A lot of SEO agencies pivoted to "AEO services" in 2024–2025. Most of what they're selling is SEO with a new label. Better schema, faster pages, more comprehensive content — all useful, none of it specific to AEO.
That's caused a useful but misleading framing: AEO is "just SEO 2.0." It isn't. There's overlap, but the disciplines optimize for fundamentally different things and the work doesn't fully transfer.
If you're deciding where to invest budget, or evaluating an agency, you need to understand what's actually different — and what isn't.
The fundamental difference
SEO optimizes for ranking. AEO optimizes for citation.
SEO wins when your page appears in the top ten search results. You get a click. The user lands on your site. You own the next interaction.
AEO wins when the AI recommends your brand. The user doesn't necessarily click anything. You never own the interaction. What you get is an implicit endorsement in the AI's answer — which either lives with the user or doesn't.
Both are valuable, but the leverage is different. SEO gives you direct traffic. AEO gives you mindshare in the moment of recommendation, which later converts into branded search or direct traffic.
One channel is measured in clicks. The other in mindshare. Pretending they're the same metric means measuring the wrong thing.
Where the overlap is real
The honest version: a lot of work benefits both channels.
Strong technical SEO helps AEO. Fast pages, clean markup, good internal linking — AI engines crawl these the same way search engines do. If your site is a mess technically, fixing it helps both.
High-quality content helps both. A comprehensive, well-structured answer page can rank on Google AND get cited by Perplexity. No contradiction.
Backlinks still matter. AI engines weight trusted third-party mentions, and backlinks from authoritative domains are a proxy signal for that trust.
Schema markup helps both. Cleaner data for crawlers is cleaner data for everything.
So if you're doing good SEO, maybe 40–50% of that work directly supports AEO. That's real. That's useful.
Where the disciplines diverge
The other 50–60% is genuinely different work. This is where most "AEO services from SEO agencies" fall short.
Entity authority is an AEO-specific discipline. Knowledge graph, Wikidata, structured entity data — SEO cares about some of this, but AEO cares about it intensely. This is where most SaaS companies have the biggest gap and where SEO-trained teams usually aren't strong.
Answer formatting is different. SEO writers have been trained to write for featured snippets (which are related) but the answer-first format AEO rewards is tighter, less meandering, and often uncomfortable to write. Many SEO writers over-write it.
Third-party citation building is fundamentally different from link building. You're not trying to get a link. You're trying to get a specific kind of mention, in a specific kind of publication, that AI engines use as training or retrieval data. Different outreach, different targeting.
Measurement is totally different. SEO measures rankings, traffic, conversions. AEO measures citation frequency, share-of-voice, accuracy of description, AI-sourced referral. Most SEO dashboards can't show you any of this.
Should you do both?
Yes, basically always. Here's why:
SEO still works for a huge chunk of buyer discovery. Most buyers aren't exclusively using AI yet. You need the SEO foundation to capture traditional organic traffic.
SEO feeds AEO. Pages that rank well give Perplexity and other AI engines more signal about your brand. Good SEO makes AEO easier.
AEO captures what SEO is starting to lose. As more research shifts to AI, a pure SEO strategy slowly leaks relevance. AEO covers the gap.
The companies that will win over the next few years aren't choosing between SEO and AEO. They're running both, coordinated, with different specialists handling each.
How to allocate budget
Rough rule of thumb based on what we see with clients:
If you have no SEO foundation yet: invest 70/30 SEO/AEO. Build the foundation first. Layer AEO on top.
If you have mature SEO with strong rankings: flip it. 30/70 SEO maintenance vs. AEO investment. Defensive SEO work and aggressive AEO growth work.
If you're in a highly technical B2B space (DevOps, data, cybersecurity, developer tooling): shift earlier toward AEO. Your buyers are using AI more. The behavioral shift is faster.
If your buyers are non-technical and older-demographic: shift slower. Google still dominates some buyer groups and probably will for another few years.
There's no single right answer. But "50/50 split across the board" is almost never right either. Your allocation should reflect your specific buyer behavior, which you can see in your analytics and sales conversations if you look.
The agencies quietly winning in 2026 are the ones treating AEO as a distinct discipline with its own practitioners, not as an SEO add-on. If you're evaluating a partner, the easiest tell is: ask them to describe what they'd do that's specifically different from SEO. If they can't answer cleanly, they're selling rebrand, not practice.