SEO is the practice of being findable. AEO is the practice of being recommended. Those sound similar and they are not, and the gap between them is where most B2B marketing budgets are currently being wasted.
Here is the distinction that matters. In classic search, the engine hands the user a list and steps back. The user does the evaluating. In an answer engine, the machine has already done the evaluating before the user sees anything. It has read the sources, formed a view, and is now telling the user what to do.
You cannot optimise your way into that view by editing your own homepage, because your homepage is not evidence. It is a claim.
The comparison, without the hand-waving
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| The question being answered | Which pages match this query? | What should this person actually do? |
| What the engine returns | A ranked list of sources | A synthesised recommendation with citations |
| What you are competing for | A slot in the list | Inclusion in the recommendation |
| Strongest signal | Links from relevant, trusted domains | Repeated, independent, positive third-party mentions |
| Weakest signal | Your own marketing copy | Your own marketing copy, even more so |
| Where the work happens | Largely on your site | Largely off your site |
| Failure mode | You rank on page three | You are simply not mentioned |
| Recovery time | Slow but predictable | Faster, but requires other people to change their minds |
Why your own content matters less than you want it to
Every vendor claims to be the best option for their category. An answer engine trained on the open web has seen millions of those claims and has learned exactly how much they are worth, which is close to nothing.
What it has not learned to discount is a stranger with no commercial interest saying "we moved to X last year and here is specifically what got better and what got worse". That sentence carries information. Your landing page does not.
Answer engines weight sources roughly in proportion to how costly it would be for that source to be wrong. A vendor claiming to be good pays no price for exaggerating. A practitioner recommending a tool to peers who will remember, does.
This is why community platforms, independent review sites and editorial coverage carry disproportionate weight, and why a page you wrote about yourself carries so little. It is not a bias against you. It is a reasonable inference about reliability.
What AEO actually requires that SEO does not
A presence in conversations you do not control
The uncomfortable centre of AEO is that the highest-value work happens on platforms where you have no editorial control, where self-promotion is often against the rules, and where getting it wrong is publicly humiliating.
Done properly this looks like: aged accounts with genuine posting history, weeks of contributing value before mentioning anything commercial, disclosure where the community requires it, and a willingness to say "we would not be a good fit for that" when it is true. Done improperly it looks like a brand getting screenshotted and dragged, which is a far worse outcome than being invisible.
Honest comparison content, published by you
If a buyer asks a model "X versus Y, which should I pick", the model needs comparative material. If you have never published any, it will use whatever exists, which is usually your competitor’s comparison page or an affiliate round-up ranked by commission.
Publishing a genuinely fair comparison, including the cases where you lose, is the single most underused AEO tactic in B2B. It feels like surrendering ground. It is actually the only way to get your framing into the answer at all.
Entity clarity
A model needs to know what you are before it can decide whether you fit. That means consistent naming across the web, schema that declares your organisation and what it does, a clear category self-description, and no ambiguity with similarly named companies. This is unglamorous plumbing and it gates everything else.
See how the models describe you today
Thirty prompts across baseline perception, category capture, head to head, objection surfacing and source tracing. Run them yourself, in your own account, and find out what your buyers are being told.
Get the prompt packWhere SEO and AEO reinforce each other
They are not alternatives, and treating them as a budget trade-off is the most expensive mistake available here.
- Links improve citation odds. A domain with genuine authority is a domain models have more reason to trust when they encounter it.
- Community threads rank in Google. A useful answer in a well-trafficked community frequently ends up ranking for the commercial query itself, which means the AEO work produces SEO results directly.
- Ranking content becomes source material. Pages that already rank are pages retrieval systems are more likely to fetch. Your best-performing SEO asset is often your most-cited AEO asset.
- One research process feeds both. The questions your buyers ask a model are the same questions they type into Google. The prompt set and the keyword list converge.
How to tell which one you are behind on
Run this diagnostic honestly. It takes twenty minutes.
- Search your main commercial keyword in Google. Are you on page one? That is your SEO position.
- Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the same question phrased as a human would ask a knowledgeable friend. Are you named? That is your AEO position.
- If you rank and are not named, your problem is consensus. You have authority and no advocates.
- If you are named and do not rank, your problem is classic SEO. You have advocates and no technical foundation.
- If neither, start with the foundations. AEO built on a site models cannot crawl is money set on fire.
- If both, your problem is a nicer one: defending a position rather than earning it.
A note on the acronyms
AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO. The industry has not settled on a name and probably will not for another year. The distinctions people draw between them are mostly marketing, with one exception worth knowing: GEO tends to be used for generated answers specifically, while AEO is sometimes used more broadly to include featured snippets, People Also Ask and voice results, which predate language models by years.
Do not spend time on the taxonomy. Spend it on whether your name comes up when a buyer asks for a recommendation.
Related reading: GEO vs SEO goes deeper on generative engines specifically, and the AEO Readiness Scorecard will tell you which of the four pillars is holding you back.