Say you’ve spent the last three years building your organic search presence.
Your important pages are indexed. You’ve built service or product pages around the things customers search for. You’ve published useful content. You’ve earned links and mentions. Some of those pages are ranking.
Then someone asks:
“What’s our AEO strategy?”
And suddenly it sounds as though you need another search strategy.
Now you’re being told to publish FAQs, add more schema, get mentioned on Reddit, optimise for prompts, open your site to AI crawlers and restructure content so ChatGPT can understand it.
Some of those things may be worth looking at.
But I wouldn’t start there.
Before building a separate AEO strategy, I’d look at what your existing search strategy already covers — and where it stops doing enough.
Because if you’ve already invested in good SEO, you’re probably not starting from zero.
SEO and AEO Aren’t Two Completely Separate Systems
The way people discover businesses is changing.
A traditional search journey might look something like:
Search → Results → Website → Evaluation
An AI-mediated journey can look more like:
Question → Synthesised answer → Brands/sources → Further research
That difference matters.
Someone can now ask a detailed question, get several options explained to them and potentially form a shortlist before visiting any of those companies’ websites.
But that doesn’t mean everything we learned from SEO suddenly becomes irrelevant.
A technically sound website still matters.
Clear information about what your company does still matters.
Useful content still matters.
Authority and reputation still matter.
Making important information accessible to search systems still matters.
Google itself describes crawling, rendering and indexing as fundamental parts of how Search discovers and understands web content. Structured data can also give Google explicit information about a page and its meaning.
ChatGPT Search has its own discovery mechanisms. OpenAI says public websites can appear in ChatGPT Search and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot if you want content to be discoverable, surfaced and cited in ChatGPT Search. OpenAI also makes an important qualification: placement isn’t guaranteed.
So I don’t think the useful question is:
SEO or AEO?
I think it’s:
What does our existing search strategy already handle, and what needs to change as discovery becomes more AI-mediated?
I use five questions to work through that.
1. Can Search and Answer Engines Access You?
Start with the boring part.
Can search systems actually access the pages containing the information you want them to find?
For Google, that means the familiar technical SEO foundations: crawlability, indexability, sensible architecture, correct status codes, canonicalisation where needed and making sure important content isn’t accidentally hidden from Googlebot. Google can render JavaScript, although its own documentation acknowledges that JavaScript-powered sites introduce additional considerations.
For ChatGPT Search, there’s another check worth adding.
OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to help discover content for ChatGPT Search. If appearing in ChatGPT Search matters to you, check that you aren’t unintentionally blocking it in robots.txt.
And don’t confuse OAI-SearchBot with GPTBot.
OpenAI distinguishes the two: OAI-SearchBot is relevant to search discovery, while GPTBot controls whether content may be crawled for potential model training.
That’s a good example of where AEO adds something to an existing technical SEO process without requiring you to throw that process away.
If your technical SEO is already in good shape, you aren’t rebuilding the foundation.
You’re expanding the audit.
2. Can They Understand What You Actually Do?
Access isn’t enough.
Imagine landing on a company’s homepage and reading:
We empower organisations to unlock transformative growth through intelligent solutions.
What does the company actually sell?
Who is it for?
What problem does it solve?
A human can’t tell much from that sentence either.
So before worrying about whether an AI system “understands your entity,” I’d ask a much simpler question:
Is the information needed to understand the business actually clear?
Your important pages should make it relatively easy to establish things like:
- what the company does;
- what products or services it offers;
- who those products or services are for;
- what problems they solve;
- where the business operates, where relevant;
- and how the different parts of the business relate to one another.
Structured data can help search engines by providing explicit machine-readable information about a page, and Google supports structured data for things such as organisations, products, local businesses and other content types.
But I wouldn’t treat schema as a magic “AI visibility” switch.
If your website itself is vague, adding Organization markup doesn’t suddenly give you a clear positioning strategy.
Clear information first. Structured data where appropriate second.
3. Can They Connect You to the Problems Your Customers Describe?
This is where I think AEO becomes particularly interesting.
Companies tend to describe products and services.
Customers tend to describe situations.
A cybersecurity company might optimise a page around:
SOC 2 compliance software
But a potential customer using an answer engine might ask:
We’re a 50-person SaaS company starting to sell to enterprise healthcare clients. Customers are asking about SOC 2, but we don’t have a dedicated security person. What should we use?
Same underlying market.
Very different expression of intent.
Traditional keyword research is still useful here. I wouldn’t replace it with “prompt research.”
I’d add another layer to it.
Look at the situations surrounding the search:
Who is asking?
What are they trying to accomplish?
What constraint have they introduced?
What would make one solution more appropriate than another?
What terminology might they use before they know the name of the solution?
That can expose content gaps that keyword volumes alone don’t always make obvious.
Your website may explain your features perfectly while never explaining when those features become useful.
That’s the bridge I’d look for.
From keywords to situations
Instead of only asking:
What keywords do we want to rank for?
