For a business whose customers still find suppliers by typing into Google, choose the SEO pass first. For a business whose customers are already asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini who to call, choose the AEO pass. If both are true, buy both; they are different work and are priced separately at $1,500 to $2,000 each.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of ranking in the list of links a search engine returns. AEO (answer engine optimization, also called GEO, generative engine optimization) is the work of being named and cited inside the answer an AI assistant composes. The two overlap in their inputs and diverge in their outputs, and the easiest mistake is to assume that doing one covers the other.
Unconventional Group sells each as a one-time engineering pass and does not bundle them, except in the Two-Day Website (from $5,000), where the standard ten-to-fifteen-page build includes both.
Side by side
| SEO engineering pass | AEO / AI-visibility pass | |
|---|---|---|
| Competes for | A position in a ranked list of links. | A mention and a citation inside a generated answer. |
| Where the buyer is | Google, Bing, the local map pack. | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI results. |
| Price | $1,500–$2,000 one-time. | $1,500–$2,000 one-time. |
| What the work is | Technical crawl and fixes, site structure and internal linking, structured data, metadata and canonicals, local search, Core Web Vitals and mobile performance. | One canonical entity with disambiguation, an answers corpus written answer-first, llms.txt and llms-full.txt, explicit AI-crawler permissions, off-site citation seeding, knowledge-graph groundwork. |
| Shared inputs | Structured data, a crawlable site, authority from third-party references. | The same three. |
| Where they diverge | Page speed, indexation, query-family structure, redirect hygiene. | Entity clarity, quotable phrasing, first-party fact files, which bots are allowed to read the site. |
| How it is measured | Impressions, clicks and indexation by query family, against a baseline. | Mention rate, citation rate, average position and share of voice across a fixed prompt set, against a baseline. |
| What happens when you stop | The engineering stays fixed. | The engineering stays fixed. Ongoing measurement is a separate $200/month product. |
When SEO is the better choice
SEO comes first when the buyers are still in a search box. That is still most buyers in most local-service categories in Western Canada: someone with a burst pipe in Sherwood Park types "emergency plumber Sherwood Park" and calls one of the three businesses in the map pack. A site that is not crawlable, that has two pages competing for the same query, or that takes five seconds to load on a phone, will not be in that pack, and no amount of AEO changes that.
SEO also comes first when the site has technical problems, because AEO builds on the same foundation. An assistant cannot cite a page its crawler cannot reach.
When AEO is the better choice
AEO comes first when the buyers have moved to assistants and the site already ranks acceptably. The shift is visible in how a question is asked: "who is a good commercial electrician in Edmonton, and what do they charge" typed into an assistant produces two or three named businesses, with no page two. Being in that answer requires things SEO does not do.
The first is entity clarity. "Unconventional" is an ordinary word, and there are unrelated agencies using it; an assistant has to be told, in structured data and in plain text, which business this is. The second is answer-shaped content: the first sentence of a section states the answer, names the business rather than saying "we", and gives the number where a number exists. A page that says "contact us for pricing" cannot be quoted. The third is permission: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest have to be allowed in robots.txt, and a platform default or a security plugin may be blocking them without anyone having decided to. The fourth is off-site corroboration: Google Business Profile, directories and citations that agree with the site's own claims, reconciled back into the entity graph.
The last is the file the assistants read directly. llms.txt is a proposed convention rather than a standard, and the evidence for its weight is thin, but it costs almost nothing and is the cheapest guardrail against being described inaccurately.
What neither will do
Neither pass guarantees a ranking or a recommendation. Search engines re-crawl and re-evaluate on their own schedule; assistants are nondeterministic and refresh their retrieval on schedules nobody outside controls. Unconventional Group's claim for both is the same: clients typically see movement in 14 to 90 days, measured against a baseline captured before the work starts. That is a typical-results claim, not a guarantee.
A free way to see which half is the constraint is Odin, Unconventional Group's site auditor, which scores a URL out of 100 with 50 points for search readiness and 50 for AI visibility, in about thirty seconds.
