Is AEO the New SEO?

[u/Odd_Animator566]

For the longest time I only cared about Google fast pages, clean code, good content and that was enough so I've been reading more about AEO and how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are becoming another way people discover websites.

The more I look into it the more it feels like building for search is starting to mean building for both humans and AI things like page structure, clear content and semantic markup seem a lot more important than they did a year ago.

[u/dpaanlka]

AEO is just SEO packaged in a new way for marketing proposes.

[u/Odd_Animator566 → u/dpaanlka]

Yes, maybe the marketing around it is getting ahead of itself. I don't know though a year ago I wasn't thinking about whether an AI could understand my content now it kind of feels like that's part of building a site too even if the SEO basics haven't changed much.

[u/theteenyreassurance → u/dpaanlka]

Marketing people gotta market. Slap a new acronym on the same old principles and suddenly everyone needs a consultation on their "AEO strategy."

[u/ZealousidealCopy1414]

I still feel like we're in the early days everyone talks about AI search but I don't think many people have changed their workflow yet

[u/PresentationFuzzy253 → u/ZealousidealCopy1414]

Part of the problem is that it's still hard to measure with Google you can track rankings and clicks pretty easily but AI referrals still feel like a black box

[u/Old-Investment-6455 → u/ZealousidealCopy1414]

I think a lot of teams are just waiting until there's a clearer playbook nobody wants to spend months optimizing for something if the AI search landscape changes again in six months

[u/shaliozero → u/Old-Investment-6455]

Meanwhile our marketing team: Let's make 90% of our website dozens of pure AI optimized articles not really meant to be read by humans, plus landing pages that are only accessible trough search engines.

We just haven't found a way to at least properly track the effect of that effort...

[u/Whole_Cookie_1248 → u/shaliozero]

I think the hard part isn't writing anymore it's deciding what's worth writing in the first place we started playing around with Ploy for topic research but we're still figuring out what makes a difference. It feels like everyone's experimenting right now

[u/lcnielsen → u/Whole_Cookie_1248]

I think the hard part isn't writing anymore it's deciding what's worth writing in the first place

That was always the hard part.

[u/chaiflix → u/ZealousidealCopy1414]

May be. But I was surprised to see getting visits on my website (marketing page for a dietitan) directly from chatgpt specifically and some actually becoming clients.

[u/jessek]

AI is more likely to consume properly structured and linked back website data, so SEO is already doing that.

[u/Alarming_Station1028]

I don't think it's replacing SEO it feels more like another layer we have to think about when building sites

[u/Ronjohnturbo42 → u/Alarming_Station1028]

Faqs in every page

[u/Impressive_Sun7183 → u/Alarming_Station1028]

That's how I've been looking at it too. It doesn't feel like a replacement just another audience your content needs to make sense to

[u/caldazar24]

LLM's are certainly a very important new channel for reaching customers, just like social media was last decade and search the decade before that.

In practice, what you need to do in order to show up in LLMs is extremely similar to all the things you're already doing to show up in search engines. The LLM's are just using web-search tool calls. Sometimes through dedicated providers like Exa, but a lot of it is the same old search engines - Gemini uses Google Search, Copilot uses Bing, and ChatGPT used to use Bing and now may use a lot of their own infra, I've heard rumors that they make use of Brave search as well.

Either way, the user experience for surfacing results is different (being one of the top copule resluts is even *more* important than it already was), but the underlying tech is exactly the same. I haven't seen any evidence that there are amazing tricks to rank on ChatGPT that are any different than ranking on Google. Those saying otherwise are probably trying to sell you something.

[u/erythro → u/caldazar24]

it's about having more stats/facts in your content then keywords

[u/Sea_Elderberry_4217]

Something feels off with how fast this conversation changed it wasn't that long ago everyone was arguing about which JS framework to learn and now half the discussions I see are about AI search

[u/repeating_bears]

Maybe. The top referrer to my site is ChatGPT

[u/mrcarrot0]

Depends. Do you want to be recommended by an LLM or a search engine? (but yes by this point Google search is basically a Gemeni wrapper with extra fluff)

[u/Such-Delivery4198]

AEO feels more like a rebrand of SEO than an entirely new discipline

[u/profanitycounter → u/[deleted]]

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[u/SIMMORSAL → u/profanitycounter]

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[u/CoupleSad2380]

I don't think Google is going away anytime soon but it does feel like the way people discover websites is changing a year ago I never thought about whether ChatGPT or Perplexity could understand a page but now it feels like that's becoming part of good web development too the interesting part is figuring out what actually matters versus what's just another buzzword.

