Traditional SEO is largely about ranking a page so someone clicks through to read it. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is about something different: structuring content clearly enough that an AI system can extract a specific answer directly, sometimes without the person ever visiting your site at all.
That's a genuinely distinct goal, and it needs distinct content structure: clear question-and-answer formatting, direct definitions, FAQ schema, and content organized around specific questions rather than long unstructured narrative.
AEO doesn't replace SEO — it builds on the same technical and content foundation. But the specific structuring work is different, and increasingly worth doing as more people get answers directly from AI systems rather than clicking through search results.