The Short Answer

AEO is not replacing SEO. If you're wondering how to optimise for AI search, you need to start with the same foundations that make good SEO work.
Keep your focus on quality content, strategic keywords, strong internal linking, topical authority, and a technically sound website. This is how to improve SEO.
A good AEO strategy makes your content easy to understand. This gives it a better chance to rank in both AI search results and traditional search.

Table of Contents

Are acronyms starting to make your marketing life difficult? Well, it's time to calm down and stop panicking. AI search has changed discovery, yes, but the basics that make content worth finding haven’t suddenly disappeared out of the blue.

Instead of scrolling through a page packed with blue links, people can now ask ChatGPT a question or use Google's AI-powered search features and get an answer immediately. Naturally, this has created a whole new collection of acronyms for marketers to have to worry about.

AEO. GEO. AI SEO.

Before you know it, you’re singing ‘E-I-E-I-O’ and wondering what’ll come next! If you've spent any time recently reading marketing content, you might be wondering whether the entire SEO strategy you've been working on needs an overhaul.

It probably doesn't (phew) but if you want to know how to optimise for AI search, the answer starts with many of the same principles that have always driven good SEO. In other words, AEO isn't here to kill SEO, it's another reason to get it right.

What are AEO and GEO?

It's always helpful to understand what all of these new acronyms mean.

Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is the practice of creating and structuring content in a way that answer engines can easily understand it and then use it to respond to a user's question.
Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is a closely related term generally used when talking about visibility within AI-generated search experiences and tools.
Traditional SEO has always focused on helping pages to appear at the top of the search engine results. AEO and GEO extend that idea to environments where the users may receive an AI-generated answer rather than a list of websites.

AI systems really do still need useful, understandable, and trustworthy information to be able to produce good answers. This means that many of the signals that have long mattered for SEO will stay important when you think about how to rank in AI search results.

So is AEO basically good SEO?

Pretty much. There are a few extra considerations in there, though. Search has been moving away from just matching exact keywords for years. Search engines have become much savvier at understanding context and user intent. AI search pushes that even further. Google says traditional SEO practices still apply, so it’s worth listening to the big dogs!

Instead, you can concentrate on answering the topic properly and stop forcing your keywords where they don’t belong! A good AEO strategy, therefore, starts with a good SEO strategy. And if you've already got the basics, you're on your way. Let's take a look at the fundamentals that are worth getting right.

1. Create content that actually answers the question

Quality content is something that sounds obvious and has been bleated about for years, but it's still one of the most important parts of search engine optimisation - and Google agrees. Google’s SEO best practices still put helpful content front and centre. Before you write a page, you need to think about why someone is searching for that topic and give them the information that they are asking for.

This will also make your content easier for AI systems to understand it when someone asks a relevant question. You're not writing for AI, you just want to make sure that your content is useful enough that both people and search systems can understand its value.

2. Keep your keyword strategy tight

Keywords haven't disappeared. They can still tell you a lot about what people are searching for and the language they use when they search for it. The difference is that good SEO doesn't mean stuffing them into every available heading.

You want to use keyword research to understand the topic, related questions and the intent behind the search, and then you want to cover those subjects naturally. For example, someone researching “how to improve SEO” might also want to understand content quality or backlinks. Covering the broader topic helps to create a more complete resource.

3. Don't leave your internal links behind

Internal links help people to move through your website while showing search engines how your content relates and helps them to understand the structure of your website.

If you've written a huge guide to SEO, for example, you might link from it to a more detailed resource about keyword research or content strategy. This will create a connected group of useful content, rather than a collection of isolated blog posts. And that leads neatly into...

4. Build topical authority

Publishing one great article is always worth celebration, but building a genuinely useful collection of content around the subjects that your business knows well is way better. That's where topical authority comes in. External authority matters too, with quality backlinks and brand mentions, as that helps to establish your business as a credible source of information.

However, rather than trying to write about everything vaguely connected to your industry, you can focus on the areas where you actually have expertise. When you cover those important topics thoroughly enough and connect related pieces of content through internal links, you're going to be able to build that credibility. You want your website to provide clear signals that you're a source worth trusting.

5. Don’t forget about technical SEO

You can write the best article on the Internet, but it's not going to do much for your organic visibility if search engines struggle to access your website. And that's why the technical foundations do still matter. Your website needs to be crawlable. It should also be secure and reasonably quick while being mobile friendly at the same time.

Pages should always have logical URLs and descriptive titles. And you don't necessarily need to become a technical SEO specialist yourself. You just need to make sure that the foundations aren't working against everything you're trying to do.

How do you rank in AI search results?

There is really no magic AEO checklist that guarantees that your business will appear in an AI-generated answer. Anybody promising you one should probably be treated with a little bit of caution. AI search is quickly evolving, and different systems will select and present information in different ways.

What you can control is the quality and the accessibility of the information that you publish. If you're creating content based on genuine need and answering questions clearly, that's a pretty solid AEO strategy - and it happens to be a pretty solid SEO strategy.

Search is going to continue to change, and the acronyms probably will too, but if the rise of AEO has you wondering how to improve SEO for the age of AI, don't panic and rebuild your entire strategy. Start by doing the basics well, and when you're ready to take your strategy to the next level, consider bringing in SEO professionals who can turn those fundamentals into a long term strategy for your business.

How to do good SEO in the age of AI