Top SEO to AEO Crossover Tactics for Outsized Impact
Top SEO to AEO Crossover Tactics That Have an Outsized Impact
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has always been about helping people (and search engines) find the most relevant, high-quality content. But now there’s a new player in the game: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
Instead of traditional search result pages, answer engines (think AI-driven assistants and generative search) aim to provide direct, immediate answers to user queries. That means your content is not just competing for rank, it is competing to be cited and surfaced directly by AI.
The good news? Many of the same tactics that improve SEO also boost your chances with AEO. By focusing on crossover tactics, you can get double the benefit from the same effort. This is about working smarter: less wasted energy, more outsized impact.
To dig deeper, we asked two industry experts, one from the client side and one from the agency side, to share their hottest SEO/AEO crossover strategies.
Fundamentals Still Matter: Christine Brady
Tactics:
- Schema markup
- Visually structured content
- Backlinks
“With AI now amplifying traditionally minor ranking signals, what was once a ‘nice-to-have’ is quickly becoming a requirement. The difference between your content being cited by AI or not often comes down to these previously minor SEO factors.”
Christine Brady, Sr. SEO Manager - Remote.com
Christine’s advice underscores the importance of getting the basics right. Schema helps machines understand your content. Structured layouts make information easier for both humans and AI to parse. And backlinks remain one of the most durable trust signals in both SEO and AEO.
It’s All About the Links: Laura Beatty
Tactics:
- Clean link structures
- Internal linking
- Canonicalizing pages
“Search engines and AI models both rely on clarity and authority, and links are still one of the strongest signals we’ve got for both. With newer answer engines using simplified knowledge graphs, we’re seeing a return to the basics. Aleyda Solís showed that ChatGPT pulls from Google’s SERPs when it can’t find a page, which proves that if you’re visible in traditional search, you’ve got a shot at being part of AI answers too. And OpenAI is using scraped search data to train its models, which puts the link graph right back at the center. Links are votes. Now those votes aren’t just counted by search engines, they’re also counted by the AIs learning from them.
I started out building links, and today it’s the same game with higher stakes. If you’re still using ‘click here’ or ‘read more,’ you’re wasting a ballot. Smart internal linking, strong anchor text, and canonical clarity aren’t optional; they’re like spelling the candidate’s name right on a write-in ballot. High-value links—especially the ones built in collaboration with PR, product, and partnership teams—are how you win visibility across both SEO and AEO.”
Laura Beatty, CEO - No Bad Days Digital
Laura emphasizes the connective tissue of the web: links. From keeping your URLs simple, to making internal pathways intuitive, to setting canonical pages for consistency, links determine whether your content gets found and by which engine.
The Combined Power of SEO & AEO Crossover Tactics
Looking across both expert perspectives, a clear pattern emerges:
- Schema & Structured Content → Improve SEO ranking factors by helping search engines understand context, while also acting as AEO visibility signals that make it easier for AI models to extract precise answers.
- Backlinks & Clean Link Structures → Strengthen domain authority for SEO and ensure that AI-powered engines know which pages to cite and trust.
- Internal Linking & Canonicalization → Consolidate authority, prevent duplicate content, and reinforce topical clusters, which improves traditional SEO rankings while making your site easier for answer engines to parse.
Together, these crossover tactics create a dual impact: they boost your traditional SEO performance and improve your visibility in AEO environments where direct answers are generated.
Why This Matters for Marketers and Content Teams
In the shift from SEO to AEO, every effort you make should be pulling double duty. By prioritizing crossover tactics, you are not only improving traditional rankings, you are also increasing the chances that AI-powered search will spotlight your brand.
But there is a catch: staying on top of technical SEO and AEO tactics takes time, organization, and precision.
That is where tools like Smuves come in. If you are a marketer or web admin juggling schema updates, link structures, and content optimization, Smuves helps you bulk edit and manage your HubSpot CMS with speed and confidence. So you can keep pace with both SEO and AEO without burning out.
🔑 Final takeaway: Do not think of SEO and AEO as separate silos. Think of them as a crossover opportunity where the right tactics multiply your impact.