What’s the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO (search engine optimisation) helps your website rank in Google’s list of results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) helps AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews understand your business and quote it in their answers. Both need clear pages and accurate business details, but AEO depends more on direct answers to questions, FAQs and structured data.
What SEO is
SEO is the work that helps your pages appear when someone types a search into Google: clear page titles and descriptions, a page for each service and town you cover, fast pages that work on a phone, and links from other trusted sites.
What AEO is
AEO is newer. More people now ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling through results, and the assistant gives one answer, often naming one or two businesses. AEO is the work that makes yours one of them: direct answers to real questions, facts that match everywhere, prices, reviews and structured data that describes your business.
Where they overlap
Most of the groundwork is the same. A clear headline, a page per service, accurate contact details and good reviews help with both. That’s why our Snapshots check SEO, AEO and conversion together: a visitor who finds you through either still has to choose you.
Which should a small business fix first?
Start with whatever is broken or missing on your own site: contradictory facts, missing prices, no FAQ, buttons that don’t work. Those hurt you in Google, in AI answers and with visitors all at once. Then build pages for the services and places you cover.