AEO vs SEO: The ONE Big Difference

So, how is it possible that Apple gets recommended by AI platforms for best laptops even when apple. com is nowhere to be found in the traditional Google results? Well, that's the biggest difference between SEO and AEO. I'm Nathan Gotch and I've led thousands of successful search campaigns over last 15 years and I'm the author of the upcoming book AI SEO for Dummies. Let's jump right into it. So, let me start with the fact that AEO is not a completely new discipline from SEO. In fact, I would view SEO as the foundational layer and AEO is layered on top of that foundational layer. But with that said, let's dive into this because there are some clear differences and I have a real-life example for you. So, when we look at Apple in particular, this is one of the best examples to prove why this is very different. If you look on the left-hand side, we can see the traditional search results, okay? This is for the keyword best laptops and we can see Apple is completely nonexistent. They do not rank at all, okay? But then, if we look at Apple's performance across the AI platform, just going to be ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude, you can see that they absolutely crush it, okay? So, they dominate across all these AI answers. So, why is there this discrepancy? It comes down to totally different goals and totally different ways of measuring performance. So, in traditional search results, our number one objective is to identify a relevant keyword that maps well to what we sell. We build a relevant page for that keyword and then we publish that and Google comes, crawls that page, indexes that page, and ranks that page. And if we do a good job and we've covered all the other signals that are required, you can rank in these traditional search results. That is the objective. It is a page-centric strategy. One page, one objective, and that's to rank. And the objective of ranking here, obviously, this has changed a lot over the last many years here, but it used to be because you would rank well and that would drive organic CTR, meaning you would get clicks and you would get organic traffic to your website. And if you do a good job, that would convert into sales, okay? That was the reason for doing it. But what we're doing in AI is totally different. So, we can still do SEO to influence AI. However, the big thing here, what you're seeing very distinctly different, is that this is about entity optimization, right? So, we want to build the brand. Apple is the entity and they have one of the most well-known brands on the planet. They've been in business for over 50 years, but this is a perfect example where they have very poor SEO performance for a critical keyword that they need to have performance on, but it doesn't matter for their AI performance for that same exact phrase because they've taken care of all the other things I'm about to show you. So, this is the big shift that we need to be focused on, which is going from this idea of just like really hyper-focused on one page to thinking broadly about entity visibility, the overall driving the overall offsite performance of that brand, right? That is what influences the AI answers. Now, do these traditional search results influence AI answers? Absolutely because when you look at these results, you'll find that Apple is often cited on almost all of these results, okay? So, it's those citations, it's those brand mentions that influence what you're going to see here in the AI answers. And this is the thing that you really need to just focus in on. If you want to drive as much visibility for your brand, your client's brand, you want to get focused on all the stuff that's happening off of your website. I've been saying now for the last many years that I'd say it's 80% of your time should be spent off of your website. For me, I would argue it's upwards of 90%. I think 90% of your efforts to influence AI platforms should be spent off of your website. Now, these can still be your owned assets, right? You could focus on apple. com as that's the center hub, that's the mothership, but then you go after your owned assets, that'd be YouTube, LinkedIn, X, any sources that are known to have good retrieval. Those are going to be the places you want to focus in. Get your owned assets right first, then now start to venture into the earned media opportunities. So, a small example is like on YouTube, you can reach out to influencers, try to build a collaboration with them, and get them to mention your brand, get them to recommend your brand. And you do the same thing for all these external sources. This is absolutely critical. And then, one thing you can do is just run a simple visibility split test, okay? So, just run through this simple checklist. So, do we rank in traditional search? Very simple question. If the answer is no, let's fill in that gap first because we know that if we dominate the traditional search results for our most critical keywords, greatly increases our odds of influencing the AI answers. And then the inverse of that question, are we getting recommended in AI answers? If the answer is no, then we go back and reflect on all these variables where we need to make sure our brand is present there, okay? And then, if not, who is winning, right? Who's beating us? We need to look at the top competitors and see where are they getting brand mentions? Where are they doing marketing? This is These are the gaps that we have to fill. It's purely

math. If the competitors have more reviews than you, brand mentions branded searches than you, those are clear signals that we have gaps, okay? So, we want to narrow those gaps, grow the brand, and really at the end of the day, SEO, if you want to call it that, and AEO, it's really just digital marketing, okay? But we're going to call it what it is, but really the objective here is we want to, in a perfect world, we want to get this type of performance for our brand in the AI answers, but we also want to rank in traditional search. We need to really focus on search everywhere optimization. That is the goal. We don't all have the luxury of being as well-known as Apple, right? Not every brand is going to have that. In fact, it's extremely rare for a brand to be at this level. We don't have that luxury. So, we have to build our presence search. Do it with your own website and attack the other search results and try to get your brand mentioned on those other search results, okay? And then, finally, just to wrap this up, we want to focus, the key difference here is AEO versus SEO. What is that key difference? SEO helps you rank pages in search results and how is largely based on just traditional search algorithms. So, relevance and offsite signals, in other words, backlinks, okay? Those are the like the most key signals. For AEO, it's very different. It's about the entity itself and we need to optimize for that entity. We need to build the trust of that entity. Now, the good news is if you do good SEO, that's certainly going to make everything a lot easier. Now, good news, if you want to see your current performance or your client's performance inside of ChatGPT and the other AI platforms, we just built a new free tool. You can go ahead and run it. It doesn't cost anything. There's no credit card required. There's no upsells. Just go ahead and get your free report. I'll have a link below this video. It'll give you a score for visibility across the major AI platforms.