It's tempting to declare SEO dead and AEO its replacement. That framing sells newsletters but it's wrong, and acting on it will cost you.
Classic SEO optimizes for position in a ranked list. AEO optimizes for inclusion in a generated answer. Those are different targets, but they share a foundation: both depend on content a search system can crawl, parse and trust. The pages that rank are frequently the pages models cite, because models are grounded on the same open web.
What changes is the unit of value and the way you measure it. In SEO the unit is the page and the metric is its rank. In AEO the unit is the quotable passage and the metric is how often it becomes the answer. A page can rank tenth and still supply the sentence the model quotes.
The practical upshot: don't abandon SEO, re-aim it. Keep the technical foundation and authority work, and layer on the structural discipline that makes your content extractable. The two compound.