SEO vs. AEO: Where are SEO and AI Visibility Similar and Different?

AI Search vs. Traditional SEO

Traditional SEO focused on keywords, getting your pages to rank and for overall site traffic to grow. You’d need to make your site ‘stronger’ through backlinks, and you’d need to have good technical foundations and a lot of content on your site.

SEO practices also primarily focused on Google.

While Google is still the main source of search traffic, consumers are quickly changing their search behavior. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Claude, Copilot and AI Mode are all new ways that consumers find information about your brand and can even sign up or interact with your brand.

AI search works differently because instead of leading you to 10 blue links where you would have to continue your own research, AI search seeks to fully answer your question. To do that, it needs to pull information from around the web to formulate an answer. So, it looks at your website, but it also looks at other third-party sources, called brand mentions.

AEO vs. SEO

Don’t sacrifice SEO for AEO

It can be tempting to make a bunch of changes to your website to perform better in the answer engines.

This should be done with caution, and every change to the website should be weighed against potential SEO risk and potential traffic impact.

Here are some things to look out for:

• Cannibalization
• Over-optimization
• Duplicate content
• Spammy backlinks

To explain these simply:

Cannibalization: Where you have two pages or sections competing for the same keywords, sometimes you can make it so neither of them rank

Over-optimization: You can get an over-optimization penalty from Google. Think things like ‘keyword-stuffing,’ which come into play now with optimizing for AI because optimizing too much can make it look like you are trying to manipulate the search engines. Put what’s needed on your site, but you don’t need to say everything 100 times for the AI engines to find it.

Duplicate content: If you see in a prompt tracker that a certain piece of content is being cited, you might be tempted to add that verbiage all over your site in multiple places to ‘show up better.’ This will create duplicate content issues and result in the pages getting filtered out of Google’s index.

Spammy backlinks: Just like with traditional SEO, you don’t want to seek out spammy backlinks or brand mentions just to pump up the volume. At best, these will get filtered out, and at worst, you can receive a penalty. You want to make sure the sites you get links from are relevant to your brand, and not some sort of link farm or private blog network.

When you look at some of the prompt tracking software, you might see that the prompt you are looking to show up for is pulling information from the owned websites of competitors. The instinct will be to add supporting content for the prompt somewhere on your website.

Here’s a couple of issues with this:

1. You may already have that content on your website, and the answer engine just can’t find it.
2. Your site might not have enough supporting evidence off-site to show up in the answer even if you add the content to your site.

Work on your off-site evidence

Just like with traditional SEO, you’ll need to work on your brand off-site to increase your brand’s authority. With SEO, this meant backlinks, which increased your site’s authority or strength. Sites with more authority could rank higher and show up for more keywords.

With AEO, this means increasing your brand’s authority. This means you need more mentions throughout the web of what your brand does, who it serves, how it’s used and more.

Just like with backlinks, some of these mentions will come naturally over time. But if you are looking for growth, you’ll need to do some of this promotion. There are simply too many brands for each one to get enough natural off-site promotion without you engaging in this process.

Contact us for an analysis into how we can increase your off-site brand mentions and get your brand served as the answer to your desired consumers.