In July 2025, Ahrefs found that 76% of AI Overview citations came from Google's top 10, and by its March 2026 update that share had fallen to 37.9%. (Ahrefs) If your plan still assumes a page-one ranking buys you a place in the answer, that drop should worry you. SEO gets your pages ranked in search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) gets your brand named and cited inside the answers AI assistants and AI search features write for your buyers.
The two share most of their foundations. The biggest search engine doesn't even treat them as separate disciplines, and for its own products that view mostly holds.
Our view is simple: for most B2B SaaS teams, AEO is not a second program. It's SEO plus two jobs SEO never did well, earning mentions off your own site and measuring answers that change every time you ask. Treat it as a separate budget line and you'll pay twice for the same pages. This post shows where the line actually falls, what to measure, and what to do first.
New to the term? Start with the plain-English guide to what AEO is.
The short answer
The answer engines in question are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's position is blunt: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO," says Google's own guide. (Google Search Central) That's true for Google. It's less true for ChatGPT.
The foundations are shared. Crawlable, indexed pages with useful, original content help both.
The unit of success differs. SEO wins a ranking and a click. AEO wins a mention or citation inside an answer, often with no click.
The source pool differs. Search engines rank your pages. Answer engines also lean heavily on what other sites say about you.
Measurement differs a lot. SEO has mature, first-party data. AEO is sampled, noisy and partly invisible in analytics.
For most B2B SaaS teams, SEO comes first, because it feeds Google's AI features directly. AEO work gets layered on top where buyers are clearly asking assistants.
Where AEO and SEO are the same thing
The overlap is bigger than many AEO pitches suggest. Three areas stand out.
Both start with being crawlable and indexed
For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google says there are no additional technical requirements. (Google Search Central) The one extra step: your site must be included in the "Search generative AI" setting in Search Console. (Google Search Central)
That's an SEO checklist. Fix the technical SEO and you've fixed most of the technical AEO for Google.
Both reward original content
Google's guidance for AI features is to create "non-commodity content", meaning a unique point of view and first-hand experience instead of recycled common knowledge. (Google Search Central) That's the same advice Google gives for regular search.
Both are subject to the same spam policies
Google's guide says creating pages for every question variation "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses" violates its scaled content abuse policy. SEO consultant Lily Ray put it bluntly on X in December 2025: "those same old spam policies that applied to SEO also apply to Google's evaluation of the sites it references and cites in AI search". (Lily Ray on X)
So the shortcuts that hurt your SEO will hurt your AEO too.
Where they really split
Ranking and citation have drifted apart
The March 2026 data has a sharper detail than the headline drop: 31.0% of cited URLs didn't rank in the top 100 at all. (Ahrefs)
Ahrefs improved its citation parsing between the two studies, so the numbers aren't a clean before-and-after. It also points to query fan-out, where Google splits a question into related sub-searches and cites pages that rank for those. (Google documents fan-out; it hasn't confirmed any change to it.)
Practical takeaway: a page-one ranking for your head term doesn't guarantee you appear in the AI answer, and a page that ranks for a sub-question can.
Answer engines don't agree with each other
In SEO, you mostly optimize for one engine. In AEO, you have several, and their sources barely overlap.
Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index (126 million U.S. prompts, January–April 2026) found ChatGPT cites about 15 sources per response and Gemini about 3. (Semrush) Citation overlap between every pair of platforms it studied was below 50%. (Semrush report, PDF)
Even ChatGPT disagrees with itself. Running the same prompts in GPT-5.2's minimal and high reasoning modes, only 25.6% of cited domains overlapped. (Semrush)
Off-site reputation carries more weight
SEO has always cared about links. AEO cares about something broader: what the web says about your brand, in text and video.
Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found YouTube mentions (~0.737) and branded web mentions (0.66–0.71) correlated more strongly with AI visibility than anything else it measured. ChatGPT's correlation with Domain Rating was weak (0.266), and the number of pages on a site barely mattered (~0.194). (Ahrefs) Correlation isn't causation, but it's a strong hint about where to look.
A citation isn't a click, or even a mention
In SEO, a ranking that earns impressions but no clicks is a known problem. In AEO, it's the default. Semrush found 61.7% of AI citations came with no brand mention in the answer text. (Semrush)
The clicks you do get behave differently. After a May 7, 2026 ChatGPT update, Similarweb measured about 60% of ChatGPT referrals landing on homepages, up from roughly 26–32%. (Similarweb) That looks like people who already decided on a brand, then went to check it out. The pipeline attribution guide shows how to account for that.
Measurement is a different sport
SEO has Search Console, rank trackers and decades of process. AEO measurement is younger. Google added a Generative AI performance report to Search Console in June 2026, showing AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions. (Google Search Central Blog) For ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest, you're running your own prompt samples or paying for a tracking tool.
