GROWTH INSIGHTS / PRACTICAL GUIDES

SEO vs AEO: what should a business focus on?

SEO and AEO are complementary approaches to discoverability. SEO covers how a site can be found and understood in search; AEO emphasises clear, useful answers. Neither guarantees a ranking or citation.

Start with the customer question

List the decisions a customer needs help with before buying. Turn distinct questions into genuinely useful pages or sections rather than publishing a separate page for every small keyword variation. A direct answer should be supported by context, examples, and relevant limitations.

Keep the technical foundations

Crawlable content, sensible navigation, descriptive titles, canonical URLs, and working internal links remain valuable. Structured data should accurately describe visible information. An FAQ is useful when it helps readers; markup alone does not make an answer authoritative.

Measure the useful outcome

Review relevant search traffic, enquiries, and customer feedback. AI answer placement can vary across prompts, products, and time, so a single manual check is not a dependable performance measure. Focus on improving information quality and the business journey.

A practical first step

Audit your core service pages. Can a visitor understand the offer, audience, process, evidence, and next action without contacting you for basic clarification? Fix those gaps before investing in a large content rollout.

Further reading

Google Search Central: AI features and your website

Google Search spam policies

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