AEO
AEO vs SEO: what actually changes in your playbook
Answer engine optimisation is not a replacement for SEO. It changes what you publish, how you structure it, and what you report.
Technoyze Strategy Team7 min read
The overlap is larger than the difference
Crawlability, site speed, internal linking, useful content and clear information architecture serve both search engines and answer engines. If those are broken, AEO work is premature.
The difference starts at the unit of value. SEO optimises for a click on a ranked result. AEO optimises for an answer that names you, whether or not the click happens today.
What you publish changes
Volume-led content calendars perform badly in assistant answers. What performs is coverage of the specific decisions a buyer makes: comparisons, criteria, costs, timelines, risks and objections — written plainly enough to be quoted.
Pages that exist only to capture a keyword variant tend to be ignored entirely, because there is nothing in them a model can state as a fact.
What you report changes
Position tracking still matters, but it no longer describes your whole distribution. Add citation sampling on priority questions, branded query volume, and assisted conversions from sessions that arrive already informed.
Expect a longer feedback loop than a ranking change. Entity and schema work compounds over weeks, and assistant retrieval reflects it unevenly.
How to sequence the work
Start with technical hygiene and entity clarity, because they are cheap and gate everything else. Then rewrite your highest-intent pages to answer in the first paragraph. Only then expand coverage into the questions you do not yet address.
This is the order we use in every engagement, and it is the order our audit reports findings in.