AEO vs SEO
AEO vs SEO: a search page has 10 organic positions. An AI answer cites 8.7 sources - and most of those seats are already held by platforms and forums.
We counted the sources behind 80 AI answers to business owners' questions. The mean was 8.7 citations per answer. The most cited domains were YouTube, Reddit and Salesforce - not vendors with good service pages.
8.7
sources cited, on average, in an AI answer to a business owner's question
What we measured
- AI answers to business owners' questions cited a mean of 8.7 sources each, with a median of 9 and a maximum of 27.
- Across 80 owner-voiced questions the most cited domains were YouTube (47 answers), Reddit (34) and Salesforce (32) - a video platform and a forum outrank vendor pages.
- Answer engine optimisation competes for roughly 9 citation seats per answer, and several of those seats are structurally held by the platform being discussed.
- On the AEO-versus-SEO questions we examined, all 15 answers were produced by a web search, so a page can enter every one of them.
The arithmetic of an answer
A search results page has 10 organic positions and everybody knows what they are worth. An answer has a citation list, and until you count one, its shape is guesswork.
We counted. Across 80 questions asked in a business owner's own words, an answer cited a mean of 8.7 sources, a median of 9, and at the extreme 27.
So the surface is not smaller than search - it is roughly the same width. What differs is who is already sitting in it.
Who holds the seats today
| Cited domain | Answers citing it | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| youtube.com | 47 | video |
| reddit.com | 34 | forum |
| salesforce.com | 32 | vendor content library |
| business.google.com | 20 | platform documentation |
| support.google.com | 13 | platform documentation |
| facebook.com | 13 | platform |
| sba.gov | 10 | government |
| thehartford.com | 10 | vendor content library |
Counted across 80 owner-voiced questions in our corpus. Two of the most reliable seats go to a video platform and a forum; several more go to the operator of the platform being discussed.
What that means for the work
The vendors that did hold a seat did not win it with a service page. They won it with a reference library: a large software company's business guides, an insurer's small-business library, a bank's. Each owns a body of specific, checkable facts that an answer needs.
That is the same conclusion our page-side tests reached from the other direction. Structured data did not separate cited pages from uncited ones - it was slightly more common on the pages that were not cited, 80% against 70%. Sentence-level mirroring of the answer performed below a coin flip, winning 10 of 26 comparisons.
So AEO, done honestly, is less about marking up a page and more about being the source of a fact worth citing. It is slower and harder to fake, which is the whole reason it is worth anything.
The questions this page answers
aeo vs seo
1,300/moseo vs aeo
880/moaeo seo
590/mowhat is aeo vs seo?
31/mois aeo better than seo?
20/mois aeo replacing seo?
20/mohow is aeo different than seo?
19/mois seo better than aeo?
1/mo
8 questions, 2,861 searches a month between them. All 15 answers we examined on them were produced by a web search, which means a page can reach every one.
Who an assistant cites on these questions today
- optimizely.com 7
- reddit.com 6
- semrush.com 6
- youtube.com 6
- riverworksmarketing.com 4
- diib.com 3
- revelmarketing.com 3
- seolocale.com 3
- elinkdesign.com 3
- yotpo.com 3
20 distinct domains are cited across these questions; the 10 above are the most frequent, with the number of answers each appears in. Counted from the answers captured in our corpus, not from a market census.
What to ask before you buy
- Ask any AEO vendor which citation seats they are targeting and who currently holds them. If the answer is not a specific list of domains, they have not looked.
- Weigh schema and FAQ markup accordingly. Our comparison found them slightly more common on uncited pages; they do other useful jobs, but they are not the mechanism.
- The realistic goal on most questions is 1 seat out of about 9, taken from an incumbent that has held it for a while.
Honest limits of what we measured
- The 8.7 figure is measured on 80 owner-voiced questions in one corpus. Other question types will differ and we would not carry the number across without measuring.
- The corpus is a sample of captured questions, not the whole answer space. A domain absent from it has not been shown to be absent from AI answers.
- Cited-domain counts are the sources listed with the answer; how much any one of them shaped the wording is not something we can see.
Questions we get asked
Is AEO different from GEO?
In practice they name the same work, and the questions people ask under both abbreviations return the same kinds of answer. We keep separate pages because the measured competitor sets differ, not because the discipline does.
Do I need one seat or several?
There is no measured click-through rate from an AI citation, ours or anyone's, so we will not pretend to know what one seat is worth. What we can measure is whether you are in the list and how often.
Does more content mean more citations?
Our comparison points the other way: cited pages had a median of 2,207 words against 2,707 for uncited ones. Length was not what separated them.
How would you approach this for us?
Start with a reading of who is cited on the questions your customers actually ask. That list is the target, and it is specific enough to plan against.
Start with one free reading
One business, real questions, the raw answers back - before you decide on anything paid. If you are running this for a book of clients, say so and we will talk terms rather than quote a page price.
Free reading
Takes about a minute.
Related
Pricing is per category, because the work differs by how competitive the answers are. See every category we measure and what a reading costs →
Published 31 August 2026. Every figure on this page is recomputed from raw observation files by a single script, so any of them can be traced back to the readings behind it. We make your site citable. We do not promise placement in any assistant’s answer - we measure whether you are in it, and show you the raw answers either way.