For 25 years, the goal of "being found online" meant ranking on Google's first page. That goal has not changed — but the battlefield has expanded dramatically. Now there is a second front: AI Answer Engines.
How Traditional SEO Works
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of making your website the most relevant, authoritative, and technically sound result for a given query on platforms like Google and Bing. The three core pillars are:
- Technical SEO: Site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, structured data
- On-Page SEO: Keyword-optimized content, proper heading structure, internal linking
- Off-Page SEO: Backlinks, local citations, Google Business Profile signals
When someone searches "garage door repair St. Louis," Google shows 10 blue links. SEO is the fight to be in one of those spots — ideally the Local Pack (map results).
How AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) Works
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content, code, and data so that AI systems can confidently cite your business as the authoritative answer to a query. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, or Apple's Siri "Who is the best garage door repair company in St. Louis?", the AI does not show 10 links — it gives one or two answers. AEO is the fight to be that answer.
Why This Matters Right Now
In 2023, ChatGPT had over 100 million weekly users. Perplexity AI processed billions of queries in 2024. Google's own AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience) now appear at the top of roughly 40% of all search results. A business that wins traditional SEO but ignores AEO is leaving an enormous amount of future traffic on the table.
The Technical Difference: How AI Engines Source Answers
Traditional search engines crawl your HTML and index text. AI answer engines go further — they look for structured, machine-readable data that explicitly states facts about your business. This is where JSON-LD structured data becomes critical.
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is code embedded in your website that tells AI engines and search crawlers exactly who you are, what you do, where you are located, your hours, your reviews, and your specialties — in a format a machine can understand without guessing.
An example for a local business might declare: "This is a LocalBusiness. Its name is X. It operates in St. Louis, MO. Its phone number is Y. It is open Monday–Saturday 8am–6pm. It has an aggregate rating of 4.9 stars from 87 reviews." AI engines consume this data and use it to construct answers to natural language queries.
Our AEO Implementation
Every Untap Web site ships with comprehensive JSON-LD schemas for LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Service, and Review. We also structure all content following the E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) that both Google and AI engines use to evaluate content quality.
The Unified Strategy
SEO and AEO are not competing strategies — they are complementary. Fast, accessible, technically clean websites that rank well on Google also tend to be the sources AI engines cite. The underlying quality signals overlap significantly. But AEO adds a layer of explicit machine-readable data that pure SEO does not address.
Businesses that implement both now will have a compounding advantage as AI-powered search becomes the dominant interface for local service discovery over the next 3–5 years.