Every few months, someone announces that SEO is dead. And that’s not something new; it’s been happening for years. 

This year the murder weapon is AEO: answer engine optimization. Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews instead of clicking through ten blue links, so the story goes, and everything you knew about search is out of date.

We're glad people are talking about AEO. We’re also doing it. It's a real shift.

But we don't buy the obituary. SEO and AEO aren't competing for the same budget line, they're working on the same problem from two sides. Think of AEO as an upgrade, or as an extra channel that can open up a lot of new visibility for your brand once your SEO house is in order. And that house is built the same way it always was. AI engines cite brands that have clear structure, real expertise and evidence behind their claims, content that stays fresh, and a reputation people talk about outside their own website.

You have to master the marketing to get cited in the answers. Let's break it down.

Your buyers really have changed how they research

Forrester's Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025 (published January 2026) found that 94% used AI somewhere in their buying process, up from 89% the year before. Twice as many buyers named generative AI or conversational search as more meaningful than any other source, including vendor websites, product experts and sales.

G2's March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B decision-makers found that 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29% in April 2025. And 69% said a chatbot led them to a different vendor than they'd planned. (Worth knowing: G2 is a review marketplace, so it's a vendor source.)

Then there's Gartner (again, March 2026, 646 B2B buyers), which found that 45% used AI tools during a recent purchase.

Hold on. 94% or 45%?

Both can be true. Forrester asked about AI anywhere in the buying process, a broad net. Gartner asked about AI tools during a recent purchase, with a smaller, different sample. Different questions, different answers, so don't blend them. The direction is the same: AI is now a normal part of B2B research, and it’s here to stay.

But they still don't trust it on its own

Here's what the "SEO is dead" crowd skips.

Bain (March 2025) found that 85% of B2B buyers buy from their "day one" list, the vendors they had in mind before research began. AI can reshuffle that list. You still have to be on it.

And buyers check the AI's work. In the TrustRadius 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect report (1,862 tech buyers surveyed in January 2026, published July 2026), 63% of tech buyers used AI in their purchase journey, and 94% of those fact-check AI answers at least some of the time. The report's own headline sums it up: AI has changed how buyers research, but not what they trust.

So what does this mean? The chatbot is the new front door. Buyers walk through it, then look for proof: your site, your people, your reviews. That proof has to exist and be findable.

What's changing is the click, not the search

SparkToro (June 2026, Similarweb panel) puts US zero-click searches at 68% for January to April 2026, up from about 60% in 2024. The panel changed in between, so read the trend, not the exact gap.

And Ahrefs (February 2026, 300,000 keywords, a vendor source) found that an AI Overview correlates with 58% lower click-through for the #1 result.

Clicks are shrinking. No argument there. We’re seeing it ourselves when we pull Google Search Console reports. But here's the kicker. In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as people moved to AI chatbots. Search Engine Journal was sceptical at the time. Well, it's 2026, and there's no sign of that collapse: Google's parent Alphabet reported search queries at "an all-time high" in its Q1 2026 results (Google's own figure). What the data shows shrinking is clicks per search, not searching itself.

People still search. They just get more of the answer without leaving the page. The question isn't whether search survives. It's whether your content is the source the answer is built from.

Why AEO doesn't work without SEO underneath it

Look at what the research says gets content cited in AI answers. Then look at a decent SEO checklist from five years ago. They're remarkably similar.

Google says so itself. Its Search Central page on AI features and your website (updated December 2025) states: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." It adds that "all existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile."

Trust still leads. Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content frames quality around E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) and says plainly: "Of these aspects, trust is most important."

Freshness matters, as it always did. Ahrefs (July 2025, 17 million cited URLs, a vendor source) found that AI-cited pages are 25.7% fresher on average than pages in organic results, and warns against faking dates. Maintenance, not trickery.

Structure and clarity. Clean headings, consistent terms, direct answers, schema. They recur in the case studies below. That evidence is mostly practitioner-reported, not controlled research, but it's basic SEO hygiene anyway.

That pretty much sums it up. The parts of "AEO" that work are mostly the parts of SEO that always worked.

"But only 12% of AI citations rank in Google's top 10"

This is the strongest counterargument. It deserves a straight answer.

Again, Ahrefs (August 2025, 15,000 long-tail queries, a vendor source) found that, on average, only 12% of URLs cited by AI assistants rank in Google's top 10 for the same query. Perplexity was highest at 28.6%; ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were between 6% and 9%. ChatGPT's in-text citations were just 8%.

Even Google's AI Overviews are drifting. Per Ahrefs data reported by Search Engine Journal, the share of AI Overview citations from top-10 pages fell from 76% in July 2025 to 38% in March 2026. Part of that is a change in how Ahrefs parsed the data. Part is "query fan-out": the AI splits one question into sub-questions and pulls sources for each.

So if your version of SEO is "rank #1 for a head term and wait", that version is in trouble. We agree.

But that's not our argument. We never said a top-10 ranking guarantees a citation. We're saying the fundamentals behind good SEO, plus real marketing presence, drive citations. Fan-out rewards exactly that: the deeper your coverage, the more sub-questions you answer. And with AI Overviews drawing roughly three-quarters of citations from top-10 pages as recently as mid-2025, ranking clearly isn't irrelevant either.

Be present everywhere, because AI reads everywhere

Here's the second half of our thesis. AI tools pull from the open web, and most of what they cite isn't your website.

