How to win SEO and AEO in 2026

Gaining online visibility in 2026 isn’t just about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and higher rankings. With the rise of artificial intelligence, AI-powered answer engines are changing the way users find information or make purchasing decisions.

To appear in both search engines and AI systems, businesses need to combine traditional SEO strategies with answer engine optimization (AEO) tactics. This includes creating high-quality, structured content, providing direct answers, establishing authority, and more.

Continue reading as I guide you through how to win SEO and AEO in 2026. I’ll show you the differences between them and how they can complement each other.

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What is AEO?

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing your content so that AI-powered engines can easily understand and cite it in generated answers. It applies to engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and even voice assistants like Alexa.

Here’s an example of AEO: if you search for “What is the best Shopify image compression app?”, you can see multiple app recommendations, including TinyIMG. It’s proof that our AEO strategies are effective at signaling authority to AI systems.

The success metric of AEO is how often your content or brand appears in AI systems. According to statistics by Forbes Advisor, 67% of users are already likely to use ChatGPT or other AI tools for search instead of traditional search engines, such as Google.

So, this strategy has become important for driving traffic, gaining user trust, and potentially increasing conversions.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving your website so it ranks higher in traditional search engines, like Google or Bing. Optimizations can include writing unique & structured content, improving keywords, building authority, technical improvements, getting backlinks, and more.

SEO success can be measured by the ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) – the higher your website appears, the more traffic you’re likely to get.

However, you can also measure SEO results by other features. For example, your brand may appear in the AI Overview, top stories, the People Also Ask section, and more.

AEO vs SEO: key differences

The main difference between SEO and AEO is that SEO focuses on optimizing for traditional search engines, whereas AEO focuses on appearing in AI-generated answers. You can see the main differences between the two practices below.

How do SEO and AEO complement each other?

Both SEO and AEO strive to deliver the most relevant and authoritative content to readers, except through different channels. Here are a few key points on how SEO and AEO complement each other:

• Both rely on unique content. Whether you’re optimizing for SEO or AEO, both of them value content that’s well-researched, contains expert insights or first-hand experience, and is structured in a hierarchical manner.
• Both prioritize authority. Domains that have backlinks and strong authority, which are classic SEO signals, are more likely to be cited in AI-powered engines.
• AI explores deeper content. AI doesn’t necessarily take information from your high-ranking page. Instead, it can explore and pull deeper pages from your website, like documentation or specific blog posts.
• Citation patterns differ by AI tool. A study by Ahrefs found that Perplexity has the lowest overlap with Google’s rankings, with 28.6% of cited URLs being in Google’s top 10 results. Meanwhile, the biggest overlap was with ChatGPT.

How to win both SEO and AEO

To win both SEO and AEO, focusing on keywords and generic content with small changes isn’t enough. Now, the best strategy to increase visibility in both traditional search engines and AI systems is to build authority and create clear, unique, and structured content. Here are the main steps to win both SEO and AEO:

1. Set up structured data
2. Focus on unique content
3. Build up authority
4. Use clear content structure
5. Optimize content with entities
6. Regularly update your content
7. Improve your website speed

Now, let's review all of these steps in more detail.

1. Set up structured data

Structured data is organized and easy to scan information about your pages that traditional and AI-powered search engines use to understand your website.

In SEO, it helps promote rich results, such as showing your product price, shipping information, or reviews straight in the search results page.

Meanwhile, in AEO, structured data helps AI systems get the main facts about your pages or products quickly. A study by Peter Schanbacher found that the FAQPage schema can improve the chances of being cited in AI responses 13 times, while the Product schema can increase it by 4 times.

You can set up structured data manually, but it requires coding knowledge. If you’re not familiar with it, hire an expert or use a third-party app.

For example, on Shopify, TinyIMG makes adding JSON-LD structured data easy – all you need to do is add details relevant to your business, including shipping, return policy, and similar. Meanwhile, the Product schema is added automatically as soon as you embed the app.