Also ask:
What would someone need to describe for our company to be a sensible answer?
Then look at whether your existing content actually supplies that information.
That might lead to new comparison pages, use-case content, industry pages, implementation guidance, FAQs or simply better explanations on pages you already have.
It doesn’t automatically mean publishing another 100 articles.
4. Is There Enough Evidence Beyond Your Own Website?
This is the area where I’d be most careful about sweeping AEO advice.
You’ll often hear things like:
“Get mentioned on Reddit.”
“Get more reviews.”
“Get listed on these ten sites.”
“LLMs love third-party mentions.”
The problem is that AI visibility isn’t one universal ranking system.
Different answer engines can use different retrieval systems and sources. Even within the same platform, the sources used can vary depending on the question.
So instead of deciding in advance that you need Reddit, PR or another directory, I’d investigate the actual competitive environment.
Take the prompts that matter to your business and look at:
- Which companies keep appearing?
- Which companies are being recommended rather than merely mentioned?
- What sources are cited, when citations are shown?
- How are those competitors described across the web?
- Which relevant industry publications, review platforms, directories or other independent sources mention them?
- What evidence supports the claims those companies make about themselves?
Then compare that footprint with yours.
Maybe the gap is reviews.
Maybe competitors have stronger industry coverage.
Maybe their positioning is simply much clearer.
Maybe they have useful content addressing a situation you’ve ignored.
Maybe your problem isn’t third-party evidence at all.
Investigate the gap before prescribing the tactic.
That’s much more useful than treating “get mentioned on Reddit” as an AEO strategy.
5. Are You Measuring the Right Outcome?
This might be the biggest adjustment.
If your entire AEO dashboard asks:
“Did ChatGPT cite our website?”
you’re measuring only one type of visibility.
A brand could be mentioned without being cited.
It could be accurately described without being recommended.
It could be recommended while another website supplies the citation.
And it could receive plenty of citations without generating meaningful commercial results.
So I would separate the outcomes.
Accuracy
When someone asks about your company, is it described correctly?
Mention visibility
Does your company appear in relevant category or market conversations?
Recommendation visibility
When someone describes a problem you genuinely solve, are you entering the consideration set?
Citation visibility
Is your website being used as a source when relevant?
Referral traffic
Are people actually reaching your website from AI search experiences?
OpenAI says ChatGPT referral URLs include utm_source=chatgpt.com, which means ChatGPT Search referrals can be tracked in analytics platforms such as Google Analytics.
Commercial outcomes
Are any of those visits, mentions or recommendations contributing to enquiries, demos, leads or revenue?
Because eventually that’s what matters.
An increase in “AI visibility” that has no relationship to the way your customers discover and evaluate businesses may be interesting.
It isn’t automatically valuable.
An AEO Strategy Should Tell You What Not to Do
This is where a checklist becomes a strategy.
You don’t need to optimise all five areas simultaneously.
You need to identify the constraint.
For example:
If important content can’t be accessed:
Fix the technical problem before commissioning 20 new articles.
If your company is described inaccurately:
Fix the information and messaging surrounding the business before chasing more mentions.
If your company is understood correctly but doesn’t appear for relevant buyer situations:
Investigate the gap between how you describe your offering and how customers describe their problems.
If competitors consistently appear and you don’t:
Compare their content, positioning, search presence and external evidence with yours before deciding what tactic to copy.
If you’re already appearing frequently:
Stop assuming “more visibility” is automatically the objective. Work out whether that visibility is producing the right kind of discovery and eventually contributing to business outcomes.
That’s what I mean by treating AEO as strategy rather than another optimisation checklist.
The process becomes:
Diagnose → Find the constraint → Prioritise → Test → Measure
Then repeat.
So, Do You Actually Need a Separate AEO Strategy?
Probably not in the way it’s often being sold.
You don’t need one search strategy for Google, another for ChatGPT, another for Claude and another for whichever answer engine launches next month.
You need a modern search strategy that accounts for the different ways people now discover, evaluate and choose businesses.
SEO remains part of that.
Technical accessibility remains part of it.
Content remains part of it.
Brand authority and third-party evidence remain part of it.
AI-mediated discovery adds new questions: how your business appears in generated answers, whether it’s understood accurately, whether it’s associated with relevant buyer situations, whether it’s entering consideration sets and whether any of that creates commercial value.
The objective isn’t to abandon SEO for AEO.
It’s to understand what changed, what didn’t, and where your next investment will actually make a difference.
Before You Build an AEO Strategy, Diagnose the Problem
If your starting point is simply “our brand isn’t showing up in ChatGPT,” don’t jump straight into optimisation.
First establish what “not showing up” actually means.
Is the problem accessibility? Understanding? Association? Citation? Recommendation? Or something else?
I break that diagnostic process down in Why Isn’t My Brand Showing Up in ChatGPT?
Read the AI visibility diagnostic
And if you want to understand how Strategy by Sukriti approaches search across SEO and AI-mediated discovery: