You might have seen “AEO” floating around lately, usually next to a lot of confident claims about it being the new SEO, or SEO being dead, or some other headline that’s mostly trying to get you to click. So let’s slow down and actually explain what AEO is and whether it’s something you need to be doing anything about right now.

What is AEO? Here’s the short version

Answer engine optimisation is about making your content easy for AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and voice assistants to pull directly into an answer. Instead of someone clicking through to your website to find information, the AI reads your page, pulls out the relevant bit and gives the customer the answer right there. Sometimes with a link to your site, sometimes without.

Traditional SEO is about ranking well in a list of search results. AEO is about being the source an AI decides to quote when someone asks it a question directly.

Is AEO actually different from SEO or just a new name for it?

Honestly, it’s mostly the same fundamentals wearing a new label, with a few extra things worth paying attention to. Clear, well structured content, accurate business information and a website that actually answers questions still does most of the work. We went into the mechanics of this in our post on whether AI content hurts your SEO, and touched on the AI search side more broadly in where AI actually helps a small business, worth a read if you haven’t seen either of those yet.

The bit that’s genuinely a bit different with AEO is how directly you’re answering questions. SEO content can afford to build up to a point over a few paragraphs. AI tools tend to prefer content that gets to the answer fast, in a clear sentence or two, ideally in a format like a heading followed directly by the answer, rather than a long wind up.

Does this actually matter for a small, local business?

More than you’d think. When someone asks an AI tool something like “what’s the best time to get my car serviced before a long drive” or “how much does a typical kitchen renovation cost in Sydney”, the AI is pulling that answer from somewhere. If your website has content that clearly and directly answers questions your customers are already asking, you’re in the running to be that source. If it doesn’t, you’re simply not part of the conversation, even if you’d have been a great fit for that customer.

It ties in closely with local search too, since a lot of these AI powered answers still lean heavily on local relevance and up to date business information. If you haven’t already, our piece on why local SEO matters covers a lot of the same ground from the local angle specifically.

What actually helps, practically

You don’t need to overhaul your whole website for this. A few things genuinely help.

Answer the actual questions your customers ask, somewhere on your site. FAQ style sections work well for this, so do individual blog posts built around one specific question. Keep your business details (hours, location, services, pricing where relevant) accurate and consistent everywhere they appear online, since AI tools cross check this kind of thing across multiple sources before trusting it. And keep sentences reasonably direct, an AI tool pulling a quote from your page will grab the clearest sentence available, so make sure that sentence is actually correct and useful on its own, without needing the rest of the paragraph for context.

What we’d tell you not to worry about

There’s a fair bit of noise around llms.txt files and various technical add ons being sold as essential for AEO right now. It’s a genuine proposal and some AI tools do use it, but most of it isn’t required for a typical local business site, and none of it replaces having clear, accurate content in the first place. If someone’s trying to sell you a quick technical fix without asking what your content actually looks like first, that’s worth being a little sceptical of.

Where AEO fits into what we do

This isn’t really a separate service you need to bolt on, it’s become part of doing SEO properly in 2026. It’s baked into how we approach SEO work for clients now, alongside the usual technical and content side of things, rather than something sold separately.

If you’re not sure whether your site is set up to be picked up by AI search the way it should be, that’s an easy thing for us to take a look at. Get in touch and we’ll give you a straight answer on where you actually stand.