Is AEO Just SEO by Another Name?

Michael Transon 0:00 – 0:27

The window is really open right now. Nine out of ten brands in our research didn't have any presence in AI. What that extrapolates into is that in most categories, there's still a lot of room to get there. And if you can get there early, you're in a good position.

Michael Transon 0:28 – 0:54

Hey, how's it going? I'm Michael Transon. I happen to be the founder and CEO of a search agency for about the last 14 years, but I'm also a professional skeptic in this industry that tends to sell a lot of certainty. This podcast is called The Search Signal. We're going to spend time here talking about what's changing in the world of search marketing and what it also means for you and for the companies you work at.

Michael Transon 0:55 – 1:10

Before we get into today's episode, I'd like to roll through what's happening in the world of search this week. I've got four things from Google and two studies to walk through.

Michael Transon 1:11 – 1:44

First, Google confirmed this week that there's a new toggle in Search Console that'll let anyone opt out of showing up in either AI Overviews or AI mode. You can do that without touching your organic search results. This is starting to roll out in the UK first. Before you decide to flip that on, it's probably important to know what AI search is actually doing in terms of traffic for your business and your site. Most teams don't have a totally clear read on what's happening there yet.

Michael Transon 1:45 – 2:11

At the same time, Google added impression data for the first time inside Search Console for pages that are showing up in AI-generated responses. This is the first time we've had anything natively from Google on this. Inside Google Search Console, if you haven't pulled that yet, I'd say before you turn that opt-out switch on, this is a really good place to start.

Michael Transon 2:12 – 2:53

Google also launched Search Profiles: dedicated pages inside search for publishers and creators who've built a following on at least one major social or video platform. They pull your content into one location, let people follow you into the discover section of search, and tie all of that into knowledge panels. A new profile can even trigger a knowledge panel for someone who hasn't had one before as an individual. If you're running any kind of visibility program for executives or people at your company, check whether they qualify for this feature.

Michael Transon 2:54 – 3:30

Ask Maps is rolling out on mobile, which changes how local search handles complicated questions. Someone can ask about hours and amenities in one shot, and Google builds a single answer pulling from your Google Business Profile and third-party sources at the same time. If you've got physical locations, what I'd check is whether your profiles are complete enough to show up when someone's question is crossing a few different conditions at once.

Michael Transon 3:31 – 4:24

On the research side, Rand Fishkin at SparkToro partnered with SimilarWeb to look at how US searchers are behaving on Google. In the first few months of 2026, almost two-thirds of searches ended without a click. A couple of years ago that number was closer to six in ten. A decade ago, it was under half. They also found that when an AI Overview shows up, which by our research is more than a fifth of all searches right now, click-through rate drops by more than half on top of that. If your whole mental model of search is that it's only a traffic channel to your website, the data has been moving away from that for a while. It's picking up speed this year.

Michael Transon 4:25 – 5:26

The last one: Burson, a communications firm, looked at about 55,000 AI-generated responses across roughly 85 companies on several platforms. What they found is that getting mentioned in AI answers doesn't automatically buy you credibility. The brands whose claims people ultimately believed were making concrete, checkable statements: actual facts, product details, specifics about how the business operates, versus vague positioning language. The vague positioning got mentioned but didn't move anybody to act on it. If you go read what most brand positioning documents say, this might be a bigger problem than the visibility one.

Michael Transon 5:27 – 9:18

All right, that's the news. Let's get into this week's topic. Are AEO and SEO the same thing? If you've asked that question lately, you've probably gotten two very different answers, and both probably sound convincing. One camp says AEO is a completely different discipline that needs its own budget. You need to hire somebody else or another agency to handle it. The other camp says it's just SEO with a new name and whatever you're already paying for probably covers it. I don't think either of those is right.

Part of the confusion has to do with the acronym soup. Every couple of months there's a new label for this space: AEO, GEO, AI SEO, LLM optimization. And the second something has a name, somebody starts selling it to you as either a threat or an opportunity. That's made it genuinely hard to answer what is actually a pretty simple underlying question: does the same investment that's been historically building your organic visibility also build your AI visibility? Or are those two very different types of work? Because that answer changes how you allocate your budget and whether the SEO program you've been running actually covers this new and important part of the buyer's journey.

The good news is there's starting to be enough measurement data across enough websites and brands to give us a real answer. The data, in my opinion, beats a lot of the confident opinions that have been filling the void while everyone has been trying to figure this out.