2. Focus on unique content

SEO and AEO both prioritize unique content instead of generic information. For example, Google continuously stresses the importance of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T) considerations.

It means you should create content that involves first-hand experience, deeper knowledge of the topic (like expert insights), and authoritativeness to support website trust.

This also helps provide Large Language Models (LLMs), like GPT-5 or Gemini, unique insights instead of generic data that AI systems are trained on.

As an example, when I type “Shopify product image size” into Google Search, my “Best Shopify image sizes” article is on the first page:

If I insert the same query in ChatGPT, my article is also among the listed sources:

This shows that unique content, which includes first-hand experience, uses trusted sources to back up claims, and more, can help both SEO and AEO.

3. Build up authority

Brands that keep getting mentioned across different websites are building up site authority and signal trust to traditional and AI search engines.

To develop authority, you should consider focusing on your backlink and brand mention strategies. A backlink is a link from another website that points to yours, while brand mentions are mentions of your brand, which can be both linked or unlinked.

Here are a few strategies you can try:

• Make sure your content is well-researched, includes surveys or expert insights that others would want to link to
• Create co-branded content or conduct studies or interviews through collaboration
• Offer guest posts for companies with high website authority
• Give out comments as an expert of your own niche to blogs or other websites

4. Use a clear content structure

If you structure your content in a clear and logical way, it’s going to be easy for readers to skim through and for search engines and LLMs to understand. Here are a few tips you can use to ensure both traditional and AI-powered search engines can easily scan, extract, and understand your content:

• Hierarchical heading structure – use H1 only once per page to establish the topic and use H2, H3, H4 and other headings to further expand on the topic. Avoid inconsistencies, like jumping from H2 to H4 when there’s no H3 between them.
• Use lists – content is easier to comprehend when information is put into bulleted or numbered lists. For example, you can put product features into bullet lists to make it easy to skim through.
• Maintain consistency – ensure your whole page uses the same style and layout so traditional and AI search engines can understand and follow the content more easily.
• Short and direct answers – begin from explaining the essence of each heading in the first paragraph (around 40-60 words) and expand on details later on.

For example, here’s an article about SSD cards with an H2 “What is an SSD?” The text in the first paragraph focuses on a direct answer about what exactly an SSD card is.

Only after the direct explanation of the meaning does the article go on to further expand on additional information. It uses a numbered list to clearly establish how an SSD works, making it easy to scan.

5. Optimize content with entities

Improving your content with entities helps provide AI and traditional search engines with a deeper understanding of your brand or its products.

For example, if you’re selling a smartphone, your primary entity will be a specific model, like “iPhone 15 Pro.” But for AI systems to cite you, you’ll need to include supporting entities for more context.

You can use the Google Cloud Natural Language AI to see what entities it recognizes in your text and use it to optimize your content with ones that it didn’t detect.

Here’s what to keep in mind when optimizing with entities:

• Consistent terminology – use the same names for tools or products throughout the page. For example, use “ThermoSense Pro” without changing it to “TS-Pro” or other abbreviations that aren’t widely accepted.
• Supporting entities – for AI systems to cite you, you’ll need to include supporting entities for more context. These can be related to features, like “recycled polyester,” or those related to use cases, like “sensitive skin” or “noise cancelling.”
• Related topics – always make sure you include related subtopics about a product or theme. For instance, for a “waterflosser,” subtopics can include device cleaning, pricing, usage instructions, or similar.

6. Regularly update your content

Content updates are important for keeping your pages relevant. It’s a ranking factor for SEO that keeps content quality high, especially if the relevancy of the content tends to change.

According to a study by Gorilla Marketing, out of 1,000+ updated pages, around 43% experienced a boost in organic traffic over a 6-month period.

Additionally, a study by Seer Interactive found that LLMs also prefer fresh content, with 94% of hits occurring on content published within the last 5 years.

