AEO vs SEO

Crawlability, page speed, clean information architecture, accurate structured data and genuine subject depth all matter exactly as much as before. Assistants retrieve from the indexed web; a page search engines cannot reach is a page an assistant cannot cite.

If your technical SEO is in order, most of your AEO foundation is already built. The gap is usually measurement and source strategy, not infrastructure.

Three things change in a way that affects day-to-day work.

• Keywords become prompts. A keyword is a fragment typed into a box; a prompt is a whole question carrying constraints. The constraints decide which brands get named, so they cannot be stripped out.
• Ten slots become two or three. Ranking fourth on a results page still earns clicks. Being fourth in an answer usually earns nothing, because readers act on the first recommendation or two.
• Third-party sources carry more weight. An answer about your category is frequently assembled from review sites, community threads and documentation rather than vendor pages — so what those sources say about you matters more than what you say about yourself.

It is entirely normal to rank well and be invisible in answers, or the reverse. Ranking is about your page; being named is about the sources an engine trusts to summarise your category.

That disagreement is the useful signal. A page that ranks but is never cited usually means the engine found the answer somewhere else — and that somewhere else is where the work is.