Michael Transon 9:19 – 12:05

Before we get into the data, I want to spend a minute on what we're actually measuring, because if we don't use the right language here it can cause a lot of confusion downstream when we talk about implications for budget and tactical execution. When people say AI visibility, there are really only two specific signals, and they behave differently.

The first is mention rate: how often an AI platform names your brand in a response when someone asks a question in your general category. The second is citation rate: how often a platform actually links to content on your website as a source when it's building that answer. A brand can be mentioned without being cited, and cited without being mentioned, and there are two different problems behind each situation. Mentioned but not cited means the AI knows who you are and associates your business with the category, but it's not treating your content as referenceable material worth linking to. Cited but not mentioned is the inverse: the AI is pulling content from your site to build answers, but your name isn't surfacing in the response.

Mention rate is whether AI systems recognize you, meaning who you are and what you do. Citation rate is whether they trust your website and content as a legitimate source. You want a picture of both.

Michael Transon 12:06 – 16:16

The most direct way to test whether AI visibility and organic visibility are the same thing is to measure how much they're overlapping. If ranking well organically reliably gets you into AI answers, you'd see the pages AI platforms are citing line up tightly with the pages at the top of organic search for the same questions, and you'd see that relationship hold over time.

In late 2024, there were a couple of analyses finding something like three-quarters of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in the top 10 organically for the same query. About a year later, a BrightEdge study had that at a little over half. By earlier this year, two other analyses put it somewhere between a fifth and a third. This is not a slow drift. The relationship between what ranks and what gets cited has changed a lot in a very short window, and all the data is pointing in one direction.

The mechanism matters too. When a buyer asks an AI something like, "What's the best enterprise data management platform for a healthcare company?" the AI doesn't run one search and match it to one page. It breaks that question into sub-questions and retrieves sources across all of them simultaneously. What's enterprise data management? Who are the leading vendors? What are the healthcare-specific requirements? What do clients say about implementation? A brand that holds a strong position on the primary keyword but has thinner coverage across all those sub-questions can rank really well in search and still be missing from huge chunks of what the AI response is building. The question stops being how you rank for a specific term and starts becoming whether you have authoritative content across the full range of questions a buyer in your category is actually going to ask.

Michael Transon 16:17 – 20:28

So if organic rankings don't reliably predict AI visibility, what does? Ahrefs looked at something like 75,000 brands trying to find what correlates most strongly with AI Overview citations. Number one, it wasn't domain authority. It wasn't backlink counts. What it actually was is how often a brand simply gets mentioned by name across the web: in articles, reviews, comparison pages, and industry reports. The brands getting named in other people's content were showing up in AI search at way higher rates than brands with strong domain authority or strong backlink profiles that weren't getting mentioned.

The top 25% of brands by web mentions earned more than 10 times the AI overview mentions of the next quartile down. That is a huge compounding gap. It suggests that brands investing in third-party content early are building an advantage that's going to be harder to close later.

And let's be clear about what this is, because it's not backlinks. A backlink is another site linking to yours. A branded web mention is another site referencing you by name, whether or not there's a link attached. An article that calls your company a leader in the category, a review that names you, a comparison piece that includes you: that's what matters. And it has to be in content you don't own, on somebody else's website.

There's a structural reason behind this. Search engines rank pages by evaluating links and relevance signals - work the industry has been building programs around for a long time. AI systems do something different underneath. They build associations between brands, products, capabilities, and concepts based on how those things appear together in all the text they've processed. When your brand keeps appearing next to the topics that matter to your buyers, in credible third-party content, the system learns there's an association between your brand and those topics. A strong link profile without your name showing up in co-occurrence with your category topics means that association just isn't there for those AI systems to draw on.

Michael Transon 20:29 – 27:49

Now let's talk about what Victorious has found in our own data over the last six to nine months. We tested a couple hundred brands across five major industry verticals and looked at over 100,000 prompt responses in AI, then cross-referenced those against organic performance data. This is all in our Q1 quarterly search report, which is linked in the show notes.

Across the full data set, the correlation between domain authority and citation rate in AI was essentially zero. Against mention rate, it was barely above zero. The metric the industry has used for years as the main proxy for whether a website is authoritative has no meaningful predictive relationship with AI visibility. If you've been building domain authority as a route to AI visibility, the data says these are not correlated. I'm not saying that work is valueless - it's been done for good organic search reasons. But focusing on domain authority growth will not close the AI visibility gap.

