Every prospective client who comes to me asks about AI search. And they should – they want to understand how people are finding businesses like theirs and what they need to be doing about it. But the first thing I explain is that SEO is still part of that work – in my opinion, the biggest part of that work. Google puts it plainly in its own guidance: “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

That’s directly from Google’s Search Central guidance, in the section addressing AEO and GEO. So I have questions about where we’re finding the budget for AI search optimization when we apparently couldn’t find the budget for SEO. (Apparently, we just needed to call it something else to get the budget approved.)

I want my clients to show up when someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation. Improving that visibility is part of my work. But to be quite frank, if your service pages still don’t explain what you actually do, we need to deal with that. Those pages don’t become less of a priority because we’re interested in AI search. They’re some of the information we’re asking search systems – and potential customers – to use to understand your business.

Which is why the findings in Search Engine Journal’s latest survey caught my attention. AI search optimization is moving up the spending agenda, while some of the work supporting that visibility is moving down.

Why Is Proven SEO Work Slipping Down the Priority List?

In Search Engine Journal’s State of Search 2027 findings, 43% of respondents plan to invest in or prioritize generative engine optimization (GEO) over the next year. But when asked what’s actually producing their strongest results, only 14% pointed to AI search optimization. Content refreshes and technical SEO were among the activities getting credit for strong results, yet both are slipping down the priority list.

That’s the part I have trouble with. We’re eager to fund AI visibility while giving less attention to work that’s actually helping.

And the work being pushed down the list supports AI visibility, too. Google explains that its AI search features use its existing search ranking systems to find relevant, up-to-date pages for their answers. A page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet before it can be included in those features. So if a technical issue is keeping your service page out of Google’s index, fixing it is part of your AI search work. I’d want to know why we were putting that off while approving a budget to improve AI visibility.

I don’t expect businesses to wait until something is fully established before investing in it. There should be room to test and learn. And the survey doesn’t tell us that individual businesses are cutting technical SEO to pay for GEO. But it does give us a reason to look at our own decisions. If your content updates have been sitting on hold for six months and you’re now reviewing an AI search proposal, are those updates included? Or are they still waiting for someone to approve them?

That’s difficult to judge from a proposal that just says “improve AI visibility.” I want to see which pages need work, what needs to change, and how the proposed work addresses the problems already on the list.

What Additional Work Does AI Search Actually Require?

The starting point is still SEO. Before recommending additional AI search work, I want to know whether your website gives us accurate, useful content to work with and whether search engines can access it. We don’t need to wait until every page is perfect before investigating AI visibility, but the problems we already know about need to be part of the plan.

With that work underway, we can review how your business appears in AI answers. Can someone find you when they describe the problem you solve, without already knowing your name? If your business is mentioned, is the description accurate? Which sources are being cited? Those questions give us something specific to investigate.

Established SEO tools are adding ways to do this. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit and Ahrefs’ Brand Radar track brand mentions and citations in AI answers. These are relatively new capabilities, and we need to understand what each report covers. A mention in a set of tracked answers tells us something different from a visit to your website or an inquiry. I want to know which questions and platforms we’re measuring before treating a visibility score as evidence that the work is paying off.

The findings should help us decide what needs attention. If an answer describes a service you stopped offering, we need to investigate where that information is coming from. If customers are asking a comparison question your website never addresses, we should review whether answering it would help them make a decision. Some of the resulting tasks will be familiar SEO work. The additional research gives us more information about where to focus it.

That’s where I can see a reason for additional budget: research, monitoring, and tests tied to specific findings, with the necessary website work included. If we’re paying to track AI mentions while the content updates remain on hold, we’ve funded another report. We still need someone to do the work.

A Few Final Thoughts

I’m interested in what AI search can do for a business. But if we couldn’t get approval to update the service pages six months ago, but we can get approval for AI search optimization today, I want those pages included in the work. I don’t want to be having the same conversation six months from now, with a new reporting dashboard and the same outdated website. Call the budget whatever you need to. We still need to do the SEO.