Preparing for the Next Era of Search: Navigating the overlap between SEO and AEO
The answer is becoming the search result
Search used to come with a pretty reliable next step: the click. You asked Google a question, scanned the results, and chose where to go for the answer.
That familiar exchange is changing.
Today, 60% of U.S. adults say they read AI summaries at the top of search results. Add Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI-powered search experiences to the mix, and visiting websites to get your answers seems increasingly obsolete.
For marketers, that creates a new challenge. Being easy to find still matters, but so does being understood, trusted, and cited by the platforms delivering those answers.
So, does preparing for this new search experience mean shifting our focus from search engine optimization (SEO) to answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Not quite.
The key is understanding how the two work together, because the next era of search is already taking shape in the space where SEO and AEO overlap
Search is changing, and so is the value of a ranking
For years, the logic of SEO was relatively straightforward. Higher rankings meant greater visibility, greater visibility meant more clicks, and more clicks created more opportunities to turn search traffic into business.
That connection hasn’t disappeared, but it isn’t nearly as tidy as it used to be.
Pew Research Center found that when a Google AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no AI summary. That same research found that appearing within the summary didn’t necessarily earn the click either: users clicked a cited source in just 1% of visits.
Other research points in the same direction. An Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords found that the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page.
It would be easy to look at those numbers and conclude that rankings now matter far less than they used to. That’s not quite the full story. Rankings still matter. What needs to change is how we think about what a high ranking actually delivers.
In an AI-powered search environment, there are now at least three questions worth asking: Are we being found? Are we being cited? And are we being clicked?
The answers won’t always be the same.
SEO and AEO aren't competing strategies
It would be tempting to treat this as the beginning of the AEO era and start rewriting the search playbook accordingly. Marketing does love a new acronym.
But SEO and AEO aren’t competing for the same job.
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps make content discoverable, relevant, and authoritative in traditional search. Answer engine optimization (AEO) builds on that foundation, with greater attention to whether search and AI platforms can understand your content well enough to use it when answering a question.
The overlap between the two is substantial. Google’s own guidance makes that clear: its generative AI features are rooted in the same core ranking and quality systems that power Search, and established SEO best practices remain foundational to appearing in AI experiences.
That means the fundamentals haven’t suddenly expired. Technical accessibility still matters. Search intent still matters. Authority, expertise, and trust still matter. And useful, original content written for actual humans matters perhaps more than ever.
What’s changing is what we’re asking all of those things to accomplish.
As search becomes more answer-driven, the information we publish needs to be clear, credible, and valuable enough to become part of the answer. But before it can become the answer, it still needs to be found.
That’s why SEO and AEO work better together than apart.
What changes when you're optimizing for answers?
Getting found is still the starting point. But when a search platform can assemble an answer from multiple sources, simply being relevant to a keyword isn’t enough. Your content needs to contribute something useful to the conversation.
That starts with understanding what people are really trying to accomplish when they search. They’re asking questions, weighing options, comparing products, solving problems, and making decisions. The better your content addresses those needs, the more useful it becomes to people and the systems trying to answer them.
Knowing what your audience needs is one thing. Making sure your business is part of the answer AI serves up to them is another. Clear headings, focused sections, direct answers, and logical structure make your expertise easier for search platforms and people to understand, and easier to draw from when AI is building an answer.
That isn’t some secret AEO formula. It’s an approach built on established SEO fundamentals that have helped strong content perform well in search for years.
But structure can only take you so far. If everyone is answering the same questions with variations of the same information, being clear won’t make you particularly worth citing.
Original research can. So can first-party data, genuine expertise, strong opinions backed by evidence, and insights earned through actual experience. Recent Semrush research found that qualities including clear summarization, E-E-A-T signals, question-and-answer formatting, and strong section structure were positively associated with AI citations.
The opportunity, then, isn’t to produce more content “for AI”. It’s to produce more content worth finding, trusting, and citing.
Being #1 doesn't guarantee you'll be the answer
Still, strong content is only part of the search equation. SEO has always depended on a wider set of signals, including technical foundations, off-page authority, credibility, and the broader digital presence that helps establish who and what can be trusted. As search expands into AI-generated answers, many of those established SEO signals remain relevant.
But they don’t necessarily produce the same results.
Appearing at the top of Google is a clear sign that you’re getting a lot right. Yet even a number-one ranking won’t guarantee your content a place in an AI-generated answer.
When Ahrefs looked at 863,000 Google searches and four million URLs cited in AI Overviews, only 38% of those sources also appeared among the first 10 search results. Nearly a third didn’t make the top 100 at all.
Ahrefs also found a striking difference between platforms. Just 10% of the URLs ChatGPT cited for short-tail queries appeared in Google’s top 10. For Perplexity, that jumped to 65%. AI visibility isn’t consistent from one platform to the next, and being visible in one search experience doesn’t guarantee the same visibility in another.
The key takeaway from that research isn’t that rankings matter less. It’s that rankings alone no longer tell us the whole visibility story. “Where do we rank?” is still an important question, but we also need to understand where and how our brand is being cited and represented in AI-generated answers, and how those answers are impacting clicks. That means widening our view of search performance to include AI visibility alongside the rankings, traffic, and behaviour we already track.
Fewer clicks don't necessarily mean less value
As search visibility expands beyond traditional SERP rankings and into AI-generated answers, it becomes necessary to look at clicks in a different light.
We’ve already seen that AI-generated answers are reducing click-through rates. But that doesn’t make the click itself any less valuable. What’s changing is how much we can learn from the number of clicks alone.
AI is now doing much of the work that used to happen after the click. People can compare options, narrow their choices, and find answers to many of their questions before they ever reach a website.
By the time they do click, they may have a much better idea of what they’re looking for. Early research offers an interesting glimpse of what that could mean. In March 2026, Adobe found that AI-referred visitors to U.S. retail sites converted 42% better than non-AI traffic. They also spent 48% more time on site and viewed 13% more pages per visit.
What those numbers suggest is that the clicks we get via AI may carry greater intent. That makes volume only one part of the performance story, and raises a bigger question: are the metrics we’ve relied on for years still telling us enough?
Search measurement needs to catch up
For marketers, all of this means looking at search performance a little differently. Rankings, organic traffic, click-through rates, and conversions still matter, but they can’t capture everything that happens when part of the search journey takes place before someone reaches the website.
We now have more to account for. Are our businesses appearing in AI-generated answers? Which content is being cited? How are our brands being represented? And what happens when that visibility does, or doesn’t, lead to a website visit?
Answering those questions requires us to look beyond some of the metrics we’ve traditionally relied on. In a 2026 Semrush survey, nearly half of marketers said they were struggling to measure the impact of AI search on pipeline or revenue.
That means we need tools that can give us a clear view of what’s happening within AI search. Those tools are starting to emerge. Google has already added dedicated generative AI reporting to Search Console, giving marketers a better look at how their content performs within its AI search experiences.
That’s progress, and the more our view of search expands, the less sense it makes to approach its different parts in isolation.
Don't choose between SEO and AEO. Build for search.
With more ways to ask questions, more places to get answers, and more opportunities to encounter a business before ever reaching its website, search has become a far bigger playing field. Optimizing for search now requires a broader game plan.
That game plan starts with SEO, but it doesn’t end there. AEO builds on the same foundation, extending our focus to where and how businesses appear within AI-generated answers. Bring the two together, and we’re not optimizing for one version of search or another. We’re building for how people actually search today.