Marketing leaders expect SEO and AI search to grow side by side, at least in the short term, according to new research from mobile analytics and marketing tech firm Branch.
Branch’s AI Search and Discovery Enterprise Benchmark Report, based on a survey of 300 enterprise, marketing, growth, and digital leaders across six industries, concluded that leaders don’t expect AI search to replace SEO, and that both channels will continue to grow.
The leaders project that the percentage of website traffic from traditional SEO will grow from 45% to 53% in 2026 — an eight-percentage-point increase, the 20-page report noted. At the same time, they expect the percentage of website traffic from AI search to grow even faster, jumping from 35% to 50%.
“This shift is dramatic,” the researchers wrote. “Only 26% received over half their traffic from AI search in 2025, but by the end of 2026, 49% expect to hit that threshold. That’s nearly doubling in one year.”
However, they added: “These projections assume AI search will drive traffic the same way traditional search does, which is unlikely.”
“As AI platforms deliver more complete answers directly in their interfaces, the relationship between discovery and website visits is changing,” they continued. “Leaders are managing both channels now, not choosing between them — and that means tracking more touchpoints, mapping more complex customer journeys, and solving attribution challenges that didn’t exist a year ago.”
SEO Evolves Into GEO
“AI search won’t replace SEO, but it will absolutely demote old-school SEO from king to one part of a bigger system,” maintained Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst at SmartTech Research, a technology advisory firm in Las Vegas.
“SEO still powers discoverability at the index and content layer, but AI optimization now sits on top of it, translating brand authority, structured content, and relevance into model-readable signals and synthesized answers,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Even Branch’s own framing is not ‘SEO is dead,’ but that marketers are moving from SEO to [AI Overview], which is a meaningful expansion rather than a clean replacement,” he said.
AI search won’t kill SEO, but it will evolve it into GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — predicted Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.
“Traditional SEO focused on site structure and keywords to rank in a list,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “GEO focuses on brand authority, sentiment, and ‘citability.’ The goal is no longer just to be ‘found,’ but to be the definitive source that the AI chooses to include in its synthesized response.”
AI won’t replace SEO so much as absorb and transform it, contended Molly McKinley, founder of Redtail Creative, a marketing and strategic communications consultancy in Raleigh, N.C.
“Traditional SEO optimized for algorithms that ranked pages,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “GEO optimizes for algorithms that synthesize answers. The underlying logic is similar, such as being the most credible and well-structured source on a topic, but the signals that establish credibility have shifted.”
“Third-party validation and earned media matter more now than they did in a pure keyword world,” she said. “The brands that understand this earliest will have a real head start, but the ones chasing shortcuts will find themselves invisible in ways that are much harder to diagnose than a dropped ranking.”
Complementary Technologies
SEO and GEO aren’t nearly as far apart as the hype would have us believe, argued Peter Sloterdyk, chief marketing officer for Gist, of Pasadena, Calif., an AI-based writing assistant program.
“They complement each other, and both are still wildly necessary,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “While conversational AI engagements will most certainly become the default for consumers in the not-too-distant future, I don’t yet see a world where the SEO best practices we’ve embraced over the last two decades disappear. Content is once again ruling our sphere, as it influences both SEO and GEO performance.”
Channing Ferrer, chief revenue officer and Americas CEO of Brevo, a global customer-engagement and marketing-automation platform, agreed that AI won’t replace search, but added it will absolutely change what effective SEO looks like.
“Traditional SEO is still foundational because AI systems are often drawing from the same underlying web content ecosystem that search engines index,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “But AI discovery introduces a new layer marketers now have to think about, whether their content is crawlable, rankable, understandable, attributable, and useful inside AI-generated answers.”
Much of AI search optimization is simply good SEO, asserted Ryan W. Bailes of Bailes Zindler, in Tyler, Texas, a digital agency that builds websites, SEO programs, and paid media campaigns for businesses.
“It is still vital to maintain your website’s crawlability, indexation, content quality, authority, internal linking, and technical health,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Now, it is also vital to ensure machines can easily read your content by including schema, Open Graph, content structure, consistent messaging, product feeds, and any other relevant information you can provide,” he said. “Brands succeeding in AI search are not abandoning SEO. They are adapting to the new AI reality.”
New Search Paradigm
The Branch report explained that traditional search has been the foundation of digital acquisition for more than 25 years. Organic search traffic, search engine optimization best practices, and Google’s dominance have shaped how businesses think about discovery, visibility, and customer acquisition.
But AI search and large language model experiences are creating a new discovery paradigm, it continued. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and other AI platforms are changing how people find information and how brands get discovered.
For the first time in decades, the rules of search are changing, it added.
“Marketers are always looking for the next concept, the next mechanism for finding clients,” said Adam Landis, head of strategic growth at Branch.
“And for good reason,” he continued. “It’s existential for a brand to maximize ROI and reach with clients. To miss a paradigm shift could leave the brand behind and threaten its very existence.”
“For marketers to demonstrate — and vote with their wallets — that AI is growing in importance means marketers need to pay attention to these shifts,” he added. “If they don’t, they could find themselves irretrievably behind.”
“The new paradigm is forcing brands to rethink how they show up online,” observed Anne DeSpain, founder of DeSpain Consulting, an AI operations and workflow automation consultancy in Park City, Utah.
“SEO became a very strong skill set and somewhat formulaic, to the point where it was getting easy to game the system,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “The shift is requiring brands to be more authentic about storytelling, because LLMs reward authoritative, well-structured content over keyword-stuffed pages.”
“If your brand doesn’t have a clear, credible story backed by real substance, you’re not getting surfaced,” she said. “AI platforms are also more selective, so the stakes are higher now. In traditional search, you might rank on page two. In AI search, you’re either there in the output, or you’re not.”
“As an industry trend, AI search will indeed change SEO as we know it, but that should not scare consumers or businesses,” added Eli Clemens, a policy analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a research and public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
“Today, if you want to read an online recipe, you sometimes have to scroll through large amounts of HTML content to get to the recipe itself,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “Some consumers like the extra content and some do not, but the main reason why online recipes are designed that way is SEO-driven incentives.”
“AI-driven discovery can synthesize all of the extra content or get just the basic recipe to the consumer, whichever one the consumer wants,” he said. “From a consumer perspective, that is better technology. For businesses that rely on search for marketing, there is uncertainty and the need to adapt, but also a clear opportunity to build new strategies around model optimization, both for being cited by models and for being incorporated into models’ inference process.”
