In 2024 SEO meant "rank on Google." In 2026, half of high-intent queries never touch a search results page — they happen inside ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.
This is why every premium site we ship now is engineered for two things simultaneously: classical SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
What's actually different about AEO
Classical SEO ranks pages. AEO gets your brand quoted inside an AI's answer. The mechanics:
- Schema markup (FAQ, Service, Organization, Article)
- Semantic chunking — short, declarative paragraphs an LLM can lift verbatim
- Entity-rich copy mapped to Knowledge Graph nodes
- Conversational headings that match how people ask AIs questions
- E-E-A-T markup (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)
The crawl rules are different too. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and OAI-SearchBot each respect robots.txt differently. We allow all of them — opting out of AI crawlers is opting out of the next decade of search.
The minimum viable AEO stack
- 1JSON-LD with FAQ + Service + Organization schema on every key page
- 2One declarative answer paragraph per H2/H3 (the AI cites these)
- 3Entity-rich anchor text and internal linking
- 4Author / studio bios with Person schema
- 5Topical hub-and-spoke structure (one pillar page, 5-10 spoke pages per topic)
Done well, this gets you cited inside ChatGPT and Perplexity within 30-60 days of launch.
What still works for classical SEO
Everything you already know: technical SEO, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, topical authority, backlinks. The difference is that AEO compounds faster for new sites. SEO is a 6-12 month game. AEO can show citations within weeks if the schema is clean.
Both matter. Ship both.