Organic traffic, the actual business outcome domain authority was always trying to approximate, did show a moderate real relationship with AI mentions. So not domain authority, but organic traffic. The underlying result of good SEO work does transfer to AI visibility to a meaningful degree. The proxy metric doesn't.

We also broke this down by vertical. Healthcare brands had the strongest combined performance in our data set, highest mention rates and citation rates. Healthcare brands come with very clear entity identifiers: provider names, specialties, locations, network affiliations. The AI has a lot of organized, useful information to work with. SaaS also did well on both, for a different reason: the content ecosystem around software is dense. Reviews, comparisons, editorial coverage - that's what AI systems are drawing from consistently for that vertical.

Financial services showed something interesting: citations ran a little ahead of mentions. That category carries a lot of editorial media coverage, and AI platforms are treating those publications as authoritative. Brands are getting pulled into citations from editorial content even when the brand isn't the focus of the piece.

Legal was the most striking inversion. Brand mention rate was under 1% of relevant responses. Citation rate was above 10%. Legal content is doing a lot of work for AI answers, but the firm behind the content almost never gets named. That's an entity recognition problem, not a content quality problem. The content is clearly good enough to get cited. What's missing are signals connecting it to a specific brand identity that's clear enough for the AI to surface the attribution. The fix is third-party content and co-occurrence with those topics - not producing more content on the site.

Ecommerce showed the widest gap in the other direction: mentioned in close to one in five responses, cited in roughly one in 20. Those brands are recognized because of marketplace presence and consumer familiarity. Their owned content isn't being treated as reference material. Recognition and citation authority are running almost independently.

One more number: about 90% of the brands in our data set had no AI mentions at all in Q1 2026. In most categories, the window to build a meaningful AI presence before the space gets heavily contested is still open.

Michael Transon 27:50 – 31:51

So let's come back to where we started: is AEO just SEO by another name? What our research shows is that the brands with the strongest AI visibility didn't build a separate AEO program. They're the brands who took SEO seriously, built clarity around their entity and their associations with their category in third-party content, and built presence in content they don't own, with depth across the types of topics their buyers actually care about.

What's reassuring is that none of these are new requirements AI search invented. These are parts of search authority that have always been there, but shallow, metrics-chasing programs were always skipping them. Organic rankings never exposed that skipping. You could hold good rankings through strong technical optimization and link acquisition without ever building a real third-party brand presence. The rankings looked healthy while the underlying authority wasn't there. AI search is what finally made that gap visible.

So the honest answer has two halves. AI search and SEO aren't the same thing in the sense that organic rankings or keyword rankings will tell you anything reliable about your AI visibility - they won't. But they're also not two separate disciplines that need two different programs or two separate budgets. It's the same underlying project: building authority for your brand around the topics your buyers care about. It's just going to be measured across two different surfaces.

And when we look at brands with AI visibility gaps, it's almost always the same underlying issues: thin signals and weak presence in third-party content, shallow topic coverage on the site, not publishing enough content across the areas they should be. Those are SEO problems that existed before AI search did. AI search is just a new diagnostic that finally caught them.

Michael Transon 31:52 – 35:00

As we wrap up, here's what I'd take into your marketing meetings and budget planning. First, stop using old SEO metrics like domain authority or backlink counts as a proxy for AI visibility. The correlation is essentially zero. Keep doing SEO - it's still a profitable platform and it will continue to be. We just need to stop using that number to judge whether the program is building AI visibility.

Second, start tracking brand mention rate and AI citation rate, and track them separately. Cited but not mentioned means AI is using your content but can't associate it with your brand - that's a third-party presence problem. Mentioned but not cited means it knows you exist but doesn't trust your content as a reference - that's a content authority and depth problem.

Third, audit your third-party presence. How often is your name showing up next to category topics in content you don't own? Review sites, editorial coverage, comparison pieces, industry reports - that's the strongest predictor in all the research covered today. Most programs aren't tracking it at all. If you haven't executed on a third-party content strategy that goes beyond link building, get on that.

And the reason to move now: the window is still open. Nine out of ten brands in our research had no AI presence in Q1 2026. The compounding patterns in the data show that early movers are building a gap that's going to get harder to close the longer you wait. If you're responsible for running a marketing program at a company, I'd be trying to get something in motion in the next 90 days.

If you got something out of today's episode, go ahead and follow the show so the next one finds you. That's it for this week's episode of The Search Signal. We'll see you next week.