AI SEO has two meanings. It can mean using AI tools to speed up SEO work, such as research, briefs and audits. More often today it means optimizing your website for AI-powered search, so Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can read your pages and recommend your brand in their answers.
The second meaning is the one that changes results. Buyers increasingly get an answer before they see a list of links, so a brand can rank on page one and still be missing from the answer.
AI SEO for a website includes the classic foundations (crawlable pages, strong content, links) plus newer checks: whether AI crawlers can access the site, whether content is visible without JavaScript, whether structured data describes the business clearly, and how AI answers describe the brand compared with competitors.
Using AI tools for SEO work is useful too, as long as people check the output. AI drafts and analysis still need human review for accuracy and originality.