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

SEO helps your pages rank in search results and earn clicks. AEO helps AI assistants find your business, describe it correctly and cite it in their answers. AEO is built on SEO, and a local business needs both, in that order.

What is the difference between AEO and SEO?

SEO is about being listed, and chosen, on a results page. AEO is about being named and cited in an answer.

Most of the measurement row comes from the tools’ own documentation. Google says appearances in AI features are counted in the Search Console Performance report under the “Web” search type. Its generative AI performance reports add a separate view of impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates.

Bing’s AI Performance report, introduced in public preview in February 2026, shows total citations, average cited pages and the “grounding queries” the AI used when it retrieved your content.

Where does GEO fit in?

GEO, generative engine optimization, comes from a 2023 research paper that introduced it “to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses.”

Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Guidelines now define both terms. SEO “improves the technical quality, clarity, and accessibility of websites.” GEO “focuses on content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses.”

AEO and GEO name the same goal. For more on the terms, see What is AEO?

Do AI answers rely on the same signals as search?

For Google and Microsoft, largely yes, according to their own documentation. OpenAI sometimes uses search partners as well as its own crawler, and Perplexity and Anthropic run their own search crawlers.

• Google: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary,” per its AI features guide.
• Google Gemini: Google describes grounding in Gemini Apps as “providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time”.
• Microsoft: Copilot and similar experiences are “powered by Bing’s search index”, and Bing says they rely on “the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search.”
• OpenAI: ChatGPT search “sometimes partners with other search providers” and rewrites a question into one or more targeted search queries.

For Google and Microsoft, then, the pages and listings that serve you in search are also the raw material for their AI answers.

What is different about AEO?

1. There are more crawlers to let in. Each assistant documents its own: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, and Claude-SearchBot for Claude. Because a robots.txt rule can name a single crawler, a site can be open to Google and closed to ChatGPT search.
2. Answers are assembled from pieces. Microsoft says assistants like Copilot break content “into smaller, structured pieces that can be evaluated for authority and relevance.” Bing’s guidelines ask for content that is “easy to understand without external context.”
3. Clicks tell less of the story. Bing notes that content may appear as citations in Copilot without a click, and that “a decline in clicks does not always indicate a loss of visibility.”

Do you need both?

For a local business, AEO without SEO has little to stand on, because Google’s and Microsoft’s AI features draw on their search indexes. SEO without AEO can leave gaps: an AI crawler blocked by a hosting setting, opening hours shown only in an image, or a business name spelled three ways across listings.

Our recommendation is to do them in order. First the SEO foundation: indexed pages, a complete Business Profile, and a page for each service. Then the AEO checks in the AI visibility checklist.

Neither discipline comes with a guarantee. Bing’s guidelines say that “SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations.”

The work is in making your business easy to find and describe, then measuring what changes. The two services are described on the SEO and AEO pages.