AIVisCity Weekly #1: SEO vs AEO — What’s Actually Different
- Mayor of AIVisCity
- Mar 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 18
Welcome to the first issue of AIVisCity Weekly — a weekly briefing for those who want to understand how AI tools are changing the way customers discover businesses online.
In this week’s issue:
What’s Happening in AI Search — two recent developments from Google and ChatGPT that show how AI-generated answers are becoming a more important part of search.
Weekly Insight — a simple explanation of SEO vs AEO, and why the difference is less about tactics and more about the goal.
Try This Yourself — a quick way to see whether AI tools mention any businesses in your category, including yours.
Worth Reading — a few useful articles if you want to explore the topic further.
AIVisCity This Week — a quick note on our newly released guide, Getting Your Business Found by AI.
🔍 What’s Happening in AI Search
Two recent developments highlight how quickly AI is changing the way people search for information online.
Google AI Overview (AIO) grew 58% in just One Year
According to recent analysis, AI-generated summaries now appear on nearly half of Google search queries, a 58% increase from last year. Interestingly, only a small portion of the sources used in these summaries overlap with the traditional top search results.
This matters a lot because the user may never click a website link, even if it's ranked top of the search results.
OpenAI recently released GPT-5.4
OpenAI says GPT-5.4 improves how ChatGPT searches and combines information from the web, making AI answers feel more like a finished response than a list of links. The system can now browse multiple sources more effectively and combine them into a single response. This means AI assistants are increasingly acting less like search engines and more like research assistants that produce answers.
In fact, you may have already noticed this shift yourself. When you do search online today, how often do you just read the AI-generated summary and click the citation links there instead of the top site in the search results? Let us know by commenting on this post!
🔮 Weekly Insight: SEO vs AEO — What’s Actually Different?
You may have a rough idea of what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is about: helping a website appear higher in search results so customers can find it.
As AI assistants start answering questions directly, a new term has begun circulating in marketing discussions — AEO, short for Answer Engine Optimisation. Sometimes people refer it to GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) or AI visibility. These terms all point to the same shift: making it easier for AI systems to recognise and mention a business when responding to a question.
Despite the new terminology, AEO is not a completely different discipline from SEO. In fact, many of the underlying practices are very similar. Clear descriptions of what your business does, a well-structured website, consistent information across the web, and credible mentions from other sources all help both search engines and AI systems understand your business.
The real difference lies in the Objective.
SEO focuses on ranking. The aim is to appear near the top of a list of search results so that people click through to your website. On the other hand, AEO focuses on being included in the AI answer. When someone asks an AI assistant a question, the system reads information from many sources and decides which businesses to mention.
A useful way to picture the difference is to imagine your business is having a booth in Trade Fair. In the SEO world, success is a bit like having a booth close to the entrance. The closer you are to the front, the more visitors will see you first.
Now imagine a visitor walking into the trade fair and asking a guide: “Where should I go if I’m looking for a good coffee roaster?”
In such case, your goal is to make your booth very clear about what you do and what you offer to the guide. When the guide understands your business well, they are more likely to recommend your booth when the right visitor asks - even when you are deep into the exhibition hall.
That is essentially how AEO works with AI Tools (GPT, Google AI Overview, etc.)
So the difference can be summarised simply:
SEO helps people find your website (by rank high in search results).
AEO helps AI systems understand your business well enough to recommend it.
💻 Try This Yourself
Ask an AI Assistant About Your Business
Open an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and ask a question a potential customer might ask. For example:
“What are good accounting software options for freelancers?”
“Who are the best coffee roasters in Manchester?”
“Where can I find custom 3D printing services?”
Look at the answer carefully. Do any businesses get mentioned? Are specific brands recommended? Are sources cited?
Most importantly, is your business mentioned at all?
This quick exercise can give you a first glimpse of how AI systems currently interpret your industry — and whether your business is visible in those answers.
📕 Worth Reading
If you're curious to look deeper into how AI search is changing the internet, these articles are worth a look.
LLMs Are Overtaking Search. Here's How to Adjust Your Online Presence
Harvard Business Review
A clear explanation of how AI systems are starting to replace traditional search results with synthesized answers — and what that means for how organisations present information online.
Semrush Report: AI Overviews' Impact on Search in 2025
Semrush
A large-scale study analysing when Google's AI Overviews appear and how they affect click-through behaviour across different types of search queries.
How AI Is Reshaping Search Strategy in 2025
UNRVLD
Explores how generative AI summaries are changing how people interact with search results, with fewer clicks and more reliance on direct answers.
🌇 AIVisCity This Week
Our New Guide: Getting Your Business Found by AI
This week we released our new guide, Getting Your Business Found by AI.
It is a practical guide for small business owners who want to improve how their business is understood and recommended when customers use AI tools to ask for help. Rather than treating this as a technical SEO problem, the guide focuses on something more fundamental: how clearly your business is described, how consistent your signals are across the web, and how easy it is for AI systems to understand when you are relevant.
The book is built around a set of practical missions, designed to fit into normal business operations. It helps readers see how AI currently interprets their business, identify gaps or mixed signals, and improve them through small, manageable actions over time.
You can find the guide here:https://www.aiviscity.co.uk/found-by-ai-guide
👋 Until Next Week
How are you seeing AI affect the way people search for businesses in your industry?
If you have noticed changes — or if you tried the quick check in this issue — we’d love to hear your observations. Feel free to share them in the comments.
See you in the next issue of AIVisCity Weekly
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