Most of the work is the same. What differs is what gets measured, and that difference changes enough of the priorities to matter.
What is genuinely the same
Technical crawlability, because a model cannot read what it cannot fetch. Clear page structure, which matters more here rather than less. Consistent business information across the web. Being genuinely mentioned by other people.
If your SEO was good in the way that means useful content and real third-party mentions, most of it transfers directly. If it was volume and link acquisition, less does.
Anyone telling you AEO is a wholly new discipline is overstating it. Anyone telling you it is just SEO is understating it.
What actually differs
The outcome. SEO produces a position in a list of ten, and the user chooses. An answer engine has already chosen, names two or three businesses, and everyone else is absent rather than further down. There is no fourth place to occupy.
The measurement. Position tracking has no equivalent. The question becomes: across the questions your buyers ask, in what share of answers are you named, and who is named instead. And it splits in two, because being cited as a source and being named in the answer are different outcomes. Across the 608 answers we measured, plenty of brands supply the reading and a much smaller group gets the recommendation.
Where the leverage sits. In SEO your own site is the primary asset. In AI search your pages influence whether you are retrieved, and other people's pages influence whether you are recommended. In the category we track, Reddit is cited 225 times across 608 answers, ahead of every agency website in the field.
What a page is for. An SEO page satisfies a query better than the alternatives. An AEO page contains a passage clean enough to lift out and drop into an answer. Those overlap, and a page built purely to rank often has nothing liftable in it.
What differs in the deliverables
An SEO retainer typically contains keyword research, technical fixes, content production and link building.
An AEO engagement contains prompt selection, citation source claiming, content built around single questions, and third-party placement. The citation claiming is the piece with no real SEO equivalent, and in most categories it is the highest-value early work.
The question that sorts your current agency
Ask them: can you show me a prompt-level report, and do you separate being cited from being named?
An SEO agency that can do both is doing this work already and you do not need a second supplier. Many cannot, and that is the honest reason the specialist category exists rather than a marketing claim.
Do you need two agencies?
Usually not, and two is often worse than one. The work overlaps enough that split ownership produces duplicated effort and an argument about attribution.
Better arrangements: one agency that can demonstrate both, or an SEO agency plus a one-off AEO audit that tells them what to prioritize differently.
The uncomfortable part for both sides
AI search punishes the shortcuts more efficiently than Google did. A page built to rank rather than to answer used to work reasonably well. To a retrieval system it reads as a page with nothing in it, because that is what it is.
That is bad news for anyone whose SEO was volume-led, and it is why some SEO agencies have moved into this fast and others have not moved at all.
If you already have an SEO agency, what to change
For most businesses the answer is not to replace anyone. It is to change what gets reported and what gets prioritized.
Change the report first. Ask for a prompt-level view: the buyer questions, the engine, and two columns for cited and named. If they cannot produce it, that is the honest gap rather than a reason to leave. Many SEO teams can build it once they know it is the deliverable.
Reallocate roughly a third of the content budget to sources. Not more content. Claiming, correcting and completing the registers, directories and review platforms your category runs on. This is the highest-return work available in the first ninety days and it is usually nobody's job.
Add one external workstream. One placement, mention or community presence per month, tracked. It is the slowest lever and the one that decides whether you are recommended rather than merely read.
Keep everything technical. Crawlability, structure and speed matter as much here as in search, sometimes more. None of that work is wasted.
If after ninety days the citation figure has moved and the named figure has not, the gap is the external workstream, and that is a scope conversation rather than a supplier one.
What the reallocation is worth
“We've always grown through referrals - builders who know us pass our name on. That works, but it only reaches people who already know someone in the industry. Within a couple of weeks of the content going live, we had someone contact us directly through the website. That's a channel we didn't have before - and the enquiries have kept coming.
PROCERT is a building certification firm that had grown entirely on referrals. Within a couple of weeks of the work going live, someone who had never met them inquired directly through the website. Fur Magic went from absent to the most-cited brand in their category in three weeks, ahead of long-established competitors.
Both published with the starting number, the end number and the period: PROCERT and Fur Magic.
A worked example of the handover
A business with a three-year SEO relationship they did not want to end, and a visibility problem their agency could not see.
The conversation. They asked for a prompt-level report. The agency did not have one and said so. They asked whether cited and named were tracked separately. They were not.
What they did not do. Replace the agency. The technical work, the site structure and the content quality were all genuinely good, and none of that was the problem.
What they changed. Three things, agreed in one meeting. A tracked question set of fifteen, reported per prompt with two columns. A third of the content budget moved to claiming and correcting sources for six weeks. One external placement per month added to scope.
What happened. The citation figure moved inside two months, entirely from the claiming work. The named figure moved in month four, after the second external placement.
What the agency said afterwards. That the source work was the part they had not known to prioritize, and that once it was a named deliverable it was not hard.
Most of the time this is a scope conversation rather than a supplier one, and the scope conversation is much cheaper.
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Ashur Homa
Built and scaled a digital brand to $100M+ in sales with zero ad spend. Has helped businesses generate millions through AI go-to-market strategy. Leads growth at Omni Eclipse.
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