SEO, or search engine optimization, has morphed so much over the past few years that at this point it’s little wonder that the digital marketing gurus keep up with their charades and saying it’s dead each year, or going to die.
One thing that has really thrown a wrench into conventional digital marketing, especially organic digital marketing channels like search engine optimization, has been the rise of AI models.
Now, optimizing for these models is called answer engine optimization, or AEO, and some agencies that offer traditional SEO services also offer answer engine optimization services.
One of the common questions out there is what’s the difference between SEO and answer engine optimization services. This short post will investigate that matter.
What’s Really the Difference Between Search and Answer Engines?
There are two main differences between search engines and answer engines an AI platforms: how people use them and how they assemble results.
Most users enter relatively short keywords and queries into search engines, which then analyze a series of items known as ranking signals, which include domain age, content depth, keywords, and over 200 others, to assemble results.
Most users interact slightly differently with answer engines like ChatGPT. They enter full interrogative statements in the form of long-tail keyword queries looking for a specific answer. The output from an answer engine is much more curated, and moreover, unlike search engines, they comprise large language models, or LLMs, that scrape their data set using relative symbolic and linguistic significance to try to ascertain, and output, an answer.
The SEO-AEO Crossover
If it sounds like search engines and answer engines operate in relatively similar ways and can be used to similar ends, you are correct. This is why some search engines like Google have integrated generative AI search features like the AI overview into the search generative experience, or SGE.
Today, you can ask some search engines full-fledged questions and get a specific answer, not entirely unlike what you’d get with an answer engine, so this begs the question: how are SEO and AEO services different?
Ultimately, since answer engines use the internet as part of their expanded data set, the same ranking signals that influence SEO will impact AEO – there’s just one big thing you need to key in on with answer engine optimization services.
What Answer Engine Services Come Down to
In SEO strategies, there have conventionally been considered four major pillars, which are technical, off-page, on-page, and content. Today, 90% of what makes good SEO, if not more, is content.
Answer engine optimization services consist almost entirely of content. If there is something grievously wrong with your website, it will need to be rectified from a technical perspective, but that does not change the fact that 99% of answer engine optimization services are about publishing answers.
Like in SEO, there is a focus on keywords, but it is much less rigid. Rather, answer engine optimization services focus on enriching your domain with succinct answers to questions that potential customers are searching.
This increases the chances that your website not only will succeed in the search engines, but through answer engines like the AI overview of Google SGE, search features like the People Also Ask section of the search results, and answer engines themselves like ChatGPT and Grok.
Getting Started
Investing in answer engine optimization services for your eCommerce business will improve authority, credibility, and trust, while also boosting your brand, your website, and in some instances, even your specific products’ organic visibility through answer engines and search engines. Get started working with a qualified agency who can deliver those results today.
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