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SEO vs AEO: how to get found by Google and AI

June 18, 2026·5 min read

For years, getting found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. That is SEO. But buyers have changed. More and more of them ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity before they ever open a search engine, and they act on the answer they get. Showing up there is a different game, called AEO.

This guide explains both in plain language and answers the questions people ask most about them. Optimize for only one and you are invisible to half your future customers.

SEO and AEO share the same foundationSEO ranks you on Google and AEO gets you cited by AI, but both run on the same fundamentals.SEOrank on GoogleAEOcited by AIsharedfoundationcrawlable, clear, trusted: the same work wins both
Two scoreboards, one foundation

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of making your website easy for search engines like Google to find, understand and rank. In practice that means the technical basics: a robots.txt (a file that tells search engines which pages they may read), a sitemap (a list of your pages so search engines can find them all), clear titles and meta tags (short summaries of a page for search engines), a logical heading structure (headings arranged so the main points stand out), plus content that matches what people search for. Done well, your pages turn up when someone googles what you offer.

What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?

AEO is the same idea for AI answer engines. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best tool for something, the model picks the names it can read clearly and trusts. AEO is the work of making sure your site is one of them: structured data (invisible code that tells search engines and AI what a page is) that says exactly what you are, an llms.txt that guides the models to your key pages, and direct, citable answers to real questions.

What is the difference between SEO and AEO?

SEO gets you ranked in a list of links that a person clicks. AEO gets you named inside an answer that a person reads and trusts, often without any click at all. SEO is about position; AEO is about being cited. They share a lot of the same foundations, but they are judged by different systems, so a site can be great at one and invisible in the other.

Does SEO still matter now that people use AI?

Yes, more than ever. Google is still where most searches happen, and many AI answers are built on top of the same web content that ranks well, so strong SEO often feeds strong AEO. The mistake is treating them as either/or. The sites that win do both, because the foundations overlap and the reach doubles.

How do I get my site recommended by AI like ChatGPT?

Help the models understand and trust you. Add structured data (Schema) so they know what your product is and who it is for. Add an llms.txt that points them at the pages that matter. Answer the real questions your buyers ask, in clear language they can quote. And keep your technical SEO clean, because a site AI can't crawl is a site it can't recommend.

Where HowFindable comes in

We check both at once. Paste your URL and get two scores, one for Google and one for AI, plus the exact signals you are missing. If you want, we generate the fixed files for you, ready to upload. The scan is free.

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