AEO shifts the unit of optimization from the page to the passage. Instead of asking "will this page rank," AEO asks "will an AI model quote this exact sentence as the answer." That means clear, self-contained answers near the top of content, explicit entity names, and structured data that helps a model verify who is saying what.
AEO overlaps heavily with traditional SEO fundamentals — crawlability, authority, and content quality still matter — but adds a layer focused on extractability: short direct-answer paragraphs, defined terms, FAQ blocks, and consistent named entities (people, organizations, products) that a language model can confidently attribute a claim to.