u/magus523

I am told FAQ schema helps, but my testing says otherwise. ChatGPT only reads rendered page text.

So if I put something in the rendered page text, like a description about the service, and a specific named package, will that increase the chance it says what I want it to say?

I know these things are rando, but RAG should be able to be influenced. it's not pulling everything from training data. It's pulling from reviews right? H1 on the page?

Man you can't ask these tools how they work. They just hallucinate answers. We can only test.

AEO is not SEO 2.0. Here's the actual difference. (Flame suit on.)

I've spent the last year mapping Answer Engine Optimization as a discipline. The number one mistake I see is SEO firms treating it like an extension of what they already do. It isn't. This is a different game with very different relationship between business and buyer.

In SEO you follow the rules Google spelled out. In AEO you figure them out, because the field is poorly documented and nobody has handed you the playbook.

In SEO you dealt with one authority, standardized and dominant. In AEO you're dealing with at least four major AI engines that don't agree with each other. A brand visible on ChatGPT can be completely invisible on Claude or Perplexity.

In SEO your buyer made the decision alone. In AEO the AI actively makes a recommendation and pre-sells the customer before they ever reach your site.

In SEO businesses competed with list aggregators that outranked them on their own category and sold the traffic back to them. In AEO your site can become the Source of Truth and cut out the middleman entirely.

In SEO if you didn't hit page one you kept writing and building links. Problems could be fixed later. In AEO if you aren't baked into the model's training before the window closes, you wait until the next training round. The brands already inside become harder and harder to displace.

In SEO crappy content could still rank with enough backlinks. In AEO the model looks for the best human-created content and original thought. Thin content gets ignored entirely.

In SEO it was about backlinks. In AEO it's about entity relations — who you're connected to, what you're cited alongside, what the model associates you with.

In SEO you hacked the PageRank algorithm for time on page and last click. In AEO you show up in enough places that the model builds a neural association between your name and the problem you solve. It's ambient, not algorithmic.

In SEO it was highly technical and formulaic. In AEO it's more like PR. Relational. It's about who mentions you and in what context.

In SEO domain authority from backlinks was the primary signal. In AEO YouTube carries a citation advantage over every other video platform that isn't even close.

In SEO signals were page-level. In AEO schema is load-bearing infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.

In SEO you aimed for position one on page one. In AEO you're aiming for the citation link inside the answer, or better, for the model to name you unprompted before the buyer types anything.

SEO is deterministic. AEO is probabilistic.

SEO was about one search, one result. AEO is about conversations, memory, and what the model has already decided about you before the buyer shows up.

That last layer, where the model recommends you without a live search triggering it, is what I call the weight layer. Getting into it is a different discipline than anything SEO built. Happy to go deeper on any of these.