SEO, AEO and AIO: What do they mean for your website?

The way we search for businesses, services and information online is changing quickly. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of the website projects currently moving through the Indeko Creative studio.

A couple of these businesses have two brands living under one umbrella, another is building courses and programs, and there are online stores in the mix too. They’re all very different businesses, which means their websites need to solve very different problems. So before I’m anywhere near designing pages, there’s a lot of deeper thinking happening.

How should the site be structured? How will someone find what they need? What are they likely to search for? How do we make multiple offers make sense? And importantly, how do we give the finished website the best opportunity to actually be found?

Increasingly, that conversation involves three little acronyms: SEO. AEO. AIO.

I know, just what we all needed. More internet acronyms. 😆

But beneath the terminology lies something quite simple: people are changing how they search, and our websites need to keep up.

So, let’s unpack what each one actually means — without making this wildly technical and confusing.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it’s the one you’re probably most familiar with.

At its simplest, SEO helps search engines understand what your business does, who you help and when your website might be useful to someone searching.

And yes, SEO is absolutely still relevant. In fact, Google’s current guidance is very clear that strong SEO foundations continue to matter in generative AI search, because its AI-powered search experiences are connected to its core search and quality systems. So while search is evolving, we haven’t suddenly thrown everything we know about SEO out the window.

Good SEO still involves things like:

• clear website and page structure

• useful, relevant content

• descriptive page titles and headings

• language your audience actually uses

• internal links

• image information and alt text

• technical foundations that allow your site to be crawled and understood

And no, good SEO does not mean awkwardly repeating the same keyword twenty times (thank goodness). It’s really about clarity and intent.

If you’re an interior designer working in Northern Sydney, for example, your website should give both your visitors and search engines enough clear information to understand that. Beautiful imagery can do a lot for your brand, but it can’t do all the heavy lifting.

So, what is AEO?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. In simple terms, AEO is about making your website content easier to understand as a clear, useful answer to the questions people are already asking online.

And those questions are becoming more specific, more detailed and more conversational, especially with the rise of AI search. I mean, let’s be real. Who hasn’t asked ChatGPT or Claude something we once would have typed into Google? I think almost all of us these days could say we’ve done it. More than once!

And this shift absolutely matters because your website needs to do more than just list your services. It also needs to answer the questions sitting behind the search.

That might happen through your service pages, headings, FAQs, blog articles or simply through the way you explain what you do. And this is where good brand and website strategy becomes especially important, because you can’t answer those questions well if you haven’t first done the groundwork.

You need to understand your audience. What are they looking for? What are they trying to work out? What do they need to know before they feel ready to enquire? Where might they be confused? And how does your particular business help?

AEO isn’t about stuffing your site with hundreds of questions in the hope that one of them gets picked up by a search engine. It’s about creating genuinely useful content that helps someone understand whether you’re the right fit for what they need.

Google’s broader guidance follows a very similar principle: create helpful, reliable content for people first, rather than content created primarily to manipulate search rankings. Which, refreshingly, is also just a much better, and more human way to communicate. We all need that.

And what is AIO?

AIO is commonly used to describe AI Optimisation — thinking about how your website can be understood and surfaced within AI-powered search experiences. You may also see terms like GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, used in this space. The terminology is still evolving, and Google itself tends to frame AEO and GEO as part of the broader practice of optimising for search rather than completely separate disciplines.

The acronym matters far less than the shift behind it. More and more, we’re not simply Googling something and scrolling through ten blue links. We’re time poor. We’re asking AI tools to compare options, explain things, narrow down choices and sometimes recommend who or what might suit us. (Don’t get me started on how much innate wisdom we’re potentially outsourcing while we do this. That’s another conversation entirely.)

But it raises a pretty important question for anyone with a business website:

Can AI actually understand what you do?

If an AI-powered search tool encounters your business online, can it clearly understand:

• what you offer

• who it’s for

• where you work

• what you specialise in

• what makes your approach different

• whether you have genuine experience and expertise in that area?

That’s the useful part of thinking about AIO. And thankfully, it does not mean adding another layer of boring, robotic, this-doesn’t-sound-like-me copy to your website.

The things that tend to make a website stronger for people also help search systems make sense of it: clear positioning, well-structured services, specific language, useful content, credible expertise and enough substance to explain what makes the business different.

We’re also starting to see website and analytics platforms provide more insight into how businesses are showing up through AI-powered search — another little sign that this way of being found is here to stay.

Does my website now need three separate optimisation strategies?

Thankfully, no. You don’t need an SEO strategy over here, an AEO strategy over there and some mysterious AI strategy tucked into another folder. There is a lot of overlap.

Strong technical SEO still matters. Clear positioning matters. Thoughtful website structure matters. Useful, original content matters. Understanding your audience matters. So does explaining what you actually do in language another human being can understand.

Google’s own 2026 guidance on generative AI search specifically recommends continuing with foundational SEO, creating unique, expert-led content and avoiding questionable “AI optimisation hacks”.

So the goal isn’t to chase every new search trend or redesign your website every time another acronym appears. It’s to build a strong foundation and plan for the way your clients are actually finding information now.

This is why website strategy happens before design.

For me, this is also why website design is never just about arranging beautiful pages. There’s a substantial strategy layer that happens before I begin designing: understanding the business, the human behind it, its audience, offers and positioning, mapping the user journey and working out how all of that needs to translate into content and structure. And search is now part of that conversation from the beginning too.

Across my website builds, SEO, AEO and AIO considerations form part of the early planning alongside the brand itself. For my Soulful Website Journey, that also includes strategic search direction developed in collaboration with my trusted SEO and copywriting specialist. Because there’s very little point in investing in a thoughtful, beautifully designed website if the people you want to work with struggle to find it, understand it or work out whether it’s actually for them.

AI can help. But humans still matter.

I use AI. I think it can be brilliant for research, ideas, organisation and helping us work through information. But it can’t replace the judgement that comes from truly understanding a business, the people behind it and the audience we’re trying to reach—from a human perspective.

Nor do we want AI to flatten every brand into the same perfectly optimised internet voice. That’s a hard pass.

The opportunity here isn’t to make our websites sound more like machines; it’s pretty much the opposite. We want to create something clear enough for technology to understand, but specific, useful and human enough for the right person to recognise themselves in it.

That part still needs us. And I think that’s actually the reassuring — and best — bit.

Kylie.