SEO vs AEO
you need both now.
SEO ranks you on Google. AEO (answer engine optimisation, also called AI visibility) gets you named by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI. They are close cousins and the same on-page work feeds both, so Clearway does them together, and runs the playbook on our own site first.
Two audiences search now: Google, and the AI.
For twenty years SEO meant one thing: rank on Google. That still matters, but it is no longer the whole game. More buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Copilot a question and take the answer without ever clicking a blue link. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the work of becoming the source those assistants quote. The good news: AI assistants and Google's crawler read the same on-page signals, so fixing them once helps both.
SEO vs AEO, side by side.
The simplest way to hold them apart: SEO is how you win a page of Google links, AEO is how you become the name an AI assistant says out loud. With SEO the customer still clicks through and chooses; with AEO the assistant has already narrowed it to three or four businesses before the customer does anything, so being named is everything. SEO has mature, well-known ranking signals; AEO is newer, probabilistic, and reads a different layer (your Bing and Google listings, reviews, consistent details, and content written to be quoted).
Here is the part most people miss: you can rank well on Google and still be invisible in ChatGPT, because AI assistants do not read your Google rankings. That is why SEO alone is no longer enough, and why doing only AEO leaves the Google traffic on the table. The honest answer in 2026 is both. The good news is the foundational work overlaps by roughly two thirds, so doing them together costs far less than buying them separately.
What the work actually is.
On the SEO side: a clean, fast, crawlable site; the right titles and meta; structured data that hands Google the facts; a Google Business Profile that wins the local map; reviews; and content built around what people actually search. On the AEO side: making sure the AI crawlers are allowed, that your key facts sit in the raw HTML (most AI bots do not run JavaScript), answer-format content the assistants can lift cleanly, an honest third-party footprint, and instant indexing so new pages reach Bing, and therefore ChatGPT and Copilot, in minutes instead of weeks.
It is not a trick or a one-off. Rankings and citations are positions you hold against competitors who are also pushing, so the work is ongoing. The foundation gets built once, in your site; the climbing is monthly.
We practise this on our own site first.
This page is the proof. Clearway Apps runs the exact SEO and AEO playbook we would run for you, on our own site, before we charge anyone for it: prerendered pages so the AI can read us, schema on every page, a Google Business Profile and a Bing listing, instant indexing, and content written to be quoted. We would rather show you a site that is found and cited than tell you we know how. Being early on AEO is a real edge, most agencies are not even talking about it yet.
Want AI visibility as a simple monthly plan with monthly tracking? That is Clearway Found, the AI visibility packages, with a free AI Visibility Check to see where you stand first.
See Clearway Found plansOften paired with seo & aeo.
Website Design
Fast, mobile-first websites for small businesses. Pick an industry template or we design something custom. Built to rank, built to convert, live in days, not months.
Web App Development
Custom web apps for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets and plugins. Booking systems, job trackers, customer portals, admin dashboards, built on a modern stack and delivered in weeks.
Automation
Custom workflow automation and AI-driven tooling that takes repetitive admin off your plate. Quoting, invoicing, lead triage, reporting, done automatically, so you don't have to.
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