AEO Isn’t Replacing SEO:
How to Help the Right People Find Your Business in the Age of AI
Lately, I’ve had more conversations with friends and clients about AEO—or Answer Engine Optimization—and what it means for their websites.
If you’re only beginning to hear this term, you’re not behind. The way people search is changing incredibly quickly, and even those of us who work in this world are continually learning, experimenting, and adapting. But here’s the encouraging part: you probably don’t need to throw out your SEO strategy and begin again.
The same strong foundation that helps your website appear in traditional search results also helps search engines and AI-powered tools understand your work. Google itself says that established SEO best practices remain relevant to its generative AI experiences. In other words, good AEO begins with good SEO.
What is AEO?
SEO—Search Engine Optimization—traditionally helps your website appear when someone searches for a particular product, service, or topic. AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, focuses on helping your content become part of the answers generated by tools such as Google’s AI experiences, ChatGPT, and other conversational search platforms.
I tend to think of a traditional search engine a highly sophisticated version of the Yellow Pages: you type in a few words and receive a list of potentially useful websites. An AI-powered answer engine works more conversationally. Someone can describe a highly specific need, add context, ask follow-up questions, and receive a synthesized response rather than simply a list of links.
That changes the search experience, but it doesn’t change the fundamental need for your website to be accessible, understandable, trustworthy, and genuinely useful.
AEO starts with your SEO foundation
Before worrying about how to “optimize for AI,” start with the basics. Search engines and AI tools need to be able to find your website, understand what it is about, and move through it easily.
That means making sure your website includes:
- Clear page titles and descriptions
- A logical site structure that makes information easy to find
- Useful, descriptive headings
- Internal links between related pages
- Fast, mobile-friendly pages
- Content that search engines can crawl and index
- Accurate information about your business, services, products, and location
- Helpful image descriptions and metadata
Once those foundational pieces are in place, there is another behind-the-scenes tool that can help search engines better understand your website: schema markup.
Schema markup is a small piece of code added to a website to label the type of information on a page. It helps search engines recognize whether they are looking at a business, service, product, article, event, review, or frequently asked question.
It isn’t a magic switch that guarantees your business will appear in AI-generated answers, and there is no special “AI schema” you need to add. Schema simply gives search engines a little more clarity. It can support a strong website, but it cannot make up for content that is vague, generic, or unhelpful.
Once the technical foundation is in place, the next question is much more human: What does your audience actually need to know?
Answer the questions real people are asking
One of the most useful things you can do for both SEO and AEO is answer the questions your audience already asks you.
These answers do not all have to live on a page labeled “Frequently Asked Questions.” Instead, they might become:
- Blog posts
- Service-page sections
- Buying guides
- Process explanations
- Comparisons
- Case studies
- Glossaries
- Tutorials
- Project recaps
- Thoughtful captions that later develop into longer articles
Start paying attention to the questions that come up in consultations, emails, sales conversations, social media messages, or casual conversations with friends. If one person is curious about something, there is a good chance someone else is searching for it.
For example, an interior designer might write about:
- What does the interior design process look like from start to finish?
- How much should I budget for an interior design project?
- What is the difference between full-service design and a design consultation?
- When should I hire an interior designer during a renovation or new build?
- How do interior designers work with architects, builders, and contractors?
These are useful questions in their own right, but answering them also does something deeper. It demonstrates experience, anticipates a potential client’s concerns, and gives search tools enough context to understand what the business actually offers.
Specificity may be your greatest advantage
Conversational search (which fuels AEO) allows people to be much more nuanced. Someone is no longer limited to searching “interior designer near me.” They might ask:
- Who is an interior designer near Philadelphia who creates layered, timeless homes, can collaborate with my architect and builder, and will help preserve the original character of an older property?
That specificity creates an opportunity for small, specialized businesses.
The more clearly your website communicates who you help, what you do, where you work, what the experience is like, and what makes your approach distinct, the easier it becomes for both people and search tools to recognize when you may be the right fit.
This is why language matters so much.
The nuances you use when describing your philosophy, process, audience, materials, location, or experience are not extraneous. They help distinguish you from businesses that may technically offer a similar service but aren’t the right fit for the same person.
Write for the human being you hope to reach. Use the language your clients use, and answer the questions beneath the initial question. I’ve written more about this relationship between storytelling, specificity, and search in Beyond Keywords: Why Storytelling Is the Future of SEO.
The central idea is simple: the details that make your story human are often the same details that help the right people—and increasingly, AI-powered search tools—recognize that you are a relevant fit. That is useful communication before it is an optimization strategy.
Your most practical content may be your most powerful
As a creative person, I naturally want my writing to be thoughtful, visually rich, and sometimes poetic. There is still room for that, even when optimizing for search results. A piece of writing can be beautiful and answer a real question, but some of our most valuable content may also be surprisingly practical.
In fact, one of the posts gaining the most momentum on my own website is called Print 101. It explains common printing terms, file types, and considerations for preparing creative work for print. At first, I found it somewhat surprising that such a practical post was performing so well, but I worked in printing for nine years, and that experience still shapes how I approach branding, illustration, packaging, and other production-based projects today.
