SEO (search engine optimization) gets your page ranked in the list of links a search engine returns. AEO (answer engine optimization) gets your brand named inside the answer itself, in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or a Google AI Overview, the AI-written summary at the top of some Google results. Keep doing SEO: AEO builds on the same pages and adds a new way to check whether buyers hear your name.
An answer engine is any tool that replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. When a buyer asks for the best running shoes under ₹5,000, the answer may name four brands and cite two review sites. A citation is a link the answer shows as its source. AEO is the work of being one of those brands and one of those cited sites. If the term is new to you, read what AEO is first. The table compares the two.
| Dimension | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | A high ranking and a click | Your brand named, and your pages cited, in the answer |
| Where it shows | Search results pages on Google and Bing | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews |
| How success is measured | Position, impressions, clicks, organic traffic | How often answers name you, where in the answer, in what tone, which pages they cite |
| What earns it | Crawlable pages, relevance, links from trusted sites | Crawlable pages, direct answers, quotable facts, mentions on the sites answers cite |
| Time to see change | Varies by site, query and competition | Varies, and a single check misleads because answers change between runs |
| Tools | Google Search Console, rank trackers, site audit tools | AI visibility trackers that rerun the same questions over time |
Is AEO replacing SEO?
No. Answer engines lean on the same web that SEO works on. Google picks the supporting links in AI Overviews from its own index: its documentation on AI features says a page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, the short text preview under a search result. It also says no special optimization or schema markup is needed on top. Schema markup is code on a page that labels facts such as prices and ratings for search engines.
ChatGPT’s search answers depend on OpenAI’s search crawler. OpenAI’s bot documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain navigational links. Perplexity runs its own crawler and live web search. Each of them starts from pages it can fetch, which is the ground SEO already covers.
A ranking alone no longer shows whether buyers see your brand. A page can rank third and still be missing from the AI Overview above the links. A brand with no ranking page can still be named, because a review site mentioned it.
What is SEO called now with AI?
SEO is still SEO. The AI-answer work has picked up several labels: AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization), LLM SEO, AI SEO and AI search optimization. They describe close to the same job.
AEO is the label SEO practitioners used first, when answers meant featured snippets, the answer box Google shows above the links, and voice assistants. GEO comes from a research paper by Aggarwal et al. (KDD 2024). LLM SEO is named after the model type: an LLM (large language model) is what powers ChatGPT and Gemini. The three-way comparison lives on AEO vs GEO vs SEO, and each term is defined in the AI search glossary.
What stays the same
Most SEO habits keep paying off in answer engines.
- Your pages must be reachable. If Googlebot cannot crawl a page, it cannot rank or appear in an AI Overview. If robots.txt, the file that tells bots what they may crawl, blocks OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT search answers will not show the page.
- Answer-first writing wins both. A page that answers the question in its first two sentences suits Google’s featured snippet box and gives an answer engine a clean passage to lift.
- Authority still comes from other people. Reviews, press, comparison articles and forum threads build trust with search engines. Answer engines read and cite pages like these too.
- Structured data should match the page. Structured data is the schema markup that labels facts like prices, ratings and opening hours for search engines. Google advises that it match the text visitors see, and says its AI features need no special markup.
What changes
The work shifts toward the answer, and so does the reporting.
- A mention is the new ranking. The unit of success is your brand’s name in the answer. Track visibility, the share of answers that name you, and average position, where you land when the answer lists options.
- Tone counts. An answer can name you and still steer buyers elsewhere. Sentiment tells you whether answers describe you positively, neutrally or negatively, and the quoted sentence shows why.
- Competitors share the answer. Answers often list several brands. Share of voice is your mentions as a share of all tracked brand mentions in those answers, so you see where you stand against each rival.
- The citation list becomes a to-do list. Sites cited when AI recommends your competitors, and never when it names you, are the places to get mentioned. Citation gap analysis finds them.
- One check proves little. The same question asked twice can return a different set of brands, so trends need repeated runs over days.
How to measure AEO alongside SEO
Keep Google Search Console for SEO. It reports impressions, clicks and position, and Google counts AI Overview appearances inside the Web search numbers there. It does not show which brands an AI Overview named, and it says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.
For AEO, pick 20 to 40 questions your buyers ask, with no brand names in them, and track the answers over time. These tracked questions are called prompts. Prompts that already contain your name inflate the score, so Depra leaves them out of the count by default.
Depra’s AI visibility tracking runs your prompts on ChatGPT with web search, Gemini and Google AI Overviews every day and on Perplexity every week, asked from inside your chosen country, and stores every full answer. The Google AI Overview tracker also records whether an Overview appeared for your query at all.
Example: an Indian buyer question
Here is a buying question from our study, in English: “I want to buy a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast on Indian skin. Which one is best?” In Hinglish, which is Hindi and English typed in English letters, it reads: “Mujhe aisa sunscreen kharidna hai jo Indian skin par white cast na chhode. Konsa best hai?”
For SEO, the job is a page that ranks for sunscreen for Indian skin. For AEO, the question is which brands the answer names, and that depends on the language. Our Hinglish vs English study read 480 answers to 10 buying questions asked from India. On Perplexity, the overlap in brands named was 23.4 points lower across languages than between two runs in the same language. On ChatGPT the same gap was 2.2 points. Gemini cited sources in 90.0% of English answers and 41.3% of Hinglish ones.
Depra suggests a Hinglish version of each question when India is one of your markets, on every plan, and your report shows the split, so you can see whether Hinglish buyers hear your name.