MyClawn AI Search Audit › AEO vs SEO
AEO vs SEO: the differences that matter for a business website
Answer engine optimization (AEO) and SEO overlap far more than most articles admit. Here is the honest split: what is the same, what is different, and what a business should do first.
The short answer
SEO earns a ranked position and the click. AEO earns a mention or citation inside an AI answer. But the mechanics are shared: answer engines cite pages they can crawl and retrieve, and Google says its SEO best practices remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no extra requirements. GEO (generative engine optimization) is a third name for the same idea; Wikipedia treats AEO as an alternate name for GEO.
Side by side
| SEO | AEO / GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page and earn the click | Be named or cited in the generated answer |
| Who reads the page first | A person scanning results | A system extracting a fact or a passage |
| What wins | Relevance, authority, a page that satisfies the search | The same, plus a clear, self-contained answer that can be quoted |
| Crawlers that matter | Googlebot, Bingbot | The same, plus OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and others |
| How you measure | Rankings, impressions, clicks | Whether you appear for buyer questions, citations, AI referral visits in analytics |
| Special files | robots.txt, sitemap | Same; llms.txt is a proposal with no confirmed use by major assistants |
Paste your website. Starter $39/mo · Pro $129/mo. Refund within 14 days if it misses.
Audit my siteWhere AEO really is different
- Separate crawlers. A site can rank in Google and still be invisible in ChatGPT search. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Many sites block AI bots wholesale, often through a CDN or firewall setting, without realizing it also blocks the search crawlers.
- Answer-first writing. A page that states the answer in its first two or three sentences is easier to quote than one that builds up to it.
- Questions, not keywords. Buyers ask assistants full questions ("who does commercial HVAC maintenance for restaurants in Austin"), so you test questions, not single keywords.
- Mentions elsewhere. For "best X" questions, answers lean on the lists, directories and forums that rank for them. Your own page is only part of it.
Where it is the same
Indexable pages, accurate titles, one clear topic per page, facts a reader can check, structured data that matches the visible page, and pages that load their main text without JavaScript. If your SEO basics are broken, AEO work on top of them is wasted.
What to do first: a priority list
- Check robots.txt and your firewall for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot and Googlebot. Minutes of work, and a hard blocker if wrong. See AI crawlers and robots.txt.
- Rewrite the first screen of your home and service pages to state what you sell, where, for whom and at what price range.
- List 15 to 20 questions your buyers ask and search each one. Note who shows up instead of you.
- Write one answer page for each of the two most valuable questions where you are missing.
- Add JSON-LD that matches what the page says, and an FAQ block with real answers.
- Re-test the same questions next month.
That list is exactly what our monthly audit does, with the fixes written out for you to paste.
How we know AEO is worth a few hours
Why we built this: we run our own software products and measure, in our own analytics, where signups come from. Over 34 days, visitors arriving from ChatGPT produced 46 signups on one product, 27 on a second and 15 on a third; Gemini sent 11. ChatGPT visitors converted from visit to signup at about 31% (internal analytics, November 2026). That is a small channel next to Google, but it converts, and we wanted the same checks for every site we run. This audit is those checks, written up for your site.
Questions
Should I stop doing SEO and switch to AEO?
No. AEO depends on SEO; answer engines cite pages they can find through search.
What is the difference between GEO and AEO?
Mostly the name. Both describe getting your content into AI-generated answers.
Can I measure AEO results?
Partly. You can test fixed questions in search monthly and watch referral visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini in your analytics. Individual assistant answers vary each time.
Paste your website. Starter $39/mo · Pro $129/mo. Refund within 14 days if it misses.
Audit my siteMore about AI Search Audit
Sources (checked 2026-11-09): developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization · developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots