SEO stabilizes your rank in a list of results. AEO makes you the answer inside an AI response. We have found that you need both, but they are not the same thing. In the Bay Area industrial market, the gap between the two is where most leads are currently being lost.
What Is the Core Difference?
| Feature | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in Google search results | Be cited in AI-generated answers |
| User Agent | Human browsing and clicking | AI model retrieving and citing |
| Main Metric | Rankings and Traffic | Citation Frequency and Selection Rate |
Traditional SEO targets an algorithm that likes popularity and clicks. AEO targets a retrieval engine that likes factual density and precise specs.
If your page is popular but vague, it might rank on Google but will fail in ChatGPT. We have seen this countless times in our technical audits. The AI sees your site, but it cannot find the specific data it needs to confidently cite you.
Do You Need Both?
Yes. You cannot have AEO without a solid SEO foundation. If your site is not indexed, it will not be retrieved. SEO gets you into the library. AEO ensures the librarian actually picks up your book and reads from it.
We often see pages ranking #3 on Google for "Santa Clara machining" that never appear in a Perplexity answer. This is usually because the content is written for a human glancing at a page, not a machine analyzing a snippet.
Where SEO Ends and AEO Begins
SEO handles the table stakes: page speed, mobile-friendliness, and site architecture. This is the handoff point. Once the machine can crawl your site, AEO takes over to make the data inside those pages "citable."
The speed of results is a major difference. Traditional SEO for competitive keywords can take 6–12 months. We see AEO improvements—like moving from zero to dominant citation share—in as little as 4–8 weeks.
Industrial AEO Techniques
Specification Structuring
Converting material specs and tolerance data into clean HTML tables instead of static PDFs.
Entity Precision
Explicitly linking your brand name and location to your specific technical capabilities in every paragraph.