Comparison

AI SEO vs SEO

The short version: classic SEO asks whether a search engine can find your page and decide it is relevant. AI-era SEO asks whether a machine can read your page well enough to use what it says. Those overlap heavily — and then, at the one point that matters most, they don't.

Where they agree

Most of the fundamentals are shared, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. Status codes, a working sitemap.xml, a sensible title and meta description, one canonical URL, headings that describe their sections — all of it serves both. If your basics are broken, no amount of "AI optimisation" fixes that.

Where they diverge

	Classic SEO	AI readability
What is measured	Whether you rank for a query	Whether the document a crawler receives contains your content
JavaScript	Search engines render it, on a delay	Most AI crawlers don't run it at all — the static HTML is the whole page
How it fails	Loudly and late: impressions and rankings drop, Search Console shows it	Silently: nothing errors, the crawler simply reads an empty page
Blocking a crawler	Blocking Googlebot removes you from Google	Blocking `OAI-SearchBot` or `Claude-SearchBot` removes you from those answers — a different switch entirely
Structured data	Earns rich results, if Google feels like it	Is read as facts — often the only unambiguous statement about what your site is

The middle row is the one worth internalising. A ranking problem shows itself in your numbers. A readability problem shows itself in nothing — which is why testing what a crawler actually receives is the only way to find it.

GEO, AEO, LLMO: the naming mess

GEO (generative engine optimisation), AEO (answer engine optimisation) and LLMO are mostly names for the same shift, coined by different people at different times. The naming is not where the value is, and it is not worth arguing about. What matters is that each of them, stripped of the label, asks a measurable question: can a machine read this page, and does the page tell it anything unambiguous?

That is also why we do not sell a "GEO score". A score you cannot reproduce is a vibe with a number attached. Ours is a ruleset you can read (all 25 checks are public), applied to a fetch you can repeat with curl.

What to do about it

Fix the shared basics first — they are cheap and they serve everything.
Then check what arrives without JavaScript. If the substance isn't in the static HTML, nothing downstream can use it: not AI answers, not accessibility tools, not archives.
Then get your declarations right — who you are, what each page is: JSON-LD, and the two files that state your policy and your map, robots.txt and llms.txt.

Run the AI SEO audit and it reports where you stand on all three, per page, with the evidence — including the parts it deliberately does not cover.