To keep your content up-to-date, follow these tips:

• Review and update factual information
• Find more recent studies or statistics that back up your claims
• Review if any of the links or references lead to outdated or discontinued tools or sources
• Think whether there are any new relevant headings you could include
• Update visuals to match your brand style if it has recently changed
• Review whether search intent is still relevant
• Check screenshot relevancy, like graphs with outdated statistics

7. Improve your website speed

AI-powered engines and LLMs often crawl content from the web to generate answers. If your pages take too long to load, AI systems may struggle to get a hold of your content and understand it. This reduces your chances of getting cited.

Plus, while not a direct ranking factor, speed is also crucial for SEO. If your content doesn’t load or takes forever to open, you’ll experience higher bounce rates. This can send negative signals to Google, which may affect your rankings.

That’s why it’s important to run your pages through free tools like PageSpeed Insights and optimize your page load time, visual stability, and responsiveness based on its suggestions. Additionally, there are a few ways you can boost your website speed:

• Optimize images. According to the HTTP archive, images can take up around 27% of total page weight. Make sure you resize images and compress them to save storage and boost speed.
• Delete unnecessary apps. Each additional app on your website inserts scripts to your website, which can overload it. So check if there are any apps that you no longer use and delete them.
• Minify CSS and JavaScript resources. Website code can often involve excessive elements that wouldn’t affect functionality when deleted, such as developer comments.
• Enable lazy loading. Lazy loading initially loads only the elements of a page that the user needs, while others are loaded when the user scrolls to them, ensuring the website loads faster.

For Shopify users, most of these tasks can be automated with the TinyIMG app. It automates oversized image resizing and compression and lets you enable lazy loading and minify files in one click.

How to track SEO and AEO results

Tracking SEO & AEO results is simple if you have the right tools. With free platforms like the Google Search Console (GSC), you can monitor essential SEO metrics, such as:

• Keyword ranking changes – how the average position for specific queries changes over time.
• Impressions – how often your page appears in search results.
• Clicks – how many clicks your page gets.
• Click-through rate (CTR) – how effective your meta title and meta description is at attracting clicks. If you identify pages with low clicks but a high number of impressions, it’s a sign to optimize metadata.
• Top performing pages – which pages are gaining visibility in search engines.

However, if you want to track AEO results and compare LLM traffic against other channels, you can scrape and calculate data with Python or other coding platforms. If you don’t have coding knowledge, a paid tool like Ahrefs is a more practical solution. Here are a few metrics that it can show you:

• AI mentions – check when your brand appears in AI answers.
• Impressions – how many people could see your mentions, based on search volume.
• AI share of voice – your brand’s share of visibility versus competitors.
• Traffic channels – lets you see what percent of total traffic comes from AI.
• Visitors – shows the amount of visitors that came from AI-generated answers, their visit duration, and bounce rate.

Keep in mind that LLM traffic is usually insignificant because AI tools give direct answers and rarely send users to websites. Even when they mention a brand, users often search for it manually, so tools like Ahrefs categorize it as direct traffic rather than LLM traffic.

Final thoughts

Winning both SEO and AEO is about combining the best practices for both to maximize visibility across multiple channels. Traditional search engines still drive traffic and sales, but AI engines like ChatGPT are also becoming a preferred way for users to search for information or look for products to buy.

To ensure you don’t sacrifice SEO over AEO or vice versa, write unique content with expert insights and build authority with backlinks and brand mentions. You should also add structured data to make information easy for machines to understand and optimize content with entities.

For Shopify users, the TinyIMG app can automate JSON-LD setup, give you page-level SEO checklists, and optimize speed, letting you focus on crafting your best content pieces.

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About the author

Kristina Jaruseviciute

Kristina is a Senior Writer at TinyIMG responsible for informing and educating readers on all things Shopify-related. In her writings, she covers a broad range of topics, from the best apps and themes for Shopify merchants to tips on how to optimize your website for SEO, performance, and higher conversion rates.