AI SEO is often described as if it were a completely new discipline, but that framing creates more confusion than clarity. Traditional SEO still matters. A page still needs to be crawlable, indexable, useful, internally linked, and aligned with search intent. Google’s documentation for AI features in Search says the same core SEO best practices apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no extra technical requirements simply for appearing in those AI experiences. So the practical question is not whether AI SEO replaces traditional SEO. A better question is this: How does the workflow change when search engines no longer only rank pages, but also summarize, compare, cite, and synthesize them inside generated answers? The Basic Difference Traditional SEO is mostly concerned with whether a page can be discovered, ranked, clicked, and converted. AI SEO starts from that same foundation, then asks whether the page can also be interpreted correctly.…