What is the difference between SEO and AEO?

When you want your website to appear prominently in search results, you do SEO. When you want your brand to be mentioned prominently in replies by answer engines, you do AEO. They both involve optimizing (O) your webpages, but the surface which your webpages appear is different: search engines (SE) or answer engines (AE).

In reality though, AEO is more of a term of art than a distinct practice. That's because optimizing for answer engines requires first being ranked on search engines, which entails SEO. So AEO = SEO for the most part. Don't think of each as different optimization techniques - you're optimizing your website the same way in both cases - but just referring to where your website gets clicks from.

How do I optimize my website?

To get more clicks from search and answer engines, you'll need to optimize three areas of your site:

1. Make it easy for bots sent by search and answer engines to crawl, understand, and index your webpages, with good internal linking structure between them so they can understand what's most important.
2. Publish lots of content that aligns with what people search for and ask answer engines about
3. Get people to write about your website on their website with a link back to yours.

In short, you need to optimize the technical aspects of your site, optimize your content, and optimize your authority by earning more links from other sites.

You'll then rank well in search engines, which answer engines will pick up because they search the web too when constructing their answers.

To summarize, AEO isn't really anything new; it's just high-quality traditional SEO. This is why working with seasoned SEO experts like Cogney is crucial. Our traditional SEO expertise directly translates to answer engine visibility. Learn how we optimize for answer engines.