What's the same
Technical health, crawlable structure, genuine expertise and third-party authority matter to both. If your SEO is weak, your AI visibility will be too — the assistants are reading the same web.
What's different
SEO optimises for position in a list. AI visibility optimises for inclusion in a summary. One rewards competing for a keyword; the other rewards being unambiguous and quotable about a topic.
SEO gives you a click. An assistant may give you a mention with no click at all — which makes brand recall and direct search more valuable than they were.
How to budget for both
Don't run them as separate programmes. The overlap is around eighty percent. Run one search programme and add the AI-specific work: entity consistency, prompt-level monitoring and quotable content formats.