AEO vs SEO in 2026: Steal My Strategy (and What to Tell Your CEO)

Most of your buyers are making up their minds about you without ever visiting your website.

Roughly 60% of all Google searches now end without a click because users are given answers directly in the results, especially thanks to AI Overviews and generative interfaces. This figure is consistent across industry research from Semrush and Ahrefs.

CTRs are also slipping in the areas where AI summaries appear. Pages that once averaged healthy engagement see 34–58% lower CTRs when an AI Overview sits atop the results page (Ahrefs).

Meanwhile, traffic from AI-driven discovery is growing. Semrush projects it could rival traditional search by 2028.

So yes, clicks are declining. You’re not imagining it! But the bigger shift is behavioural. That’s always what interests me more than the mechanics of search.

Marketing used to be… not easy, but more predictable. Classic SEO rewarded capture. Rank on Google. Run ads. Drive traffic. Capture leads. You know the playbook.

Unfortunately, the tidy cause-and-effect loops we relied on for a decade no longer map as neatly.

Now discovery is scattered and fragmenting. Perplexity, ChatGPT, Reddit, and YouTube are now entrypoints, not your homepage. And what sticks is credibility. We have to let go of “just rank” or “get seen.”

An important thing to understand is that AI compresses the comparison phase. As a brand, you’re competing to show up inside AI answers early enough to enter a buyer’s initial consideration set. Instead of reviewing 10 tabs, buyers receive a synthesized shortlist. AI is basically doing the tab opening for them. If you’re not in that first pass, you’re fighting uphill to re-enter the conversation later.

What This Means for CMOs

If you’re a CMO right now, you’re probably still being asked about sessions, MQLs, CPL, and sourced pipeline. Those metrics aren’t irrelevant, but they’re definitely incomplete.

Because while you’re optimizing landing pages and refining paid campaigns, your buyers are asking AI tools if you’re legit or overpriced. They’re asking whether a competitor is easier to implement or whether they can vibe code something equivalent and eliminate you before a demo is booked.

I’m going to hold your hand while I say this: you don’t lose the deal at the proposal stage. This is the bit nobody wants to admit in the QBR.

It’s earlier.

If you’re missing from the first summary and you’re not the name people see repeated in threads, you’re basically asking sales to claw their way back into a decision that’s already formed.

It’s tempting to interpret declining traffic as a reach problem, to assume the answer is more budget, more volume, more campaigns. But when you zoom out, it’s more like a “memory problem.” Memory behaves differently from traffic. Traffic scales with spend, whereas memory “scales” with repetition, distinctiveness, and distribution inside trusted channels.

People can’t shortlist what they don’t recall. And recall is built in repeated exposure, in being mentioned, cited, and referenced long before someone clicks.

This is why brand investment is no longer a “long-term, nice-to-have awareness play.” It’s absolutely critical. If buyers are researching in zero-click environments (which they are), your brand must exist within them. Otherwise, you’re asking performance channels and sales to convert people who were never primed to trust you.

That’s the part that makes board slides awkward.

Yes, traffic may dip. Attribution is already getting murky. The neat source-to-pipeline story we used to tell breaks down when more than half the evaluation happens inside tools that don’t pass referral data.

When I think about SEO and AEO now, I don’t think in terms of gaming algorithms. I consider whether a company is becoming the default choice in its category. Whether its POV is clear enough to be repeated by others. When a buyer asks for “the best [category] for X,” is your brand one of the two or three names synthesized automatically?

That dimension is harder to see in GA4. GA4 can’t show you the moment a buyer decides you're on the shortlist. However, it shows up later in higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and rising branded search. Those are late proof that you were already top of mind.

Basically, if branded search is rising, if share of voice in conversations is growing, if your name is appearing inside AI answers and community threads. That, MORE THAN ANY OTHER METRIC, is what I think determines whether your pipeline is fragile or resilient over the next few years.

“Visibility” in 2026 — How It’s Different

I said above that AI search is compressing comparison/discovery. Even when you do show up, that’s not the end of the work. There’s a WHOLE stage between awareness and conversion where buyers and LLMs determine if they can trust you.

As I covered in How to Write for LLMs (still my most comprehensive AI guide if you want to go deeper), traditional SEO still matters. Keywords and quality content still help structure relevance, but the context in which that relevance operates has changed.

The classic SEO stack used to reward ranking and links. The newer stack optimizes for extractability (i.e., whether ideas can be pulled into an answer) and repeat citation. This means ranking alone isn’t enough, and your ideas need to hold up when an AI condenses them into a summary.

The Shift from Keywords to Questions

People don’t start with broad, generic keywords as much anymore. They ask more complex, natural language questions like “What’s the best CRM for a 50-person team with Salesforce integration under a certain price?” and expect a single answer. AI tools parse, synthesize, and deliver structured responses that blend sources rather than simply queuing up a list of the top 10 blue links.

I still care about Google rankings in my work as an SEO strategist; they still drive measurable intent and conversions. But I also pay attention to whether the brand I’m working with appears in summaries, whether ideas I’ve written about or their owned POV are repeated elsewhere, and whether someone recognizes the phrases we’ve coined before they click.