The post is useful because it answers real questions, but it also gives readers a fuller picture of the knowledge behind my work. It reminded me that we sometimes overlook our most valuable content because the subject feels basic or familiar to us. What feels like foundational knowledge to you may be exactly what someone else needs—and it may reveal a depth of experience they would not otherwise know you possess.
This is what strong educational content can do: answer the immediate question while quietly revealing the depth of your expertise. So I would encourage you to think beyond “What keywords should I use?” and ask:
- What do my clients need to understand before hiring someone like me?
- What questions do I answer repeatedly?
- What do people misunderstand about my work?
- What decisions are they trying to make?
- What knowledge do I possess that a less experienced provider might not?
- What details would help the right person recognize that I’m a good fit?
The overlap between those answers and your content strategy is where the greatest opportunity often lives.
Trust extends beyond your website
Your own website is only one source of information about your business. Reviews, interviews, professional profiles, directory listings, articles, videos, and genuine mentions elsewhere on the web may all contribute to the broader picture of who you are and what you do—and help boost your SEO/AEO.
That doesn’t mean chasing artificial mentions or asking people to repeat particular keywords in their reviews. It simply means building a consistent, credible presence and making it easy for real clients to describe their experiences.
When requesting a review, you might invite someone to share:
- What they hired you to do
- What the process was like
- What challenge you helped them solve
- What felt distinctive about working with you
- What changed as a result
Specific, authentic reviews are far more useful to future clients than generic praise. They communicate the actual substance of your work and help people understand what it might feel like to work with you.
Can you tell whether you’re appearing in AI answers?
Although measuring visibility in AI-generated answers is still evolving, you can already find some clues about whether people are discovering your website through tools like ChatGPT. In fact, when I looked at my own Google Analytics this morning, I could identify traffic coming to my website from ChatGPT. That tells me people are encountering my content through the platform and clicking through to learn more.
What Analytics generally can’t tell me is the precise question someone asked or the full conversation that led ChatGPT (or other Answer Engine) to recommend my website. I can see that the traffic came from ChatGPT, which page the person entered through, and what they did after arriving—but not necessarily what they were searching for when they found me.
Even with those limitations, the information can still be useful. If a particular article or service page begins receiving repeated traffic from ChatGPT, that may offer clues about the topics the platform associates with your website and the kinds of questions your content is helping to answer. OpenAI also now adds a source tag to referral links from ChatGPT, which makes this traffic easier to identify in analytics platforms such as Google Analytics. Over time, those patterns can help you understand which parts of your website are gaining traction through AI-powered search.
You can also occasionally conduct your own searches in tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google to see what types of businesses and resources appear. However, treat these as informal spot checks rather than definitive rankings. AI-generated answers can vary based on the wording of the question, available sources, location, context, and changes to the platform.
If appearing in ChatGPT search is important to you, it’s also worth asking your web designer or developer to confirm that your site isn’t blocking OpenAI’s search crawler. This doesn’t guarantee your content will appear, but it helps make sure ChatGPT can access it.
As with traditional SEO, the goal is not to react to one search result or one referral. The more useful approach is to watch for patterns over time and use those patterns to better understand how people are finding and engaging with your work.
Don’t let AI distract you from what is already working
The pace of change can be exhausting. It’s easy to spend hours reading about new tools, new terminology, new ranking theories, and new ways we are supposedly expected to restructure everything we have built.
I recently found myself moving in that direction—trying to absorb every possible change and determine what I needed to do next. Eventually, I had to step back and ask a much more grounded question: What is already working, and how can I lean further into it?
That question led me back to the pages attracting attention, the ideas resonating with clients, and the specific areas where my experience offers something genuinely valuable. That is where I would encourage you to begin, too.
Look at the content already drawing people to your website. Notice the questions that lead to meaningful conversations and identify the pages that attract your best-fit clients. Then consider the next highest-leverage improvement.
It might be:
- Expanding a service page with more specific information
- Turning a recurring client question into an article
- Adding a case study that explains your reasoning
- Clarifying your location or the audience you serve
- Improving the technical structure of an existing page
- Updating outdated content
- Requesting thoughtful reviews
- Adding appropriate schema markup
- Connecting several related resources through internal links
None of these changes requires you to overhaul your entire website. In many cases, the most effective next step is simply strengthening something that is already beginning to work.
The simplest place to begin
If you want to improve your visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search, here are a few things you can start with:
- Make sure your website has a sound technical and SEO foundation.
- Clearly explain what you do, who you help, and what makes your approach distinct.
- Answer the real questions your clients and customers ask.
- Share knowledge that demonstrates the depth of your experience.
- Use specific, natural language rather than generic marketing copy.
- Build trust through consistent information and authentic reviews.
- Pay attention to what is already working before chasing the newest tactic.
AEO is a useful term for understanding how search behavior is evolving, but it does not require us to abandon thoughtful communication in favor of writing for machines. If anything, it asks us to become more helpful, more specific, and more human—and that is a strategy worth investing in, regardless of what we call it.
Not sure what your website needs next—or whether its SEO foundation is strong enough to support AI-powered search? My SEO Strategy Intensive takes a focused look at what is already working, where potential clients may be losing the thread, and which improvements could make the greatest difference. You’ll leave with a practical, prioritized strategy for strengthening your website’s visibility without chasing every new search trend.
