Learning a new skill is rarely easy. It’s even more difficult when learning the new skill requires you to unlearn a skill you had previously mastered.
That’s where most marketers are today when it comes to understanding and influencing AI search visibility. Our new report, “Moving fast, flying blind: 2026 AI search survey,” shows that the overwhelming majority of marketers—82%—say AI search visibility is their top priority, but almost two-thirds are still being judged on SEO metrics like website traffic.
Sound like you? The good news is that you’re not alone.
The trough of misalignment
You’re likely familiar with the “Trough of Disillusionment” from the Gartner Hype Cycle, in which people begin to lose faith that the hot new technology is truly going to be a game-changer.
Right now, we’re in a different sort of trough with AI visibility. Virtually every professional believes that AI will be a big part of the future of work and that being found in AI answer engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews is how their business will be discovered moving forward. But there is a gap in understanding between marketers, who are living this every day, and the colleagues and executives they report to, who are not as immersed in this rapidly evolving world.
Basically, the people we report to are stuck in the past.
62% of marketers we surveyed say they’re being judged on traditional SEO or traffic metrics—a scary reality when website traffic has fallen pretty much across the board, and most of that traffic comes from AI bots.
52% of the marketers we surveyed say that this SEO/GEO misalignment is limiting their execution—they feel they’re not doing everything they can to win this fast-moving game because they’re busy fighting a rearguard action against concepts that don’t matter nearly as much as they did just a few short years ago.
The frustration is building—46% of marketers have difficulty explaining the value of AI visibility investments to non-marketing or communications teams. The senior partners and executives are wondering why what they did before won’t help them today, and us marketing folks are struggling to come up with a good answer. (Editor’s note: We should fix that. See below.)
GEO is fundamentally different from SEO
People who have spent their entire careers in SEO are very happy to tell you that GEO is just SEO 2.0. But it’s not. While there is clearly overlap, it’s not nearly what some SEOs would have you believe.
Google’s search engine is a fairly straightforward information flow. LLMs’ information retrieval is far more complex and multi-pronged and, as we have all learned, returns slightly different results every time.
Yes, SEO still matters. It has a direct impact on AI responses. But it’s not one-to-one. In fact, studies say the overlap between Google’s top-10 organic results and AI Overview citations is somewhere between 17 and 38%.
Clearly, ranking in traditional search is not the same thing as being the answer in AI search. And you can’t measure probabilistic AI answers the same way you would more deterministic SERPs.
We can be frustrated by this misalignment and curse the marketing gods, or we can try to remedy it.
Educating your senior partners about AI visibility
As marketing and communications professionals, we should be better at this, right? Unfortunately, we often come up short when it comes to convincing others in our organizations. It’s time to launch an internal campaign to get the attention and change the minds of the people running your firm.
- Keep it simple. There is a ton of fast-changing information and opinion around AI search. Don’t try to deliver a PhD-level course on AI search to your executive leadership team. Explain that online search has changed, what used to work doesn’t work anymore, and we have to evolve and work differently.
- Make it relevant. Explain why it matters for the business: “Companies that don’t publish are becoming invisible; if we’re invisible, our business development efforts will fall off a cliff.”
- Overcommunicate. There is a marketing and psychology principle called “The Rule of Seven”—people need to hear something at least seven times before it begins to sink in. You can’t send a memo up the line and think your job is done. You have to become an evangelist for AI search; just when you’re sick of hearing yourself talk about it, you’re beginning to be heard.
If you’d like to schedule a one-hour executive overview session with us, just let us know.