Being cited isn’t the same work as ranking.

SEO optimises for ranking a page in a list of results. AEO optimises for being retrieved and cited inside a synthesised answer. Ranking depends largely on relevance and links; citation depends on entity clarity, extractability and external corroboration. They share a technical foundation — a site an assistant can’t crawl can’t be cited either — but the work above that foundation is different.

Technical and entity fixes can register within weeks. External corroboration — third-party citations, directory consistency, editorial mentions — takes three to six months to compound, because it depends on sources you don’t control. Most clients see measurable movement in citation share between months three and six.

Honestly, and with stated limits. AI-referred traffic is under-reported by every analytics platform, so we don’t lean on it. Our primary metric is citation share — the percentage of a fixed 30-prompt set where you’re named, tested monthly across four systems and logged with screenshots. We also track branded search volume as a lagging indicator of AI-driven awareness. Where we can’t prove causation, we say so.

No. Technical SEO is the foundation AEO sits on, and traditional search still drives the majority of discovery for most B2B companies. The change is that optimising only for ranking now leaves half the opportunity unaddressed.