AEO vs SEO: side-by-side comparison
SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
Goal | Rank pages in search results and earn clicks | Get your brand mentioned, cited and described accurately in AI answers |
Main surfaces | Google and Bing organic results | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode |
Unit of success | Ranking position, click | Mention, citation, accuracy of the description |
How sources are chosen | Ranking systems order indexed pages | Retrieval plus generation; Google adds query fan-out (Google) |
Overlap with Google top 10 | By definition | 37.9% of AI Overview citations in Ahrefs' March 2026 data (Ahrefs) |
Off-site signals | Backlinks matter most | Brand mentions, YouTube and community sources correlate strongly (Ahrefs) |
Consistency | Fairly stable rankings day to day | Varies by engine, mode and run (Semrush) |
Technical requirements (Google) | Indexed, crawlable, snippet-eligible | Same, plus included in Search Console's generative AI setting |
First-party measurement | Search Console Performance report | Search Console Generative AI report (Google only) |
Typical traffic pattern | Lands on the ranking page | ChatGPT referrals often land on the homepage (Similarweb) |
Spam risk | Scaled content abuse, link spam | Same policies, plus inauthentic mentions (Google) |
When to prioritize each
There's no universal split. Here's how we'd think about it for a B2B SaaS team.
Prioritize SEO when your site has basic problems
If key pages aren't indexed, rankings are sliding, or the site has hundreds of thin pages, fix that first. The B2B SaaS SEO agencies roundup compares teams that do this work. Every Google AI feature pulls from the same index, so broken SEO caps your AEO. This is also the cheapest work to measure.
Prioritize SEO when your buyers still search
Some categories are searched far more than they're asked about. Similarweb's data shows AI referrals are still a low single-digit share of traffic for most sites, even after growing 117.4% year over year to an average 770.7 million monthly visits worldwide (June 2025 to May 2026). (Similarweb) Check your own analytics before you move budget.
Lean into AEO when buyers ask assistants for shortlists
If your sales team hears "ChatGPT recommended you" (or a competitor), or your own prompt checks show answer engines naming rivals for "best X" questions, AEO work has a clear target. The AEO agencies for B2B SaaS list compares who tracks those prompts. In sales tech, where "vs" searches decide shortlists, see SEO agencies for sales automation software and the sales tech SEO playbook.
Lean into AEO when AI answers describe you wrong
An answer that gets your pricing, integrations or category wrong costs you deals quietly. Fixing the source pages, and the third-party pages the engines pull from, is AEO work with a direct payoff.
Lean into AEO when you're new or small
Ahrefs found ChatGPT's visibility lined up less with classic authority metrics like Domain Rating and branded search volume. (Ahrefs) That suggests a newer brand with genuine third-party coverage may get a hearing there sooner than in Google's top 10. It's a correlation, so treat it as a reason to test, not a promise. AI-native startups can read the SEO guide for agentic AI companies or start with the AEO agencies for agentic AI companies.
How AEO and SEO work together
The best setup is one program with two scoreboards, not two teams competing for the same pages.
One page can do two jobs. A strong comparison or integration page (see the comparison pages guide) can rank in Google and give an answer engine a clean, quotable passage. Write it for the buyer first. Google says you don't need to "chunk" content or write in a special style for its AI features. (Google Search Central)
Your keyword research already tells you what buyers want. Turn the commercial queries into the prompts you track in answer engines.
When an AI answer gets you wrong, the fix is often a page on your site that's unclear. That page probably underperforms in search too.
Digital PR serves both. Coverage and reviews earn links for SEO and mentions for AEO. Keep it genuine: Google warns that seeking inauthentic mentions isn't as helpful as it seems, and SEO consultant Glenn Gabe wrote in September 2026 that a publisher selling AI visibility to brand partners would be "inauthentic mentions". (Glenn Gabe on X)
The skip list is shared too. Neither discipline needs llms.txt for Google, special AI schema, or mass-produced answer pages. Ahrefs found adding JSON-LD to already-cited pages didn't meaningfully lift citations in AI Mode or ChatGPT. (Ahrefs)
Then keep one report. Put rankings, AI mentions and citations, AI referrals and self-reported attribution ("How did you hear about us?") next to demos and pipeline. Since some AI-driven visits show up as direct traffic (Similarweb), the demo form question matters more than it used to.
A note on terms: you'll also hear GEO (generative engine optimization) and LLM SEO. Google treats AEO and GEO as descriptions of the same goal. Agencies split them differently. Miraa, for example, frames GEO around the generated paragraph itself and LLM SEO around whether your site can support an accurate explanation. The labels matter less than the work.
Where to spend first
AEO vs SEO is mostly a false fight. For Google, they're the same work. For ChatGPT and the other assistants, AEO adds two things SEO never had to handle well: a reputation layer that lives off your site, and measurement that's noisy by nature.
Our recommendation, in order:
Fix the SEO foundations first. If your key pages can't be crawled, rendered and ranked, no AEO work will stick.
Pick the 20 or so buyer questions where being named in an AI answer would change a deal. Ignore the rest for now.
Spend on off-site mentions only after your own pages answer those questions cleanly.
Don't hire a separate AEO vendor unless your SEO partner can't measure AI answers. One team working one page set beats two teams optimizing different pages.
If you're hiring help, the roundups compare AEO agencies for B2B SaaS, AEO agencies for agentic AI companies and B2B SaaS SEO agencies. In a regulated category, the fintech SEO agencies list puts compliance review first, and the E-E-A-T and YMYL explainer covers what Google expects. For the fundamentals, see What is AEO?.
Miraa is an SEO and AEO agency for B2B SaaS. It reports on demos, SQLs and pipeline from organic and AI search, and it doesn't sell guaranteed placements in AI answers. Its answer engine optimization page sets out how it approaches the work.