• 84% of AI citations come from earned media, and paid content accounts for just 0.3%. That's from Muck Rack's Generative Pulse (May 2026, more than 25 million links from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, a PR software vendor).
• Brand-owned sites make up only 5–10% of the sources AI search references, according to McKinsey's AI Discovery Survey (October 2025, consumer-focused).
• Brand mentions beat backlinks. Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs (May 2025, a vendor source) found that branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. Correlation only, and Ahrefs says so; strong brands probably drive both.
• A University of Toronto preprint (September 2025) found AI search shows "a systematic and overwhelming bias towards earned media" over brand-owned and social content, unlike Google's more balanced mix.

And every AI engine has its own favourite sources. Perplexity's citations overlap with Google's top 10 far more than ChatGPT's (28.6% vs 8%, per Ahrefs). ChatGPT has the strongest preference for fresh content, while AI Overviews lean slightly toward older pages (also Ahrefs). Muck Rack found ChatGPT cites sources in 96% of responses, Gemini in 82% and Claude in 55%. The Toronto researchers go as far as recommending engine-specific tactics.

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You can't predict every engine's taste, and the mix shifts fast. So don't bet on one channel. Show up where these engines read:

• Your blog and website: home base, where your evidence lives.
• LinkedIn: where B2B expertise gets seen.
• YouTube and Instagram: video and visual explainers.
• Reddit and niche communities: where buyers ask each other what they won't ask vendors.
• Press, podcasts and industry publications: the earned media that dominates citations.
• Review platforms: third-party proof.

Here's the thing: that list isn't an AEO strategy. It's a marketing strategy. Good B2B brands were already doing it. AI just made the payoff more visible.

The real examples back this up

Vercel: good SEO plus community presence

The clearest example is Vercel, the developer platform. In June 2025, Vercel reported that ChatGPT was referring about 10% of its new signups, up from 4.8% the month before and 1% six months earlier. That's self-reported, but the playbook is public.

What does its published playbook recommend? Semantic depth over keyword volume. Consistent terminology and headings. Schema markup. Static HTML crawlers can read. Refreshes on 30, 90 and 180-day cycles. And authentic participation on Reddit, GitHub, Hacker News, X, LinkedIn and Stack Overflow.

Read that again. Good SEO plus presence where the audience talks. No secret formula.

Port Sight Tax: fundamentals, done properly

Port Sight Tax, a Dutch tax advisory firm, worked with Overflow Agency on a new site and organic search strategy: a Dutch and English keyword strategy, commercial landing pages and expert content. According to the agency's own case study, the site earned 379 Google AI Overview appearances across 20 pages, ranks #1 on Google for 165 keywords, and brings in about 3 marketing-qualified leads a week.

It's agency-reported, with no control group. But notice the pattern: the same work drove the rankings and the AI visibility. Not two strategies. One.

The losses: what changes and what doesn't

Chegg reported non-subscriber traffic down 49% year on year in January 2025 and sued Google over AI Overviews. Consumer, not B2B, but dramatic.

When HubSpot launched its AEO tool in April 2026, it said its customers' organic traffic had fallen 27% year on year (PPC Land; vendor-reported, sample undisclosed).

And when AI Overviews launched in France on 22 July 2026, Ahrefs tracked 963 domains and found that the most exposed ones (where more than 20% of queries triggered an AI Overview) saw a median 23.1% drop in click-through rate within nine days (a vendor source).

So what changes? Clicks, especially on broad informational content. What doesn't? The need to be the source. 

Master the marketing basics, then extend your presence

Here's how we'd order the work:

1. Fix the foundations. Clear structure, descriptive headings, direct answers up top, schema, fast and crawlable pages. Boring? Sure. Non-negotiable.
2. Show real E-E-A-T. Named authors, first-hand experience, transparent sourcing.
3. Add evidence. Statistics, sources, quotes and, ideally, your own original data.
4. Go deep, not just wide. Fan-out means AI asks the follow-up questions. Answer them.
5. Keep content alive. Real updates, not new dates on old pages.
6. Build earned presence. Press, podcasts, guest articles, partner content, reviews.
7. Show up where your buyers are. Same message, native format.
8. Measure both worlds. Track rankings and clicks, and test the questions buyers ask AI tools.

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There are no shortcuts. It’s just marketing, done consistently and in more places.

Where AEO really does differ

To be clear, AEO isn't just SEO with a new name.

• The goal is different. SEO counted clicks. In AEO, a citation inside an answer can matter even when nobody clicks. That needs new metrics and patience from leadership.
• Off-site weighs more. With earned media at 84% of citations (Muck Rack), your reputation outside your website matters more than ever.
• Rankings don't transfer one to one. The 12% overlap is real. You can rank well and still be missing from ChatGPT's answer.
• Measurement is immature. AI visibility tools each use their own prompt sets, so their numbers aren't directly comparable. Treat them as directional.

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None of that makes SEO obsolete. It makes SEO the entry ticket, not the whole game.

So, is SEO dead?

No. And AEO won't kill it.

Buyers have moved part of their research into AI tools, and clicks are genuinely falling. But AI answers are built from the open web, and what gets pulled in looks a lot like what was always good at SEO: structured, expert, evidence-rich, fresh, and backed by a brand people talk about in many places.

Every AI engine has its favourite sources. It all comes back to one thing: master the marketing, and you give the answer engines something worth citing.

The question is: when your buyer asks an AI tool about your category tomorrow, will it have a reason to mention you?

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