AEO is younger than you think — a timeline
Perplexity's answer engine launched in December 2022. Google AI Overviews went live in the US in May 2024. ChatGPT search shipped that October. Measured against SEO's near-thirty-year history, AEO as a practiced discipline is closer to two years old than twenty.
Published September 21, 2026
It's easy to talk about AEO like it's a mature discipline with its own settled best practices, the way SEO is. It isn't, and the actual dates are worth laying out plainly, because most of what people call "AEO" today has existed in a form businesses could act on for less time than a typical website redesign takes to plan.
The actual dates
- December 2022 — Perplexity launches its answer engine, the first mainstream product built specifically to answer a query with a synthesized, cited response instead of a list of links.
- May 2023 — Google announces the Search Generative Experience (SGE) at I/O, opt-in only, through its Search Labs program.
- May 14, 2024 — Google rebrands SGE and rolls it out broadly to every US searcher as AI Overviews. This is the point AEO stopped being optional to think about for anyone doing SEO.
- July 25, 2024 — OpenAI ships SearchGPT, a prototype search product.
- October 31, 2024 — OpenAI launches ChatGPT search properly, putting a second major AI platform directly into the search market.
Lay those dates next to each other and the picture is clear: the version of AEO that most businesses have heard of is under two years old. Google AI Overviews, the single biggest driver of "do we need to worry about AI search" conversations, turns two in May 2026.
What SEO looked like at the same age
SEO has been a recognized, named discipline since the late 1990s, not long after Google itself launched in 1998. That's nearly three decades of accumulated case studies, tooling, agency expertise, algorithm-update history, and settled consensus on what actually works. A business hiring an SEO agency today is buying into thirty years of institutional knowledge.
AEO has none of that yet. There's no thirty-year backlog of algorithm updates to have learned from, no settled consensus on ranking factors, because the "ranking factors" themselves, how a language model decides what to cite, are still being reverse-engineered in public by researchers and SEO practitioners in real time. Anyone telling you they have AEO fully figured out is either overselling or hasn't noticed how new the ground is.
The part that doesn't wait for you
The uncomfortable detail is that "new" doesn't mean "slow." AI Overview prevalence roughly quadrupled between January and July 2025 alone, per Semrush's tracked keyword data, before settling somewhat as Google tuned it. ChatGPT search and Perplexity have been adding users and query volume every quarter since launch. The channel is young, but it isn't moving at a young-channel pace.
That combination, genuinely early plus genuinely fast-moving, is what makes right now a specific window rather than a permanent state. In three or four years AEO will likely look the way SEO does today: mature, competitive, and expensive to break into from zero. It doesn't look like that yet.
What to actually do with that window
Not a full rebuild. The overlap with good SEO is large: clean technical foundations, crawlable content, and pages that answer real questions still matter to both. What AEO adds on top is structure aimed at being quoted rather than just ranked, and consistency across every place your business is described online, since these systems draw on far more than your website alone.
We treat this as its own line item, not a footnote on an SEO retainer, because the mechanics genuinely differ even where the instincts overlap. See what that looks like in practice, or talk to us about where your business actually stands right now, while "right now" still means something.
Frequently asked questions
As something businesses actively work on, less than two years old. Google AI Overviews launched broadly in the US on May 14, 2024, and ChatGPT search shipped on October 31, 2024. Perplexity's answer engine goes back further, to December 2022, but it took Google's and OpenAI's entries to turn AEO into something most businesses had a reason to think about at all.
SEO has been a recognized discipline since the late 1990s, not long after Google itself launched in 1998. That puts SEO at close to three decades of accumulated practice, tooling, and agency expertise. AEO doesn't have any of that yet, which is exactly why the businesses starting now are still early rather than late.
The opposite, usually. A genuinely new channel is where the advantage goes to whoever shows up first and builds real authority before the space gets crowded and expensive, the way it eventually did with SEO and with paid social before it. Waiting for AEO to "mature" mostly means waiting until the businesses that started now have already built the citation history you're trying to catch up to.
The mechanics aren't exotic: structured, crawlable content that answers real questions directly, accurate and consistent business information everywhere it appears, and pages built to be quoted rather than just ranked. Our post on how to get cited by AI search covers the specifics.