Is AEO different from SEO?

Short answer: The 5 experts here split. Lily Ray and Benji Hyam say what works in AI answers mostly follows SEO's playbook: useful pages about your brand, plus links and mentions from relevant sites. Brian Dean, Devesh Khanal and Ethan Smith say it works differently: models judge who you are rather than what you publish, prompts are conversations you can't track like keywords, and many answers don't use search at all.

What the experts say

Same goes for AEO: pages first, then mentions

Benji Hyam (Grow and Convert) · Nov 5, 2026
More links don't rank a page that isn't built around the keyword, and Benji says AI mentions work the same way. What drives recommendations is a page on your site that targets the topic, paired with a few mentions in the publications already shaping the answers.
→ Read Benji's post

You can't predict prompts like keywords

Devesh Khanal (Grow and Convert) · Oct 30, 2026
Buyers have multi-turn conversations with LLMs, and each answer is personalized to the user. So treating prompts like SEO keywords and answers like rankings "doesn't work that way," Devesh says.
→ Read Devesh's post

The GEO advice SEOs have given for years

Lily Ray (Amsive) · Oct 22, 2026
On an enterprise client's site, the page most cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode was a detailed About page, with 5x the homepage's impressions. Lily calls that "the same recommendation many of us in SEO have been making for years," and she's wary of pages written only for LLMs.
→ Read Lily's post

AEO is not just citation optimization

Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Oct 20, 2026
Similarweb estimates only about 10% of ChatGPT answers have citations, and brands a model rarely mentions on its own appear just 11% of the time even when they're cited. Ethan says AEO also has to shape what the model learned in training, because for answers without search, "optimization of search and citations has little to no effect."
→ Read Ethan's post

LLMs focus on who you are, not what you publish

Brian Dean (Exploding Topics) · Oct 20, 2026
Brian calls this "super different than SEO." ChatGPT and Claude build a model of brands and concepts, and a brand that shows up alongside a concept often enough gets linked to it. That's how Exploding Topics became the default answer to "best tools for finding trends."
→ Watch Brian's video

SaaS Marketing Experts collates expert opinions from around the web. We have no affiliation with any of the experts cited here. If you're one of them, ask us to correct or remove your take.