From The Team
AEO vs SEO in 2026: What Actually Changed
Search engine optimization did not die. It got a second job — showing up correctly inside the answer an AI assistant gives, not just the page a human clicks.
For twenty years, "getting found online" meant one thing: rank on page one of Google. That's not wrong in 2026 — it's just no longer the whole job.
A growing share of your next customer's research now happens inside a chat window, not a search results page. They ask an AI assistant "who's the best [service] near me" and get a synthesized answer with two or three names in it. If your business isn't structured in a way the assistant can confidently cite, you don't lose a ranking — you disappear from the conversation entirely.
What SEO still does
Traditional SEO — technical health, content depth, backlinks, page speed — is still the foundation. It's how a page gets crawled, indexed, and trusted in the first place. Nothing below replaces it.
What AEO adds
Answer-Engine Optimization is the layer on top: structured data and entity markup that tells an AI system exactly who you are, what you do, and where you do it; consistent facts about your business across every directory and citation source an assistant might pull from; and content written to directly answer the specific questions your customers are actually asking, in the order they'd ask them.
We track both halves for every client on our platform — schema markup on every page, plus ongoing visibility tracking for whether AI assistants are actually citing the business. See the full breakdown on our Services page.