Before You Move Your SEO Budget to GEO, Read This

It is Monday morning, and a new proposal has landed in your inbox. It includes a fresh line item called GEO. A few paragraphs later, the SEO retainer is slightly smaller. Nobody planned a trick. The market moved quickly, and the paperwork followed.

The urgency behind that proposal is real. Pew Research Center (2025) found that Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits when none appeared. Fewer clicks make any owner or marketing lead ask the same thing: should money move from SEO to generative engine optimization, or GEO?

Here is the short answer. Some of it may move, and the share is often smaller than a proposal first suggests, because a good portion of GEO is work that a healthy SEO plan already covers. The longer answer takes about fifteen minutes to read, and it ends with a five-minute method for reviewing any GEO line item you receive. We will also point out where the work is truly new, since that is where fresh budget earns its place.

In 60 Seconds

Google says optimizing for its AI features is part of SEO, and most marketers surveyed by Semrush agree. A smaller slice of GEO is new: measuring AI answers, building your reputation beyond your own website, and testing across AI platforms. The Keep, Extend, Add Test sorts each line item into shared work you pay for once, light adjustments that deserve a modest add-on, and new activities that deserve a pilot with a clear measure.

Where We Are Headed

• Why everyone is suddenly talking about GEO
• GEO in one minute
• What Google says, in its own guide
• Do marketers see it the same way?
• The Keep, Extend, Add Test
• Where the new work really is
• Your proposal review in five minutes
• Questions owners ask before moving budget
• A bolder idea: fix the foundation first
• What changes for B2B and B2C
• A 90-day starter plan
• The decision in plain terms

Why Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About GEO

Three forces arrived at the same time. The first is behavior. AI summaries now answer many questions at the top of the results page, and Pew Research Center (2025) found that people clicked a link inside the summary itself in only 1% of visits. When fewer people reach your pages, every reporting dashboard feels different.

The second force is budget. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey put marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue, flat for the year, and 59% of CMOs said their budgets could not fully support their strategy (Gartner, 2025). When the total stays level, a new priority has to be funded from an existing line. SEO is the most common donor.

The third force is momentum. In Digiday’s reporting on a Scribewise survey of 205 marketing leaders, 55% said they already had dollars set aside for GEO, and agency executives described moving part of existing SEO budgets in that direction (McCoy, 2026). That is a lot of activity around a term many teams met only recently, so a careful look before moving money is time well spent.

GEO in One Minute

SEO helps your pages appear when people search on Google, Bing, and similar engines. GEO helps your business appear inside answers written by AI systems such as Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. You may also see the term answer engine optimization, or AEO, used for the same idea. Both serve one business goal: the right buyer finds you at the moment of need, then calls, books, or buys.

• Who needs it: businesses whose customers research with AI assistants as well as search engines.
• How it works: AI systems retrieve pages and other sources, summarize them, and name the ones that look relevant and reliable.
• Why it matters: a mention inside an answer can shape a buyer’s shortlist before anyone visits your website.

What Google Says, in Its Own Guide

Google Search Central published a dedicated guide in 2026, titled Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, and updated it in July. It describes how AI Overviews and AI Mode work. Google’s systems retrieve relevant pages from the search index to ground each answer, a technique called retrieval-augmented generation, and they run several related searches at once, a technique called query fan-out (Google Search Central, 2026). In other words, the AI layer sits on top of the same index and quality systems that SEO has always served.

The guide addresses the acronyms directly. From Google’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO (Google Search Central, 2026). It then lists tactics that are not required for Google’s AI features:

• LLMs.txt files and similar special files.
• Splitting content into very small pieces for AI.
• Rewriting pages in a special style for AI systems.
• Collecting mentions that are not authentic.
• Special schema markup, although structured data continues to help with rich results.

What does the guide recommend instead?

Original, helpful pages that offer a point of view readers cannot find everywhere else, a clear technical structure, a good page experience, and accurate business details in tools such as Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles. It even offers a one-line test for any page: would a visitor find this satisfying? You can already check your own results in the Generative AI performance report inside Search Console.

One caution keeps the picture honest. The guide describes Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other assistants run their own retrieval systems, so a portion of GEO reaches beyond what Google covers. We will get to that portion shortly.

Do Marketers See It the Same Way?

Mostly, yes.

A Semrush survey of 481 marketers, business owners, and SEO professionals found that 77% describe AI search as part of SEO, while 15% treat it as a separate channel (Loktionova, 2026). The more interesting result concerns execution.

Only 22% of respondents ran SEO and AI search fully integrated across strategy, execution, and reporting. Teams that ran the two as one integrated effort were far more likely to report AI-driven traffic or leads: 81%, against 36% of teams working in separate tracks (Loktionova, 2026). Semrush sells search software, so it helps to read the survey as one informed perspective, and it points the same way as Google’s guide.