Here’s another big distinction that’s shaping how I think about content creation:

No-click queries are dead ends. “What is X?” “How do I do Y?” The answer appears in the interface, and the session ends.

Click-through queries are different. They’re resource and recommendation searches, and more like invitations. 

• “What are the best resources for marketers to learn sales?” 

• “Who should I follow?” 

• “What are the best podcasts for _______?”

Those aren’t keywords I’m trying to rank for, but roles I want my brand to occupy. To be helpful, useful. If you want to be the thing people click through to, you have actually to be the resource worth citing. (It’s in the same vein as if you want to be a thought leader you need to have actual thoughts.)

Google still processes billions more queries per day than ChatGPT, so I’m not saying traditional SEO is dead. But the marginal value of ranking for broad informational terms is declining.

This also changes how I think about distribution.

LinkedIn isn’t just a top-of-funnel “awareness play.” It helps your ideas travel and gain recognition, and the repetition builds a stake in mental real estate. It helps you become the obvious choice because you feel familiar. 

Paid isn’t just lead gen anymore, either. Yes, you can drive demos. But more often, paid amplification increases the “surface area” of your ideas. If you don’t have a massive owned audience, you borrow one using organic and paid tactics. It puts your POV in front of existing audiences — newsletter readers, podcast listeners, community members — who already trust the platform hosting it. 

Distribution is leverage. One strong idea distributed well travels further than random, isolated blog posts sitting on your site. Most B2B brands still publish in isolation, so take a look at your blog and see what you can do to share more effectively. After all, it’s content marketing. You have to do the marketing part.

This is why all the zero-click talk matters. You don’t get infinite chances to be noticed. So if your ideas never leave your owned channels, you’re betting everything on someone clicking. Not good.

But don’t worry, the goal isn’t to “add more channels” and blindly tick boxes. It’s to make sure your thinking exists inside the places shaping your buyers' perception before the shortlist is formed.

Why Authority Is Built Off-Site Before It Shows Up in Search

Back to trust and the value of SEO.

AI search doesn’t just randomly choose sources.

Search has always rewarded certain authority signals. What’s different now is that those signals are aggregated across more places, more quickly, and with less tolerance for ambiguity.

In 2026, it’s important to shift your focus from maximizing traffic volume to increasing inclusion in the moments where your buyers narrow their options. It should affect how you structure core pages, how you publish comparison and category content, and how you reinforce your positioning across earned and distributed channels so ideas circulate beyond our owned properties.

Semrush’s own internal thinking echoes this: AI doesn’t surface brands trying to game the system. It surfaces brands humans already trust — sites with backlinks, mentions, community signals, reviews, and a track record of credible content.

Though these systems still get things wrong. The scary part is they can be confidently wrong.

You can watch videos of ChatGPT describing well-known products incorrectly until someone prompts it otherwise. If the model’s version of you doesn’t match your truth, you can lose deals before a demo even starts.

That’s why cross-platform activation and distribution matter, too.

LinkedIn still functions as a search ecosystem in its own way; it’s where context and nuance spread before they ever reach Google or ChatGPT.

YouTube is search. Slack threads and WhatsApp groups mutate into referral search. Community mentions strengthen memory.

One more thing people underweight: distinctive cues.

In a world where everyone’s now writing “helpful” content, being generic is… a choice… and a losing one.

You don’t need a mascot, but you do need something repeatable: a visual motif, a phrase, an owned POV, a consistent tone. The kind of thing that makes someone say, “Oh, that’s them,” even when they’re seeing you summarized in an AI answer, not reading your homepage.

From a team perspective, this breaks the old channel silo model. SEO can’t sit in one box and social in another. The systems that evaluate credibility don’t separate them, so your marketing org shouldn’t either.

Why Original Thinking Is the Only Defensible SEO Strategy

Today’s search reality is why I invest heavily in original thinking and original research, the two most defensible kinds of content in a world where AI can instantly generate generic lists. 

AI writes generic blog posts in literal minutes. What it can’t write is:

• How you think about a problem

• What all your experience has taught you

• How your approach or framework is different

That’s usually where authority actually comes from, in the distinctions of how you see things.

For a long time, the classic SEO workflow was essentially keyword-first, then content to match. It worked. But for AI authority, I find myself starting somewhere else, with a POV I actually care about, and then check whether search behaviour aligns with it. Content briefs start with “What are we trying to say?” or “What question are we answering?”, not “How many words should this be?”

Every SEO agency says they increase pipeline, drive revenue, and power growth. They’re performance first. Data-driven. Full funnel. After a while, it all starts to blur together. The same goes for your category, too. Everyone is innovative, best-in-class, all-in-one, seamless integrations… you get the picture.

If someone could swap your logo for a competitor’s and most of your web page would still hold up, that’s usually a sign that something’s off. There’s nothing to hold onto.

