Being found is not the same as being understood.
Capabilities overlap. These are goals and buying models, not exclusive feature categories. Included work and responsibility depend on the product, plan and written scope.
Four approaches to search and AI representation| Buying question | Traditional SEO | AI SEO / GEO / AEO | AI visibility monitoring | AI answer alignment |
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| Primary question | Can buyers find our pages in search? | How do we appear in AI answers? | What is changing across prompts and AI surfaces? | Do answers represent the company correctly for the buyer question? |
| Typical measurements | Rankings, traffic and conversions. | Mentions, citations and visibility, with accuracy checks where offered. | Prompt coverage, sources, sentiment and trends, with accuracy and action features where offered. | Claim accuracy, category fit, buyer and use-case fit, differentiation, recommendation correctness and answer drift. |
| How improvement work is approached | Technical, content and authority work. | Content, technical and offsite improvements; capabilities depend on the selected product or service. | Recommendations, optimization or execution workflows depend on the selected platform and plan. | Research and a defined improvement or PR and creator materials, with agreed follow-up. |
| Who carries out changes | Your team or an agency under its agreed scope. | Your team, agents or a service provider, depending on the offer. | Your team, connected workflows or service support, depending on the offer. | The customer publishes the $99 and $399 website packages. Hands-on publishing and PR campaigns are separately quoted; PR outreach stays with the customer unless separately agreed. |
| What requires additional verification | Whether work improves the agreed search and business measures. | Whether comparable answers change and whether any business effect can be established. | Whether actions are completed and comparable answers change. | Whether subsequent comparable answers change. An observation alone does not prove source causation or a business outcome. |
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