AEO vs SEO: what's the difference for a contractor?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of earning a high position on a search results page so buyers click through to your site. AEO (answer engine optimization, also called GEO, generative engine optimization) is the practice of getting your business named and cited inside the AI-written answer itself, on engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. The difference sounds subtle. For a contractor it changes what winning looks like.

AEO is optimizing for the answer rather than the results page. When a homeowner asks an AI who to hire, the engine retrieves a handful of trusted sources, then writes a recommendation that names a short list of companies. AEO is the work of becoming one of those names: publishing pages the engines cite, maintaining the review and listing signals they trust, and measuring how often you appear across repeated runs. You'll see AEO, GEO, AI SEO, and "AI visibility" used interchangeably. They all describe the same practice.

• The prize: SEO wins a position among ten-plus links; AEO wins one of a handful of named slots in a finished answer. There is no page two of an AI answer.
• The unit of content: SEO ranks pages; AEO lifts passages. Engines quote self-contained, 40–60 word answers, so a page's sections matter more than its overall rank.
• The measurement: SEO tracks positions, which are stable day to day; AEO tracks frequencies, because AI answers change run to run and can only be measured by asking repeatedly.
• The surface area: SEO is mostly Google; AEO spans multiple engines that disagree with each other. Reddit was about 46.7% of Perplexity's top cited domains on commercial queries in 2025 and roughly 24% by January 2026 (Profound), while Ahrefs found 88% of ChatGPT's cited URLs come from its general web-search retrieval rather than news, Reddit, YouTube, or academic sources. Each engine keeps its own list.

Yes, and SEO is now partly an input to AEO. AI engines retrieve their sources through live web search, so pages that can't be found can't be cited. But the reverse doesn't hold: ranking well doesn't guarantee being named, because the engine still chooses which retrieved companies make the answer. Think of SEO as getting into the engine's reading pile and AEO as getting into its final draft.

1. Baseline your visibility: run your market's buying questions repeatedly across engines and record how often you're named versus your competitors.
2. Publish one priced cost guide for your highest-value service and city. Cost questions are among the highest-intent queries in every trade, and engines answer them by citing whoever published real numbers.
3. Tighten the trust layer: review velocity, identical name/phone/service-area everywhere, license details on your site.
4. Add FAQ and Article schema so engines can parse your pages without guessing.
5. Re-measure weekly, per engine, and publish against the questions you're losing.