AEO vs SEO in 2026: a practical comparison

If you’re running a marketing team in 2026, you’re probably hearing two acronyms in the same sentence and being told they’re both critical: SEO and AEO. The framing is usually that AEO is the new SEO, or that SEO is dead and AEO has replaced it, or that they’re basically the same thing with a different label. None of those is quite right. They’re overlapping disciplines that reward different signals, and the practical answer is that you need both, but you don’t need to do them as two separate workstreams.

This guide is the comparison we wished existed when we started building Casa’s [AEO platform](/seo). We’ll walk through what each discipline actually is, where the strategies converge, where they sharply diverge, and how to allocate effort across them without burning your team out.

**What SEO optimises for**

Traditional Search Engine Optimisation is, at its core, the practice of getting your pages to appear high on a search engine results page (SERP) when users type queries. The dominant playbook for the last fifteen years has revolved around four pillars: technical health (fast loads, clean HTML, mobile responsiveness), content depth (comprehensive answers to query intent), backlinks (authority signals from other domains), and on-page optimisation (title tags, headings, internal linking, schema markup).

Success in SEO is measurable in concrete ways: keyword rankings, organic traffic, click-through rates, and ultimately conversions. The mechanisms are well understood after two decades of research. Google’s algorithm rewards content that satisfies user intent, and competitive industries have built entire content engines around this fact.

**What AEO optimises for**

Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of getting your brand cited, mentioned, or recommended inside AI-generated answers. The "engines" in question are tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT (especially with web search and ChatGPT Search), Claude, Google’s AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. Instead of producing a list of blue links, these tools synthesise an answer and embed citations directly in it.

Success in AEO looks different. There’s no equivalent of Google Search Console giving you impression counts from Perplexity. The metric that matters is something more like share of voice across AI answers in your category — when a user asks an LLM about your industry, how often does your brand appear, and how prominently?

The signals that drive AEO performance overlap meaningfully with SEO but add new layers. LLMs draw on:

- Structured content that’s easy to extract — FAQs, comparison tables, definition lists, numbered steps - Schema markup that makes content relationships explicit (FAQPage, Product, Article, HowTo) - Third-party mentions and reviews on authoritative domains - E-E-A-T signals — visible authorship, expert credentials, citations, recency - Direct, declarative answers near the top of the page rather than buried in narrative

**Where they overlap**

The good news is that 60-70% of the work overlaps. Specifically:

- High-quality long-form content that answers user questions completely benefits both - Technical SEO foundations (fast site, clean HTML, no render-blocking issues) help both - Schema markup helps both, though AEO weights it more heavily - Backlinks help both, though AEO weights citation graphs differently - Internal linking that creates topical clusters helps both - Recency — fresh content updated regularly — helps both, with AEO more sensitive to staleness

If you’re doing modern SEO well, you’ve already done most of the work for AEO.

**Where they diverge**

The differences are real and consequential.

*Click-through optimisation.* In SEO, a compelling title tag and meta description are pure ROI — they directly drive CTR from the SERP. In AEO, those same fields matter less because the user often never clicks through. The "click" happens inside the AI tool. You’re optimising for being mentioned, not for being clicked.

*Content structure.* AEO heavily rewards content that an LLM can extract a clean sentence from. A 2,000-word essay full of beautifully crafted prose may rank well in Google but lose AEO ground to a competitor’s 500-word page that uses bold headings, a clear definition in the first paragraph, and a structured table comparing options.

*Brand-mention signals.* SEO weights backlinks (how many sites link to you). AEO weights citations and unstructured mentions (how often is your brand named in authoritative sources, even without a hyperlink). Press coverage in industry publications, podcast mentions, mentions in research reports, and reviews on platforms like G2 or Capterra all feed AEO.

*Specificity of language.* LLMs are very literal about category framing. If you call your product an "all-in-one productivity suite," and the LLM is searching for "project management software for remote teams," you may not surface even if you’d be the right answer. SEO is more forgiving here because Google has decades of intent-mapping baked in.

*Update frequency.* AEO benefits from frequent content updates more than SEO. LLMs train on snapshots and re-train periodically, but they also use real-time web search for grounded answers. Frequently updated pages signal recency and relevance.

**How to allocate effort**

Most teams should think about AEO not as a parallel discipline but as a layer on top of SEO. The split that works for most B2B and DTC businesses we’ve worked with at Casa:

- 50% of effort: shared technical and content foundations (this serves both) - 25% of effort: AEO-specific work (schema, structured content, third-party presence, brand-mention monitoring) - 25% of effort: SEO-specific work (link building, on-page CTR optimisation, query-specific landing pages)

That ratio shifts based on where you’re starting. If you’ve been doing serious SEO for years, you can move closer to 70-30 in favour of AEO. If you’re starting from scratch, do 60-40 in favour of SEO foundations — a strong SEO base accelerates everything.

**Tooling**

The tooling landscape for AEO is much less mature than SEO’s. SEO has decades of platforms — Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Search Console. AEO has a handful of younger tools, of which Casa’s [AEO audit](/seo/aeo) is one. The right starting move is to run your top three landing pages through an AEO audit, identify the structural and schema gaps, fix the highest-impact two or three, and re-audit in a month.

For ongoing tracking, monitor your brand mentions across the major LLMs weekly. Casa’s [SEO platform](/seo) tracks this across Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews — but if you’re building it yourself, even a simple weekly Google Sheet tracking 10 representative prompts and counting mentions will give you a baseline.

**The bottom line**

AEO is not the new SEO. It’s an additional surface area on top of the search infrastructure you already invest in. The teams that treat it as a fresh discipline that requires throwing out their SEO playbook waste a lot of effort relearning fundamentals. The teams that treat it as identical to SEO miss the structural and brand-mention wins that AI search rewards.

The right mental model: SEO gets you discovered through links, AEO gets you cited within answers. They share infrastructure but reward different optimisations on top of it. Plan for both.