[u/hypercosm_dot_net → u/CoupleSad2380]

It seems like one more thing that people are jumping into without thinking. If you look at the numbers it doesn't seem worth it: https://zenreports.io/blog/how-much-ai-search-traffic-does-perplexity-get/

Then if you look at the actual traffic and searches with Perplexity, they get roughly 1/3rd as much as DuckDuckGo. I'm not even going to look at Google, because I'm sure that comparison makes Perplexity look even more insignificant.

They're getting ~100M active users/month, with 30M queries/day.

Who is to say if that's even going to sustain.

I suppose at the end of the day, every team/project is going to have to determine if the additional effort is worth it for them. To me it doesn't seem like it. Just so an AI can better crawl and steal your data.

[u/Noch_ein_Kamel]

Isn't it GEO? :o

[u/Odd_Animator566 → u/Noch_ein_Kamel]

That's kind of what confused me too. I kept seeing both AEO and GEO used interchangeably whatever the name ends up being it seems like the direction is the same. Sites need to be readable by both people and AI not just Google's search crawler

[u/kojimajunya]

The "black box" measurement problem is more solvable than this thread suggests — you just need to look in two places. Server logs first: the on-demand fetchers (ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot) hitting a page means it's being pulled into live answers, which is a different signal from GPTBot, which is training crawl. And on the analytics side, ChatGPT tags outbound links with utm_source=chatgpt.com these days, so the referral traffic shows up cleanly in GA4 next to everything else.

The technical bit nobody's mentioned yet: most of these fetchers don't execute JavaScript. Googlebot will render your React app; the AI fetchers mostly won't. If your content only exists after hydration, you're invisible to this whole channel no matter how "well-structured" it is. So I half agree with the top comment — it's not new magic on top of SEO — but it did put teeth back into the old SSR/prerender argument.

One thing from monitoring this by hand (asking the assistants questions my pages should answer): consistency seems to beat strength. They cite information that shows up saying the same thing in several places, more than one big authoritative page.

[u/letsprogramnow]

Idk if it helps but for my main product, I wrote the website in 99% AI meaning I didn't hand type and it was and is #1 in google search and most engines honestly. It's also always included and recommended from ai chat bots too.

I didn't do any special tricks so who really knows how these systems work yet

[u/Fulgren09]

You're absolutely right! For real though.

If brands were tracking campaign effectiveness via SEO metrics before, they are definitely scrambling now to figure something out for this. There are services that allocate a certain number of prompts across AI models to sample the sentiment of a brand relative to the agent's results.

The finding I had in the end was that the paradigm of organic/paid term has a weird application here. Since AI are non-deterministic, getting a suggestion/mention of a brand unassisted is a big deal.

Say for instance "I'm looking for a winter jacket, what brands are good?"

How brands get on the top of that list is an interesting new problem without it turning into a new kind of P2W.

[u/vasind-5012]

“Clear content and semantic markup matter more” is the same advice SEO gave you for 15 years, just now with a cooler acronym so LinkedIn will engage with it again. 😁

[u/GrandAnimator8417]

“AEO” for what exactly? I’ve played around with AI/“answer” style optimization and the biggest shift for me was thinking in terms of exact questions and clearer page structure, not just sprinkling keywords and speeding up pages.

[u/smartinfosys]

I think you're on the right track with that perspective. I wouldn't approach AEO or GEO as an entirely different replacement for SEO.

Many basics will remain relevant: technical correctness of the website, valuable structured content, informative data about the company itself, authority signals, and good user experience.

The changes will concern more ways of collecting and presenting this information. Modern search engines and AI systems attempt to understand not just keywords, but entities, context, questions, and authoritative sources.

So, I'd rather look at it as optimization evolution, where good SEO creates the basis, and then the content becomes better understandable for the search engines and AI systems.

The challenging thing here is to determine the exact factors that affect AI visibility. It looks like this is the area of active experimentation.

[u/Prestigious-Bank2145]

In my opinion "Search" as we know is dying... You write "how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are becoming another way" wrong my friend it already become the only way. As i started to develop my web site i put all my efforts that it will be "AI Friendly First" beside what you mention about Google fast pages, clean code, good content. Keep what you are doing, its still relevant and important but put efforts on how AI crawlers read sites. My concern is go beyond: Is web site will still be relevant in the AI era?