Digiday’s reporting adds some history.

SEO veterans quoted there compared GEO with earlier waves such as AMP and featured snippets, which were once presented as separate disciplines and later turned out to be extensions of familiar search logic.

One agency chief executive estimated that about 80% of GEO is fundamental SEO. Others pointed out that retrieval systems and presence across platforms are new territory, and one expert argued that AI search may eventually earn its own dedicated team, the way social media did (Guaglione, 2026). That 80% figure is a professional estimate, not a measured result, so treat it as a handy rule of thumb.

When you line these sources up, three points stand out:

• Strong SEO foundations lift visibility in AI answers.
• A real, smaller set of GEO activities is new.
• Outcomes in AI platforms vary by prompt, so pilots with clear measures make sense.

The Keep, Extend, Add Test

Proposals tend to arrive as a single line that says GEO. The Keep, Extend, Add Test turns that one line into three honest groups, and each group gets its own budget logic.

• Keep: shared fundamentals such as helpful content, technical health, site structure, and authority building. They support search results and AI answers alike, so you fund them once, inside the SEO plan.
• Extend: SEO work adapted for AI answers, such as direct answers near the top of a page, richer FAQ sections, clearer service descriptions, and refreshed older content. These usually justify a modest add-on.
• Add: new activities such as tracking your visibility in AI answers, earning reviews and mentions beyond your site, and testing how each AI platform describes you. These fit a pilot.

Here is Extend in action. Picture an accounting firm with a page about small business tax planning. The page already exists, so the team adds a short opening summary that says who the service helps, what it includes, and what a client can expect.

Then it answers the four questions prospects ask most, updates the details, and adds a clear next step. One edit helps searchers on Google and gives AI systems clean, relevant passages to draw from. Nobody built a new page, and nobody needed a new retainer.

Now picture the Add side. A regional home services company decides to pilot. It picks a short list of questions homeowners ask before hiring, such as how to choose a contractor and what a repair should cost. Each month, the team checks how the major AI assistants answer those questions, notes whether the company is named, and compares that with calls and form submissions.

At the same time, it asks recent customers for honest reviews. The pilot has a small budget, a named owner, and a review date, so the learning arrives before the larger spend does.

The test also gives owners and marketers a shared vocabulary. Owners see which parts of a proposal overlap with work already funded. Marketers show where fresh effort is required. Providers explain what is new with confidence, because the framework makes the case on its own.

Where the New Work Really Is

A fair review gives credit to the new parts of GEO, because that is where fresh budget has the best case. The Semrush survey and Digiday’s reporting point to four areas:

• Your reputation beyond your website. AI answers draw on reviews, community discussions, video, and press coverage. Yet only 8% of surveyed marketers used digital PR for AI visibility, 9% managed online reviews, and 11% built mentions through communities and social platforms (Loktionova, 2026). That is an open field.
• Access and readability for AI systems. Which AI crawlers may reach your content, and how easily they can read your pages, are decisions worth making on purpose.
• Measurement. Answers vary by prompt and platform, and many tracking tools estimate results from simulated prompts instead of real user queries (Guaglione, 2026). In the Semrush survey, 49% of marketers named the effect of AI on pipeline or revenue as a leading measurement challenge, and 40% relied mainly on manual spot checks in ChatGPT.
• Platform differences. Each assistant may retrieve and cite differently, so results from one platform may need confirming on another.

What about traffic? AI platforms currently send a small share of visits to many publishers. Similarweb data cited by Digiday showed less than 1% of overall traffic for the news outlets it examined, while one publisher reported a markedly higher subscription conversion rate among visitors arriving from AI platforms (Guaglione, 2026).

Small volume with strong intent is a classic reason to run a pilot first, measure leads and revenue, and scale what works.

Your Proposal Review in Five Minutes

Take the GEO proposal on your desk and read each line item against two questions. Is it already part of the current SEO scope? Does it adapt something you already have? Anything left over is new, and new work deserves a pilot with an owner, a measure, and a review date.

Bring these questions to the conversation with any provider, whether an agency, a freelancer, or an internal teammate:

• Which part of this work already sits inside our current SEO scope?
• Which pages or technical items will change, and how will we confirm it?
• What counts as success: qualified leads, calls, form submissions, revenue, or AI mentions?
• How long does the pilot run, and when do we review it together?
• What do we own at the end, including content, reports, and data?
• Will SEO and GEO appear in one report with one baseline?

Good answers build trust quickly. They also give you a tidy summary to share with a colleague who missed the meeting.

