Which should a UK business do first?

Start with whichever your buyers are actually using, and test rather than assume. Ask an AI assistant the question your ideal customer would ask, then search the same thing on Google. Compare what you see. If you are absent from the AI answer but present in search, you have found your gap, and the reverse is equally informative.

For most small and mid-sized businesses the honest answer is that the foundations serve both, so the first month of work is rarely wasted either way. The divergence comes later, in structured data, extractable copy and verifiable identity, which traditional search work rarely covers.