Partly. Both need a site that machines can read and content that answers the question. They differ in what decides the outcome. Pages that rank in Google are often not the pages ChatGPT retrieves, and mentions of a brand on other sites track visibility in Google's AI Overviews far more closely than backlinks do.

No study I found measures what share of the work overlaps, so any percentage given for it is an opinion. What can be checked is where the two diverge.

Where the work overlaps

A page nobody can fetch cannot be cited, so technical access matters for both. We cover the AI side in is your website blocking the AI bots you want to cite you.

Content that matches the question carries over too. In a University of Toronto study of 158,099 AI answers, pages whose title and paragraphs matched the question were cited more than other pages on the same site. That is close to old-fashioned relevance. We went through the study in full here.

Google's systems also reach into AI answers. The Toronto researchers note that Gemini is grounded in Google Search. And in Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, link metrics showed moderate to weak correlations with appearing in Google AI Overviews. Domain rating scored 0.326 and backlinks 0.218, where 1.0 would be a perfect match.

Where they diverge

Ranking in Google does not get a page retrieved

The Toronto researchers replayed every question through the engines' APIs. 97% of the pages ChatGPT retrieved were outside Google's top 50, and 99% were outside Bing's top 30. Gemini is grounded in Google Search, yet 93% of the pages it cited were also outside Google's top 50.

ChatGPT rewrites each question into new sub-queries every time it answers. The authors say content acts mainly by matching those sub-queries in meaning, but text match explains little of the order pages come back in. The ranking reflects signals they could not observe.

Mentions beat backlinks

Ahrefs measured which signals tracked with a brand appearing in Google AI Overviews. Branded web mentions correlated at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks.

The gap shows up in the counts too. Brands in the top quarter for web mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions. The next quarter down averaged 14, and the bottom two quarters averaged between 0 and 3.

What the model already knows

The Toronto researchers also asked each model which brands it knew, with search switched off. ChatGPT wrote a brand it knew into its own searches 67% of the time, against 11% for brands it did not know.

For small vendors the models barely knew, ChatGPT mostly named a brand when a cited third-party page named it. A page naming the vendor multiplied the odds of a mention 39.7 times, against 4.2 times for large brands.

In my reading, that moves part of the effort off your own site. SEO work mostly happens on pages you control. These signals sit partly on other people's pages and in what a model already knows about you. The Toronto authors call the link between brand knowledge and citation a hypothesis, so treat it as a direction to test.

What these studies cannot tell you

  • The Toronto paper is a preprint, and I found no record of peer review. Its questions were in English about the US market, and its replay used the engines' small models through their APIs.
  • Both studies report associations. Neither shows that changing one factor causes a change in citations.
  • Ahrefs measured Google AI Overviews, not ChatGPT. It covered domains with a domain rating above 40, and it dropped the 26% of brands with no AI Overview mentions.
  • Ahrefs sells SEO tools and an AI visibility tracker. It states that correlation is not causation.

Questions to ask anyone selling AEO

  • What will you do that you would not do for SEO?
  • Which prompts and platforms will you track, and how often?
  • How will you get my firm mentioned on other sites, and which ones?
  • What will your report show: a citation in an AI answer, or a ranking?

I sell AEO as its own service, so weigh my view accordingly. My answer to the first question is tracking citations across named AI platforms with fixed prompts, and building mentions of your firm on other sites. Digital PR firms do the second for SEO too, so the split is not clean. What differs is the measure: whether a model cites or names you, whatever Google does with the page.

A few common follow-up questions

Do I need both SEO and AEO?

The studies here do not answer that. They show Google rankings and AI citations depend on different things, so a strong SEO result does not guarantee an AI one. Check both.

Does ranking in Google help me get cited?

A little, in some engines. Gemini is grounded in Google Search, and link metrics correlate only moderately to weakly with AI Overview visibility. But 97% of the pages ChatGPT retrieved sat outside Google's top 50.

Should I pay extra for AEO?

Only if the quote lists work you would not get from your SEO provider. Ask what is different, and ask to see a sample report with the client name removed.