AEO services and SEO services share a starting point - both aim to get a business in front of buyers who are searching - but the mechanics diverge. Traditional SEO optimizes for Google's blue-link rankings. AEO services optimize for whether an AI model trusts your site enough to quote it back to the user. The signals that earn a blue-link ranking and the signals that earn an AI citation are mostly different, and in a few places they pull against each other.
A site tuned for SEO five years ago is, more often than not, poorly positioned for AEO today. That is the gap AEO services close, and the reason we built a separate practice around it instead of bolting AEO onto a traditional SEO workflow. Most agencies treat AEO as an add-on line item because that is how their internal process was built. We do the opposite: AEO is the foundation, and traditional SEO rankings follow as a side effect of a properly engineered AEO site.