Answer engine optimization (AEO) is quickly taking over SEO as the top way to get your company, brand, and solutions in front of your B2B prospects.
An AEO agency solves different problems than an SEO agency. In this post, I’ll answer some common questions, like:
- What’s the difference between an AEO agency and an SEO agency?
- What problems does AEO solve?
- How is AEO different from other AI marketing approaches?
Table of Contents
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
First, though, let’s start with a definition of AEO: answer engine optimization, at its most basic, is the practice area of getting your company, brand, and products selected as part of an answer by an answer engine (ChatGPT, Bing, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, etc). As an example, if you’re Apple, you want the iPhone to come up prominent when someone asks ChatGPT, “What is the best phone to buy?”
What’s the difference between an AEO agency and an SEO agency?
An AEO agency helps a company, like Apple in the previous example, show up for that LLM search. I’ve got a longer post on KPIs, but in a nutshell, an AEO agency would usually focus on:
- Presence: How frequently your company/brands/solutions show up on answer engines.
- Citations: How often those answer engines/LLMs link to your website.
- Rankings: When you show up in answer engines, where do you rank? For example, it’s great for the iPhone to show up in a “what is the best phone to buy” query, but it doesn’t have much benefit if they’re listed below the Samsung Galaxy and other competitors.
- Traffic: How much traffic you get from LLMs.
SEO agencies are built to help your company rank on search engines, usually with a heavy emphasis on Google. SEO KPIs include keyword rankings and visibility, featured snippets on Google, search engine ranking page (SERP), and others.
These are all useful. You want your company to show up well on Google, Bing, and others. And search engines, while they’re being slowly displaced by LLMs/answer engines, aren’t going anywhere. But even though there is certainly overlap with the techniques of SEO and AEO/GEO, it isn’t the same thing. And the techniques for doing well on search versus AEO are widening every day.
What problems does AEO solve?
Compared to SEO, AEO solves a lot of business challenges:
- Want to show up on AI answers? SEO can’t help you. AEO is the way.
- Are your content and website AI friendly? SEO as a discipline doesn’t look at this at all. An AEO agency will help here.
- AI engines aren’t suggesting your solutions? Don’t ask an SEO agency for help, this is the domain of AEO.
- Looking to measure how your company/solutions are showing up on LLMs? SEO agencies will help you identify how you’re doing on Google and Bing, but if you want to know how your company measures up on Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, or other LLMs you need to work with an AEO agency.
What is AEO vs GEO vs generative SEO?
Terms like AEO, GEO, generative AI SEO, AI search, and many others get thrown around a lot. For the most part, these are interchangeable. Part of the reason is that this space is new enough that the industry hasn’t settled on just one term that works for the discipline (in the way that it has for SEO, which has been around since the mid-nineties).
My guess is that we’ll settle on “GEO” as the term (which, fun fact: I was the original creator of the Wikipedia page on GEO). But it’s far from settled. For the purposes of how On Marketing helps companies, we have the end goal of making sure you show up on AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, CoPilot, and all the rest.