Sometimes, but usually not fully. Most SEO agencies are built to optimize your own pages and earn backlinks. AEO is mostly off-site work, getting your brand cited across the sources AI reads, which is a different skill set. Some agencies are adding AEO, but many are not equipped for the publishing side.
Where SEO and AEO overlap
The two are related, so a good SEO agency is not starting from zero. Healthy SEO supports AEO: your site feeds the pool of sources AI draws from, and strong content helps. An agency that does great on-site work is doing something useful for your AI visibility too.
So this is not "fire your agency." SEO still matters, and the two work together.
Where the gap is
The gap is the off-site publishing AEO depends on. AI engines cite community discussions, reviews, and credible coverage far more than company pages. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found brand web mentions correlated with visibility in Google's AI Overviews far more than backlinks did, 0.664 against 0.218 (Ahrefs, AI Overview brand correlation study).
Rankings do not carry over either. Across 15,000 prompts, Ahrefs found only about 12% of the links AI assistants cite rank in Google's top 10 for the same prompt (Ahrefs, AI search overlap study). So an agency that wins you rankings is not automatically winning you citations.
Most SEO agencies do not publish across Reddit, Quora, Substack, and the other places AI reads, and they do not track how AI describes you across engines. Those are the parts that move AI citations, and they are outside a typical SEO scope.
How to check
Ask your agency two direct questions: do you publish content off-site on the platforms AI engines cite, and do you track our visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI? If the answer to both is yes, they may cover AEO. If not, you have a gap that on-site SEO will not close.
Where to go next
For the full comparison, read Cited vs the alternatives. For how the two disciplines differ, see AEO vs SEO: the real difference.
