Search and answer engines reward pages that state the answer clearly and support it with enough context to be cited. A large share of existing sites still do the opposite: thin promotional copy, buried answers, or pages that assume the reader already knows the category. That gap is the opportunity.
SEO still matters for the queries people type. AEO matters for the systems that pull a direct sentence or a FAQ block and present it as the answer. Both improve when a page has a clear H1, a short factual lead, supporting sections that stay on the topic, and open questions with short answers that can be extracted. The economic return comes from ranking or being cited for queries that currently resolve to weak or incomplete pages.
The work is not mysterious. Identify a question people actually ask. Write the direct answer first. Add the context, the distinctions, and the links that keep a reader on the site. Mark the page so machines can read the structure. Repeat for the next question. Sites that already do this are not evenly distributed. The inefficiency is the remaining set of clear questions that still land on thin results.
This is not a claim that every page will rank or that volume alone produces results. It is an observation that the systems currently favor answer-shaped pages, and that many categories still lack them. The opportunity is in targeting those gaps rather than competing only where the content is already dense.