Chapter one of ten
The art of getting your brand recommended by LLMs to the right buyers when they ask about what you sell.
Buyers ask Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
By Maeva Cifuentes · Updated October 2026
You compete for a position
You compete to be named
The short answer
AEO is the art of getting your brand recommended by LLMs to the right buyers when they ask about what you sell. It is an internet-wide effort that builds on SEO and reaches into brand, PR and partnerships.
A buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode for the best tool for their situation. The engine replies with a short list of names and a reason for each. AEO is the work of being on that list, described accurately, for the buyers you want.
You will see it called AEO, GEO and AI search optimization. We use the terms interchangeably, because they describe the same work.
The engine builds its answer from what the whole internet says about you. Your own site is one voice in that. Review sites, comparison lists, communities, press and video are the others, which is why we call AEO an internet-wide effort.
Think of AEO as earning a recommendation. The question for your team is how often an engine names you when a buyer describes the problem you solve.
Start by asking the engines your buyers' questions and reading the replies. Note who gets named, how they are described, and which sources the engine leans on.
AEO runs on the web index, so the foundations of good SEO keep paying off.
LLM bots have to crawl and render your site. Heavy JavaScript and default bot blocks can shut them out.
Comparison pages, alternatives pages and "best X for Y" pages keep their value.
AI assistants cite fresher content than Google's organic results do. A 2025 Ahrefs study of about 17 million citations found the pages they cite are 25.7% fresher on average.
Relevant PR, podcasts, reviews, LinkedIn and YouTube all support visibility.
From The Search Spot
Share of pages cited by AI regularly, meaning 10 or more citations. Ranking was the strongest predictor measured, at a correlation of 0.81. Source The Search Spot study of 488 product pages from the Forbes Cloud 100. The result is a correlation across large software brands.
Keep funding SEO. AEO is built on top of it, and cutting the base weakens both.
Check that AI crawlers can reach your key pages before any content work begins. Chapter 4 walks through it.
The work looks familiar, and the scoreboard is new.
| In SEO | In AEO | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| The goal | Rankings and traffic | → | Recommendations and pipeline |
| What you study | Keywords | → | Prompts and the conversations around them |
| The page copy | Benefits and persuasion | → | Plain facts on what the product is, what it costs and who it suits |
| The off-site signal | Links | → | Consensus across the web, including unlinked mentions |
| The scoreboard | A position on a page | → | How often you get named, read as a direction |
From The Search Spot
Share of pages cited by AI regularly. The copy effect is modest next to ranking. Source The Search Spot study of 488 product pages. Both charts share one scale from 0 to 100%.
Expect a new report. Traffic becomes a weaker signal, since a buyer can build a shortlist inside the engine and arrive later through a direct visit.
Rewrite product pages to state the facts an engine needs to place you. Keep branded prompts in their own group, since they inflate the totals.
AEO is a company-wide effort. SEO sits at the center of it, because this is search, and the work is still on-page, technical and off-page.
The brand team and PR have to be doing their part too, through partnerships, earned media and everything else that gets people talking about you. It all plays together, and the companies that win treat it that way.
Give AEO a shared goal across marketing, and name one person who coordinates it. Brand and PR budgets belong in the plan alongside SEO.
Bring brand and PR a list of the sources engines cite in your category. It turns a vague ask into a target list.
Prompt tracking is directional. People talk to an answer engine conversationally, so you will never know the exact words your buyers used.
The tools run your set of prompts through the engines on a schedule, some through the consumer interface and some through the platforms' APIs, and report the share of answers that mention you. Think of the share of answers as a market share but on the internet, how LLMs see you. Chapter 8 covers how the tools collect the data.
Read each engine separately. They draw on very different sources, so one blended score can hide the engines where you are missing.
Source Growth Memo, The Consensus Gap, using Omnia data across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Segments share one scale from 0 to 100%.
Ask for the trend per engine across a fixed prompt set. A single headline score tells you little.
Fix the prompt set, keep the schedule steady, and compare like with like from month to month.
Self-check
The common misunderstandings about AEO are habits carried over from SEO. Tick the ones your team still has.
Eli Schwartz argues that brand should own and fund AEO, with SEO making the site readable. We agree brand has to be involved and keep SEO at the center.
Ethan Smith of Graphite treats AEO and GEO as the same thing and prefers the term AEO.
The Ahrefs course presents AEO as an evolution of SEO rather than a replacement for it, so the two run side by side.
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