Is AEO just technical SEO in disguise or are we solving a completely different problem?

The more I test this the more I think most people are conflating two things that only partially overlap.

Technical SEO makes your site eligible to rank. AEO makes your brand worth citing. Those sound similar but the work looks completely different. Schema and structured data sit in both worlds but the part of AEO that actually moves AI citations — off-site entity presence, community participation, consistent positioning across independent sources — has almost nothing to do with technical SEO. The danger is treating AEO as a technical checklist because you end up with a perfectly structured site that AI models have never encountered anywhere that matters.

Anyone finding the technical layer actually influences AI citations or is it purely the off-site signals doing the work?