Short answer. SEO isn’t dead and AEO isn’t a separate job. Google says you don’t need anything special to show up in its AI answers, so we fixed our own site the boring way and watched one page for three weeks. It turned up for more searches, including full questions people typed. Getting the click is the hard part now, and here’s why.
Everyone and their dog is posting about SEO versus AEO this month. We’ve been banging on about it since February last year, again in July and again in May. Three posts, same conclusion. At some point you have to stop telling people and show them.
Google already answered the AEO question
There’s a whole industry selling AEO as a new thing you need to buy. Google’s own guidance on AI Overviews and AI Mode says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations. No special schema. No AI text files. Your page needs to be indexed and eligible to show in search, and the usual basics apply.
So when someone sells you an AEO package that’s separate from your SEO, ask what’s in it that isn’t SEO. Most of the time the honest answer is nothing.
What AI tools do need is to understand who you are, what you do and who for, and to find the same answer everywhere they look. That’s not new either. It’s just less forgiving now.
What we changed on our own site
At the end of September we ran our own audit on projectseven.co.nz and our technology studio’s site, the same one we run for clients. It wasn’t flattering. Here’s some of what we fixed.
- The two sites now say who they are and how they’re related, in the code Google and AI tools read as well as the footer.
- Both sites now point to our Google profiles, our socials and each other, so every source tells the same story.
- Pages that were competing with each other got a clear canonical, and the thin ones got taken out of the index.
- We set up Bing Webmaster Tools. Not every AI tool asks Google.
- We added an llms.txt file. Google says it doesn’t need one. It took ten minutes, so we did it anyway, and I’m not going to pretend it moves the needle.
Then we picked one page to work on properly. Our Should You Automate This? page had been sitting on page two for months doing nothing. We rewrote the title around what people search for, added five real examples written as the questions people ask (“Can invoices go straight into Xero?”), added FAQs that answer the obvious questions, cost included, and linked to it from four older posts that talk about automation.
What happened. Not a victory lap.
Here’s Search Console for that one page, three weeks either side of the change.
| 7 to 27 Sep | 28 Sep to 18 Oct | |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 59 | 97 |
| Clicks | 0 | 1 |
| Average position | 21.2 | 38 |
So it’s showing up for more searches, and further down the page for most of them. That’s normal when a page starts getting tested against bigger, broader searches like “business process automation services”. The average position goes backwards before it goes forwards.
The bit I liked was in the queries list. Someone searched “how do i automate non core brand management tasks?” and we showed up eleventh. That’s a full question, typed like you’d ask a person. People don’t search in keywords anymore, and a page written as answers to questions gets a look in.
One click in three weeks won’t pay any bills. We’ll check again at six weeks and I’ll tell you what it says, good or bad.
Then I looked at every question
That one search sent me down a hole. Across the whole site, over the last three months, we turned up in Google for 112 different searches written as questions. How, what, why, should, can. Those questions got us 821 impressions.
And zero clicks.
The one that stings is “how much should a small business spend on ppc monthly? auckland”. We came up third, on average, 91 times. Not one click.
My bet is Google answered it before anyone scrolled to us. There’s data on this. Pew Research tracked real people’s browsing and found they clicked a normal search result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it didn’t. Links inside the summary got clicked 1% of the time.
So being found and getting the visit are two different jobs now. Here’s what we’re doing about the second one.
- Answer the question in the first two lines. Our marketing spend post is the page Google picked for that PPC question, and the answer was buried halfway down. It now has a short answer at the top with a real number range.
- Write headings as the questions people type. Someone typed “how to get my website found nz”, so our SEO page is getting a heading that answers exactly that.
- Give people something the summary can’t. A worked example, a calculator, our own numbers. If the AI answer covers everything on your page, there’s nothing left to click for.
What I’d check on yours
You don’t need an AEO package to start. You need about an hour.
- Ask ChatGPT and Gemini what you do and who you do it for. If the answer’s wrong or vague, your site’s probably the reason.
- Search your business name and check your Google profile, website and socials all say the same thing.
- In Search Console, go to Performance, add a query filter, choose custom regex and paste in
^(how|what|why|when|where|who|which|can|should|is|do|does|are)\sto see every question you turned up for. Look at position and clicks side by side. - Pick one page and fix it properly. Ten pages done a bit won’t move anything.
- Write down this month’s numbers before you change anything. Otherwise you’ll never know what worked.
If you’d like a hand, this is what our SEO work looks like for clients, or just ask us to have a look.
Sources checked 20 October 2026. Search Console figures are from our own account for projectseven.co.nz.
