SEO vs AEO: which is right for your business?

The short answer

They are not alternatives. SEO earns rankings, AEO earns citations inside AI answers. Do both, but weight them by where your buyers already are. If most of your organic traffic comes from informational queries, shift budget to AEO now. If you sell locally on high-intent searches, keep SEO first.

What actually drives the number

The split between SEO and AEO budget comes down to four measurable things, not to opinion about the future of search.

How often an AI answer sits above your listing. Pew Research tracked 68,879 Google searches from 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that roughly one in five produced an AI summary. When a summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent when no summary appeared. Only 1 percent clicked a link inside the summary itself.

Query type. Semrush’s analysis found 88 percent of AI Overview-triggering searches are informational, and 95 percent of AI Overview keywords carry no ads or minimal commercial value, per its 2026 AI SEO statistics roundup. Translation: the queries most exposed to AI summaries are the ones least likely to convert directly. Transactional and local queries are still a rankings game.

Assistant volume. ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users, announced in February 2026. Google AI Overviews reach around 2 billion monthly users. Assistant traffic is smaller than search traffic but growing fast, and Semrush measured 1.4 external links clicked per ChatGPT visit against 0.6 from Google.

Traffic quality. Semrush also reported AI search visitors converting at 4.4 times the value of traditional organic visitors, based on more than 500 high-value topics. Fewer visits, better visits. That changes the math on what an AEO citation is worth.

How to tell which applies to you

Open Search Console and split your top 50 queries into transactional and informational. Then apply the rule.

Choose SEO first if most of your clicks come from transactional or local queries: “emergency plumber sherman oaks”, “buy X online”, brand plus product. These rarely trigger AI summaries, and when they do the summary sits above ads rather than replacing them. Your problem is still rank and page speed.

Choose AEO first if most of your clicks come from informational queries, or if your organic traffic has fallen while your rankings held. That gap is the AI summary absorbing the click. Publishing better ranked pages will not close it. Being the source the answer quotes will.

Do both, weighted 60/40 toward AEO, if you sell a considered purchase where buyers research for weeks before contacting anyone. That research now happens inside an assistant, and the vendor named in the answer starts the shortlist.

One caution. Google is explicit in its Search Central documentation: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary,” and “there’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.” Anyone selling you an AEO product that is really a schema plugin is selling you nothing.

What we’d do

TACK™ runs SEO and AEO as one program, because the underlying asset is the same: pages that answer a real question better than anyone else, in a format a machine can lift.

Concretely, we do three things. We rewrite the top of every commercial page into a 40 to 60 word direct answer, because that is the block engines extract. We add original data, quoted expert language and named specifics, since the Princeton and IIT Delhi GEO research found statistics, quotations and fluency edits lifted source visibility by 24 to 27 percent on their benchmark of 10,000 queries. And we track citations by assistant, not just rankings, so you can see which answers name you.

That combined program is what we call Get Found. It sits next to paid media and conversion, because a citation that lands on a weak page still fails. Engagements start at $5,000 per month.

Common mistakes

Reading flat rankings as a healthy program. Rankings can hold while clicks fall, because the summary takes the click. If your impressions are steady and sessions are down double digits, you are already losing to AI answers. Cost: a full year of content spend producing less traffic than the year before.

Buying an “AEO tool” instead of writing better answers. Google says no special markup is required. Schema helps machines understand a page, it does not buy a citation. Cost: a $300 to $1,500 a month subscription that changes nothing.

Abandoning SEO because AI is coming. Transactional and local queries still convert, and Semrush found 95 percent of AI Overview keywords have minimal commercial value. Cutting SEO to fund AEO usually means cutting the traffic that actually pays. Cost: your highest-intent channel.

The bottom line

SEO wins the click. AEO wins the mention that decides who gets clicked. If your queries are transactional and local, lead with SEO. If they are informational and your traffic is sliding while rankings hold, lead with AEO. Almost every business needs both, in a ratio it can defend with its own Search Console data.

We will pull that split for you on a call. Book 20 minutes at calendly.com/tack-media-agency/talk-to-an-expert or call 310-620-1141.

Sources

• Pew Research Center: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears
• Semrush: AI SEO Statistics
• TechCrunch: ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website
• GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Princeton, IIT Delhi)