AEO vs SEO: is AEO just SEO, or something different?

For Google, mostly yes. Google’s own guide to AI search says that from Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI is still SEO, and that llms.txt files, content “chunking” and special schema are not needed for its AI features. For AI assistants outside Google, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, four things work differently, and normal SEO checks do not look at them.

Where SEO already covers you

Good SEO gives AI assistants most of what they need: pages that load, clear headings, accurate titles, useful content and structured data. If your SEO is solid, AI readiness is usually a short list of fixes, not a new strategy. Be wary of anyone who sells it as a replacement for SEO.

The four differences

1. Different crawlers are knocking

SEO checks confirm that Googlebot can reach your pages. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity send their own crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, each with its own robots.txt token. Firewalls and security plugins often block “AI bots” as a group while letting Google through (how to check). A site can pass every SEO audit and still be shut out of ChatGPT Search, and the owner rarely knows.

2. JavaScript

Google renders JavaScript before it reads a page, so text loaded by scripts still counts for SEO. Most AI crawlers read the HTML your server sends and stop there. A page that ranks well on Google can look nearly empty to them. SEO tools rarely flag this, because Google sees the page fine.

3. Being quoted is not the same as ranking

SEO aims to rank a page so people click it, even if the answer sits three paragraphs down. AI assistants lift a sentence or two and answer directly. If the first sentence under “How much does it cost?” is a warm-up, the assistant quotes a competitor whose first sentence is the price. Writing answer-first changes little for Google and a lot for assistants.

4. Different facts matter

SEO usually treats facts as a rich-results project: ratings, prices, events. AI assistants also answer practical questions that rich results ignore: payment methods, parking, walk-ins, age rules. State those facts plainly in your page text first; that is what every assistant can read. Google says no special schema is needed for its AI features, but schema such as paymentAccepted and amenityFeature still states the facts without ambiguity. Our LocalBusiness schema guide shows how.

One difference inside Google

Google-Extended, Google’s robots.txt token for AI, does not affect Google Search or AI Overviews. It does control Gemini training and answers in Gemini Apps that cite the web. Some sites block it thinking it only affects training and lose Gemini citations as a side effect. See robots.txt for AI crawlers.

What to do

1. Pick your strongest page, the one with your best SEO.
2. Run a free audit on it. If it comes back clean, your SEO already covers you.
3. If it does not, the findings will almost always be one of the four differences above, and most take under an hour to fix.

None of this guarantees an AI citation. It removes the reasons an assistant might skip your page. The rest depends on what other sites, reviews and listings say about you.