AEO vs. SEO: what actually carries over

It's tempting to treat AEO as 'SEO for robots' and apply the same playbook. Some of it transfers. Most of it doesn't.

What carries over: clear, well-structured content still matters. A page that plainly states what a product does, who it's for, and how it compares to alternatives is easier for a model to summarize accurately — the same clarity that helps a human skimming a page helps a model synthesizing an answer.

What doesn't carry over: keyword density, exact-match anchor text, and backlink volume are largely irrelevant to whether a model mentions you. There's no crawler counting keyword occurrences — there's a model that has (or hasn't) learned your brand is associated with a category, and a live answer that may or may not surface it.

The other big difference is measurement. SEO gives you a stable rank you can check anytime. AEO answers are generated fresh per request, per model, per phrasing of the question — so 'ranking' is really a mention rate across many prompts and platforms, not a single number.

That's why tracking AEO requires actually asking the questions, repeatedly, across platforms — which is the whole premise behind Scan My AEO's weekly scans.