SEO didn't die when AI answer engines showed up. It picked up a roommate. Here's the honest breakdown of what's actually different in 2026 — and what's just repackaged advice.
What's still the same
Technical fundamentals — fast pages, clean markup, real backlinks, content that answers a real question — are exactly as important as they were five years ago. If your site is slow or thin, no amount of AEO tactics will save it.
What's actually new
Answer engines summarize before they link. That means your content needs to be extractable: a clean, quotable answer near the top, supported by specifics a model can verify. It also means schema markup graduated from "nice to have" to load-bearing infrastructure.
The practical takeaway
Run both playbooks at once. Optimize for the crawler and the model in the same pass — they want more of the same things than they disagree on.