Questions Owners Ask Before Moving Budget

Should we pause SEO to fund GEO? A pause removes the work that GEO builds on. Google’s guide ties AI feature eligibility to the same indexing and quality systems that SEO serves (Google Search Central, 2026), so most teams do better by keeping the foundation funded and adding a pilot on top.

How much should a GEO budget be? No universal figure exists. In the Scribewise survey reported by Digiday, 70% of marketers with GEO dollars said it made up 11 to 20% of that budget (McCoy, 2026). Treat that range as one data point from one survey. A pilot sized to what your team can measure and manage is a sound starting point.

How will we know it works? Set a baseline before anything changes. Track leads, conversion rate, and branded search alongside AI visibility, and use the Generative AI performance report in Search Console for Google’s features. When AI mentions rise and qualified leads follow, you have found a pattern worth funding.

A Bolder Idea: Fix the Foundation First

Here is a thought that rarely appears in budget meetings. For many businesses, the highest-return GEO investment is an SEO repair. Google’s guide states that a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet before it can be shown in AI features (Google Search Central, 2026). A page that search systems struggle to find or understand has little to offer an AI answer, whatever name appears on the invoice.

So the order of spending matters. Start by confirming that your core pages are crawlable, indexed, and clear about who you serve and what you sell. Next, extend the strongest pages with direct answers and current details. Then fund a defined pilot for the new activities, drawn from a modest slice of the search line and expanded when the evidence supports it. We call this protect the base, pilot the extension.

Moving a large share of SEO budget before any pilot has produced results may weaken the very foundation that AI visibility relies on. A steadier path keeps leads flowing today and gives you your own data for tomorrow. Since AI visibility is still measured imperfectly across the industry, learning at a measured pace is a competitive advantage.

What Changes for B2B and B2C

The Keep, Extend, Add mix shifts with your audience. B2B buyers often research a purchase through many questions over several weeks, and an AI assistant may help build their shortlist along the way. Clear service pages, case studies, and consistent descriptions of your offer carry extra weight in that journey.

B2C and local businesses may find accurate business details matter most. Google notes that Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles help products and services appear in AI responses and other search results (Google Search Central, 2026).

Reviews and customer feedback add another layer, because AI answers can draw on them. In both cases, the first move is the same: learn the questions your best customers ask, answer them clearly on your own site, and keep your details accurate everywhere they appear. Those tasks live in Keep and Extend, which is why the Add budget may come out smaller than expected.

A 90-Day Starter Plan

You can run this plan inside most existing engagements, and each step produces something you can show your team:

• Weeks 1 and 2, baseline: review indexing, site structure, your top pages by leads, and the Generative AI performance report in Search Console.
• Weeks 3 to 6, extend: add direct answers, FAQ sections, current service details, customer proof, and accurate business profiles to priority pages.
• Weeks 6 to 12, pilot: choose a focused list of customer questions, record how AI platforms answer them each month, and begin earning reviews and credible mentions.
• End of quarter, decide: compare leads, conversion rate, and AI mentions with your baseline, then set the next budget.

By day ninety, you hold real evidence from your own business. That makes the next budget conversation shorter and a lot more confident.

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The Decision in Plain Terms

AI search is a genuine opportunity, and exploring it is a smart move. The evidence from Google, Semrush, and Digiday tells one consistent story: most of GEO stands on SEO, and a smaller set of activities is new. Keep what is shared, extend what can be adapted, and pilot what is new. When you follow that order, each dollar has a clear job, and every stage aims at leads and sales you can count.

Ready to see where your own budget stands? Share your current SEO scope and any GEO proposal you have received, and we will map every line to Keep, Extend, or Add in a one-page summary for your team.

Want to see how the pieces fit before you decide? Explore the work of our website design company team, the programs from our SEO agency specialists, and the planning behind our digital marketing agency services.

References

Gartner, Inc. (2025, May 12). Gartner 2025 CMO spend survey reveals marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of overall company revenue [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-12-gartner-2025-cmo-spend-survey-reveals-marketing-budgets-have-flatlined-at-seven-percent-of-overall-company-revenue

Google Search Central. (2026, July 10). Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. Google for Developers. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide

Guaglione, S. (2026, March 10). GEO hype busted: How it differs (and how it doesn’t) from SEO. Digiday. https://digiday.com/media/geo-hype-busted-experts-call-it-more-seo-than-new-discipline/

Loktionova, M. (2026, June 3). Only 22% of marketers have fully integrated AI search and SEO. They’re pulling ahead. [Study]. Semrush Blog. https://www.semrush.com/blog/the-operational-gap-ai-seo-study/

McCoy, K. (2026, March 25). Marketers shift growing shares of search spending to GEO. Digiday. https://digiday.com/marketing/marketers-shift-growing-shares-of-search-spending-to-geo/

Pew Research Center. (2025, July 22). Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/