AEO vs SEO: Do You Need an AI Visibility Consultant or an SEO Agency?

AEO vs SEO: is AI visibility just SEO with a new name?

This is the objection I see and hear most, and I think it’s mostly a defense mechanism. Maybe this will help: SEO isn’t dead. SEO and AEO/GEO should be run in parallel.

People love to frame it as SEO vs GEO, like you have to pick one. You don’t. Picture a Venn diagram: SEO is one circle, AI visibility is a much bigger circle, and SEO only overlaps a slice of it. That slice is real and it matters — you can’t get cited by AI if your site can’t be crawled or ranked in the first place. But everything outside the overlap — the third-party sources AI trusts, the language your buyers actually use, the way AI reads the entire internet to build its answer — is ground SEO was never built to cover.

What are you actually optimizing for?

Keywords versus prompts versus entire conversations. Remember how everyone was posting those ChatGPT images of themselves a few months back, and it somehow knew all sorts of things about them? Your AI platform knows you — that’s a whole different ball game than a Google search term.

An SEO agency optimizes for keywords: short, clipped phrases. The average Google search is only a few words. Five years ago my faucet hunt would’ve been “bathroom faucet matte black,” click, compare, done.

But that’s not how it went this time. Instead of a keyword, I described my whole situation — selling, not renovating, here’s the bathroom — and kept the conversation going from one problem to the next, across faucets and carpet and packing, with AI recommending things I actually went and bought. That’s what AI visibility optimizes for: the messy, specific, full-sentence way people describe what they’re navigating, across an entire back-and-forth instead of a single search box.

So the work isn’t “what keywords do we rank for.” It’s “what is my buyer actually saying when they describe the problem my product solves — and are we the answer AI gives back?” I figure that out through audience intelligence — going where your audience actually talks and pulling out the real patterns and vocabulary. You can’t optimize for a conversation you’ve never heard your buyer have.

Where does the SEO agency stop and the consultant start?

Roughly: the SEO agency’s world is your website. The AI visibility consultant’s world is the whole internet — because that’s where AI reads.

Your website should be the foundation. Get it optimized, get it clean, check that box. But AI builds its answer from everywhere — Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, industry publications, review sites. The brands that get cited are the ones showing up clearly and consistently across every place AI pulls from. A flashy homepage alone doesn’t get you there.

So a big part of my job is figuring out how you become part of those third-party conversations, instead of letting the entire internet write your story for you. Most SEO agencies never touch that.

Can’t my SEO agency just add an “AI visibility” report?

A lot of them are, and I’ve watched those add-on scores mislead plenty of people.

I had a client whose SEO tool showed an AI visibility score of 85% — “leading across platforms.” Looked fantastic. You’d screenshot that into a deck and feel great. But when I clicked into the individual platforms, a competitor was clearly ahead on Perplexity, and that “leading” headline read the same on every tab, including the one we were losing on.

Then I ran the actual questions AI asks about the problem that brand exists to solve. They had 0% share of voice on 94% of them. Both numbers were technically true — one measured aggregate positioning, the other measured whether the brand showed up when a real buyer asked a real question. I go deeper on why a single AI visibility score misleads in its own post.

I saw it from the other direction with a different client. One month their AI mentions dropped, and if you only looked at that number you’d assume something broke. But their citations went up at the same time — AI had stopped just name-dropping them and started pulling them in as the actual cited source, which is exactly what you want. A number going down that was actually great news. Someone has to know the difference, or you’ll optimize away from the thing that’s working.

An add-on report hands you a number. Knowing whether that number is good news, a false alarm, or a real problem — and what to actually do about it — is the job, and no dashboard does that part for you.

What does an AI visibility consultant actually do, then?

“AI visibility” can sound vague. For me it’s an ongoing loop, not a thing you do once and walk away from, and it runs in a few stages:

• An audit first — what AI actually says about your brand right now, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI, and where the gaps are. You can’t fix what you haven’t measured, and most brands are guessing. (Here’s how I run one from scratch.)
• Audience intelligence — the real questions and the real words your buyers use, so we optimize for what they actually ask instead of a list your team brainstormed in a meeting.
• Strategy on your own site — what changes, what gets added, what questions each page needs to answer so AI can pull a clean answer straight from you.
• The third-party layer — Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, industry press. AI trusts those more than your homepage, so a big piece of the job is getting you into those conversations instead of letting everyone else write your story for you.
• Ongoing monitoring — your competitors move and the models change, so what got you cited in June might not in September. I run a monthly check on where we gained, where we slipped, and what to pull next. (I call the whole feedback loop the AI Intelligence Loop.)

An SEO agency usually isn’t set up for most of that — their world is your website ranking, and this reaches well past it.

So which one do I actually need?

Honestly? Usually both, doing different jobs.

Keep the SEO work — the foundation is real and AI often pulls from what already ranks. But if your buyers are describing their problems to AI and getting your competitors back in the answer, an SEO report won’t even tell you it’s happening. That’s the layer a consultant owns: the ongoing measurement, the audience intelligence, the audit that catches where you’re invisible, and the strategy to fix it for your specific brand in your specific industry.

If you’ve got an SEO agency you trust, great — keep them and bring me in for the part they can’t see.

Do you always need to hire this out?

Not necessarily. If you’re a small brand with a little time to experiment, you can absolutely start on your own — ask AI about your own category, watch which sources it keeps citing, and go make yourself present in those places. You’ll learn a lot just doing that.

Where a strategist makes the difference is the interpretation. I’ve spent over 16 years in marketing strategy, so when I look at a pile of AI outputs I’m reading more than where you show up. I’m reading why you do or don’t, what your buyer is actually thinking when they ask the question, and which single change will move the most. That’s the psychology underneath the data, and it’s the part someone newer to marketing wouldn’t catch yet. A small business especially can punch way above its weight with that kind of read — you skip months of trial-and-error and go straight to the levers that matter.

I’m Laura Seelinger, founder of LSX Partners. Figuring out where your brand is invisible in AI — and building the strategy to fix it — is the whole thing I do. If you just read this and got a little nervous about what AI is saying about you, we should talk. ;)