AEO vs SEO in 2026: what to structure on your site
Answer engines like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are quoting websites directly. Here is what to change on your pages so they are the ones being quoted.
Answer Engine Optimisation is not a replacement for SEO. It is a second surface. Buyers still search Google, but they increasingly ask an AI first and click a link only when they want to verify or buy.
What answer engines actually want
They want short, standalone, quotable answers. If your page opens with a warm brand paragraph and hides the definition three scrolls down, an AI will pull the definition from a competitor instead.
Five concrete changes
1. Put a clean one-sentence definition in the first forty words of every important page. 2. Use real semantic HTML: H1, H2, tables, and lists, not divs styled to look like them. 3. Add an FAQ block with question-shaped headings and short answers. 4. Emit FAQPage, Article, Product, and Person JSON-LD where relevant. 5. Keep an updated date visible on the page and in structured data.
What still matters from classic SEO
Technical foundations, topical authority, internal linking, and Core Web Vitals still decide whether your pages get crawled and considered in the first place. AEO is an addition on top of a healthy SEO base, not a replacement for one.