Comparison
How is answer engine optimization different from SEO?
Answer engine optimization tries to get a company named inside an answer. SEO tries to get a URL ranked in a list of links. AEO needs the page to be crawlable, then asks which passage is worth repeating.
| Question | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Aim | Place a URL high in a list of links | Be named in the answer |
| What the person sees | Titles, snippets, and links | A paragraph, a name, and sometimes a citation |
| Unit that competes | A page, for a query | A passage, for a question |
| Technical floor | Crawl, index, internal links, speed, relevance | That same floor, plus answer-first HTML |
| Machine layer | Sitemap, robots.txt, canonical URL, often schema | The same layer, plus schema and llms.txt that repeat the visible sentences |
| Usual failure | The page is not where the click happens | The brand is omitted, or a competitor’s sentence is quoted |
| Success signal | Ranking position and clicks | The company is named, and the description is accurate |
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. If a crawler cannot fetch the page, an answer engine cannot cite it. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended, or hiding the answer in client-only JavaScript, removes the page from consideration. Named North’s crawler policy allows those crawlers on this site for that reason.
Does SEO replace AEO?
No. A page can rank and still never be named. Ranking means the URL was a candidate for a click. Naming means a sentence was safe to say. “We are a leading provider of solutions” is hard to say, so it is rarely selected. A definition is easy to say.
What should a company do first?
Write one sentence that states who the company is, what it does, and where it operates or who it serves. Put that sentence in the first paragraph of the homepage and the about page. Then make the structured data repeat it. The sequence is How to get your company cited by AI. The citation readiness check scores a site against that sequence.