The SEO vs AEO debate is a distraction. Here's the only thing that actually matters.

What the Debate Is Actually About

There's a debate happening in marketing circles right now. Google's share of search is declining. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools are answering questions that people used to Google. So should you optimise for Google, or should you optimise to appear in AI-generated answers?

It's a reasonable question. It's also mostly a waste of time.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is the practice of creating content that ranks well in Google results. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the practice of creating content structured to be cited by AI tools when they answer questions. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is a newer term for essentially the same thing.

The technical differences between these approaches are real but modest. AEO tends to favour direct, structured answers. SEO tends to favour topical authority and link signals. The tools and tactics diverge at the margins.

But here's what they have in common: both reward content that is genuinely useful, accurate, and specific.

The Variable Everyone's Ignoring

When SEOs argue about whether to optimise for Google or AI, they're treating the algorithm as the variable. Change the algorithm, change the strategy.

The problem is that both algorithms - Google's and the large language models behind AI tools - are pointing in the same direction. They're trying to identify content that a human would find useful if they read it. Content that answers the question. Content that demonstrates real knowledge. Content that doesn't hedge everything into meaninglessness.

Google has spent fifteen years iterating toward this. Their helpful content updates, their E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), their crackdowns on thin and AI-generated spam: all of it points the same direction. Substance.

AI tools are even less forgiving. They're not matching keywords to queries. They're trying to find content that actually explains something. Vague, generic, SEO-padded content doesn't get cited. Specific, credible, well-structured content does.

What NZ Businesses Are Actually Publishing

Walk through the blog sections of most NZ business websites and you'll see the same thing. Posts titled "5 Ways AI Can Help Your Business." Posts that explain what cloud software is. Posts that list the benefits of outsourcing without saying anything about what those benefits actually are in a specific context.

This content isn't failing because it's optimised for the wrong engine. It's failing because it doesn't say anything. A person reading it doesn't learn anything they didn't already know. An AI tool reading it finds nothing citable.

The businesses seeing results from content, whether in Google rankings or AI citations, are the ones writing things like: "Here's what we saw when we automated our Xero invoice approval process and what we'd do differently." Or: "Here's why the standard advice on client onboarding doesn't work for consulting firms under 10 people, and what we do instead."

Specific. Grounded. A real point of view.

The One Test Worth Applying

Before you publish anything, ask this question: if someone read this, would they learn something they couldn't get from the first three Google results on this topic?

If yes, publish it. It will work in both environments.

If no, don't optimise it. Fix it.

This sounds simple. It is simple. It's also not what most content strategies are built around, because producing genuinely useful content is slower and harder than producing volume. It requires knowing something. It requires taking a position. It requires being willing to say things that some people will disagree with.

The Trap of Chasing Signals

The SEO industry has a long history of chasing technical signals. Word count, keyword density, meta descriptions, schema markup, internal linking ratios. Some of these things matter at the margins. None of them substitute for content that's actually worth reading.

AEO is developing its own version of this. People are experimenting with FAQ formatting, with concise answer blocks, with structured data markup, all trying to game the AI citation process.

Some of that experimentation will surface useful patterns. But the firms that will win, in Google and in AI search, are not the ones that cracked the AEO formula. They're the ones that built up a body of content that demonstrates genuine expertise in a specific area. That's what gets cited. That's what gets linked to. That's what builds an audience.

What to Focus On Instead

For a NZ business starting to think seriously about content, the question isn't "should I do SEO or AEO?" The question is: what do we know that our clients need to understand, and can we explain it clearly?

For an HR consultancy, that might be what actually goes wrong in redundancy processes and how to avoid it. For a financial adviser, it might be what the NZ Privacy Act 2020 actually changes about how client data has to be handled. For an AI agency, it might be which automation use cases deliver ROI in under six months and which ones don't.

That content works everywhere. It always has. The channel evolves; the underlying requirement doesn't.

Write something worth reading. The rest follows.

Learn how aisystemsanz approaches AEO for NZ businesses.