Leading with an owned POV changes how the work gets planned. Editorial planning becomes less about filling volume gaps and more about clarifying what you stand for. Research isn’t there to pad word count, but to sharpen your thinking. Interviews aren’t just quotes for unpublished case studies.

Keywords still matter, I’m not ignoring them. They no longer lead the conversation.

The Part of Revenue Your Dashboard Can’t See

When we talk about data and measurement in 2026, it helps to start with what our dashboards are showing us and what they’re blind to. For years, most teams lived and died by the same handful of metrics: impressions, sessions, CTR, CAC, and MQL-to-opportunity conversion. The stuff you could screenshot for the board. The stuff that made the funnel look clean.

I hope it’s clear by now that the current reality is messier than our tools were built to handle. When more than half of Google queries end without a click, and the answer is served directly in an AI summary, then a click, or the absence of one, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about demand or interest anymore.

Metrics like CTR and impressions still show activity and exposure; you don’t need to scrap them, but they don’t show why someone didn’t click, or what they did next, or how that impression shaped their thinking. That’s the point I’m trying to make when I say visibility now includes presence in answer summaries and brand mentions, not just traffic to your domain.

“Is [brand] worth the price?”
“What’s the best alternative?”
“Does [tool] actually do [thing]?”

None of those questions generate clicks, but they absolutely shape the decision.

That’s why last-click attribution can make it look like nothing worked, even when perception has already shifted upstream. By the time someone lands on your site, they may have already decided you’re overpriced, risky, or, hopefully, the preferred default choice. The click is just the residue of that earlier judgment.

What Your Dashboard Probably Isn’t Telling You

What metrics should we focus on now?

You need to show where your brand shows up in the ecosystem of discovery, upstream of clicks.

Old metrics (still useful in context):

• Sessions and unique visitors – how many people reached your content

• CTR – how often those impressions became visits

• Conversion rates – how often visits became action

• CAC and LTV – efficiency and business impact

New metrics that matter in an AI-shaped discovery:

• Brand mentions in AI summaries – whether your name and ideas surface where people review options before visiting

• AI citations / entity coverage – how often your content is used as a source inside generated answers

• Share of voice in generative search results – not just share of clicks but share of answers

• Branded search growth – whether people search for you by name, not just query terms

• Social and community references – mentions in forums, threads, and trusted spaces where peers talk about products and brands

These are all early signals of mental real estate outside the funnel.

If AI-driven visitors convert at higher rates, as some early data suggests, then the value of inclusion rises even as raw traffic falls. Fewer visits, higher intent. That shifts the goal from maximizing sessions to maximizing qualified inclusion.

Why Share of Attention Beats Share of Clicks

Google traffic isn’t dying, it’s maturing. Informational clicks are getting swallowed by zero-click layouts, but what’s left tends to be higher intent — brand, comparisons, “ready-to-buy” behaviour. So a traffic dip isn’t automatically a loss if qualified pipeline holds steady.

So when I think about SEO and AEO in 2026, I don’t think in old funnel terms.

The data is clear. What matters even more than the statistics is what they signal. The tidy cause-and-effect loop that once defined SEO — publish, rank, drive traffic, convert — no longer maps as cleanly. AI discovery is distributed across more places, happens faster, and often concludes before a website visit ever occurs.

SEO and AEO strategy therefore shifts from ranking tactics to default positioning. When someone asks for “the best [category] for X,” inclusion among the two or three synthesized names becomes the battleground. This dimension is difficult to isolate in GA4 because it sits upstream of measurable interaction, yet it reveals itself later in higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and rising branded search.

Your brand is already in AI search, you just might not like the version of you that’s showing up.

If your pages aren’t clear, models will pull from wherever they can — old reviews, Reddit threads, competitor comparisons. That’s how perception changes in the background.

So yes, optimize. But also control the narrative – what you’re protecting your audience from, what you believe, what you’re willing to say plainly.

This is where an owned POV becomes strategic. An owned POV is the only thing that holds up across all of this. It’s what makes your blog posts feel connected instead of random, it’s what gives your LinkedIn content something to repeat without sounding like everyone else, and it’s what makes an AI summary more likely to pull your framing instead of a competitor’s takedown page.

So the goal for 2026 isn’t “more content” or “more traffic.” It’s to be the name that keeps showing up in the places buyers use to decide. Sometimes that looks like a click, but more often it looks like recognition, repetition, and inclusion in lists and roundups before the click ever happens.

That’s my plan: build a POV that’s hard to confuse with anyone else, get it into the right rooms, and structure it so it survives summary. The rest of the metrics typically follow.

If you know you want to build a distinct, owned POV instead of publishing beige AI content into the void, and you need someone to shape the strategy or ghostwrite alongside your SMEs, that’s the work I do.

If your SEO, PR, and corporate comms efforts are running in parallel but not quite telling the same story, and you need someone to connect the threads into a narrative that compounds and helps the cause, we can start there.

Or if you’re simply trying to digest the idea that SEO and thought leadership are no longer separate disciplines but deeply connected through AEO and AI discovery, and you want to explore how this applies to your category, your pipeline, and your org structure, book a call and let’s talk it through.