What is AEO and how is it different from SEO?

The mechanics differ because the crawlers do not all work the same way, and treating them as one group is where most AEO advice goes wrong. OpenAI's GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, Anthropic's ClaudeBot and Claude-User, and PerplexityBot all fetch raw HTML, with no evidence any of them execute JavaScript. Google and Apple are the exceptions. Googlebot renders with headless Chromium, and Google's own guidance says a page qualifies for AI Overviews and AI Mode simply by being indexed and eligible for Search. Apple states outright that Applebot may render a page in a browser. So a client-rendered site can hold position one, qualify for an AI Overview, and still be absent from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, which is a narrower and more useful problem than the one usually described.

What that changes in practice is where the work goes. It moves to how a site is understood by machines rather than how it looks to humans: structured data that states plainly what each page is, semantic markup a parser can follow without guessing, and a CMS modelled so every meaningful entity gets its own indexable URL rather than being trapped inside a filter or a tab.

Auditing for it means comparing what Google renders against what AI crawlers actually see, and treating the gap between the two as the fix list.

A site a machine can read is a site a person can find.