SEO earns a place in a list of results; answer engine optimisation (AEO) earns a place inside the answer an AI system writes. Below: where the two differ, what two public studies found about clicks, what Google asks of site owners, and the page review we run to check whether a page can be cited.
Where the two jobs part ways
In classic search the buyer does the research: they scan results, open pages and decide whom to trust. In an AI answer the system does that work, often running several related searches behind one question, and returns a summary with a few supporting links. Your page is either one of the sources or it is not.
| Question | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| The prize | A position in a list | A mention, citation or recommendation inside an answer |
| Unit of retrieval | The page | Often a passage within the page |
| What the buyer types | Short queries | Full questions, then follow-ups in the same conversation |
| What you can measure | Rankings, clicks, conversions | Spot-checks on a fixed question set, AI referral visits, appearances in AI Overviews; much of it is a sample, not a census |
| What it still depends on | Crawlable, indexed, useful pages | The same, plus a consistent description of who you are everywhere machines read about you |
The last row is the one most AEO advice skips. AEO is not a second discipline next to SEO; it is SEO with a stricter reader. Our answer engine optimisation work runs on the same roadmap as search for that reason.
- 01Crawlable, indexed, useful pagesWhat classic search already needs; nothing cites a page without it
- 02Snippet eligibilityGoogle asks no extra file or special markup
- 03Crawler accessAllowed in robots.txt and by the CDN or host
- 04One description of youName, services and location the same wherever machines read
- 05Passages that stand aloneThe answer first, each section readable on its own
What the public studies say about clicks
Two studies are worth knowing, both with their periods and limits.
- Pew Research Center analysed the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a Google search showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result link on 8% of visits; without one, on 15%. Clicking a link inside the summary itself happened on 1% of visits. 18% of the searches studied produced a summary, rising to 60% for searches that began with a question word (Pew, July 2025).
- Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries across 42 client organisations from June 2024 to September 2025. Organic click-through rate on queries with an AI Overview fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025; queries without one fell too, from 2.74% to 1.62%. In Q3 2025, brands cited in the Overview had higher organic click-through than brands that were not (0.70% against 0.52%), which Seer says it cannot prove is caused by the citation (Seer, September 2025 update).
Read together: AI summaries reduce clicks on the queries where they appear, mostly informational and question-shaped ones, and being cited is better than not being cited. Neither study says your commercial pages will lose their traffic. An older post of ours, now merged into this one, quoted a narrower Seer range; the figures above come from Seer’s update directly.
Google’s own rules for AI Overviews, in three lines
Google’s page for site owners on AI Overviews and AI Mode (Search Central, “AI features and your website”) is short, and it removes half of most AEO checklists. Eligibility is ordinary indexing plus snippet eligibility. No extra file or special markup is asked for. Clicks from these features land in the usual Performance report.
So for Google, our first question on any page is plain: would it already qualify for a normal result with a snippet? Other assistants crawl and license the web their own way, which is why access rules and a consistent company description still earn a place in the review below.
The page review we run for AI answers
For each page that should be cited, we run the same seven checks. We recommend running them on your five most commercial pages before writing anything new.
- Name the question. Write the one question this page should answer, in the words a buyer would type into an assistant.
- Check eligibility. Indexed, snippet allowed, crawlers allowed in robots.txt and by the CDN or host, and the answer present as text rather than inside an image or a script.
- Answer first. The answer sits in the first 40 to 60 words of the relevant section, and each section still makes sense if read alone.
- One description of you. Company name, what you do and where you work read the same on the page, the about page and your main profiles.
- No claims in the code that the copy does not make. If the markup says something a reader cannot see, remove it.
- Evidence of your own. At least one thing only you can say: a case, a dated figure with its method, a named person’s judgement.
- Ask and record. Put the question to the main assistants, record the date, and note whether you were mentioned, cited or recommended.
Step 7 only means something when the questions are fixed in advance. Our own set, frozen on 5 October 2026, holds 39 prompts: 12 phrased the way an agency owner would ask and 27 the way a brand would. Each is tied to the one page on our site that ought to answer it, 35 pages in all.
Two rows show the shape. “What is a good SEO agency for a SaaS company?” is tied to our SaaS SEO page. “How much does PixelCrayons charge?” is tied to the pricing page. If an assistant answers the second from a third-party directory instead, that is a finding about our pricing page, not about the assistant.
| Field we record | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Date and engine | Answers drift; a reading without a date cannot be compared with the next one |
| Prompt ID, exactly as frozen | A reworded prompt is a different test |
| Mentioned, cited or recommended | Three different outcomes; adding them together hides which one moved |
| Which URL was cited | Being cited from the wrong page is its own fix |
| Was the description of us correct | An accurate mention beats a confident wrong one |
We publish readings only once they exist, with their dates. The AI visibility audit sets out how to score a run.
When AEO work is not the priority
If the pages are not indexed, are slow, or do not answer the question, fix that first; an answer engine cannot cite a page that classic search cannot use. A full SEO audit covers that ground.
And if your buyers decide on price lists, demos and referrals rather than research questions, AI answers may matter less to your pipeline than the studies above suggest. Check which questions your buyers actually ask before spending on it.
