I'm a brand strategist, not a developer — but every campaign I run eventually turns into a conversation with someone's engineering team. Over the past year, that conversation has shifted. It used to be about meta tags and sitemaps. Now it's about whether a site is even readable by the models powering AI answers. Here's the technical breakdown I actually walk dev teams through.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
This is the one most engineers already know. Crawlable HTML, clean URL structure, fast Core Web Vitals, valid schema.org markup, an accurate sitemap.xml and robots.txt. The mechanics haven't changed much — what's changed is how much weight structured data carries now, because it's the same markup that AEO and GEO systems lean on.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
This is about formatting content so it can be lifted directly into a featured snippet or a voice/chat answer. Practically, that means: a direct, self-contained answer to the implied question within the first 1-2 sentences of a section, genuine FAQ schema (FAQPage in JSON-LD, not just visually-styled accordions), and heading structure that maps to actual questions people ask, not just keyword strings. If a section can't be understood correctly when read on its own, out of context, it won't get picked up.
