Executive Summary
Your next client is already looking for businesses like yours. The question is whether they can find you. Search has changed significantly in the last two years. Google still matters, but AI tools like ChatGPT are now part of how buyers research before they ever contact a vendor. Most marketing conversations focus on which one to prioritise. This article argues that this is the wrong question. You need to show up in both places, and in the spaces in between. That is what we mean by a coverage question, and it is the frame we use at Media Quest to keep our clients visible in a fast-moving market.
Most of the AEO vs SEO conversation happening right now is being had by people who run content sites, SaaS products, and publisher businesses where every lost click directly translates to lost revenue. That is a real problem for them. But it is not the problem most businesses are facing.
For businesses that win clients through relationships, service quality, and trust built over time, the question is not whether to choose AEO or SEO. The question is whether you are covered across every surface where your next client might be looking for you. That is a coverage question, and it is a more useful frame than almost anything being written on this topic right now.
Eli Schwartz published a piece earlier this month arguing that AEO is not SEO 2.0 and that treating them as the same thing is a trap. It is a well-argued piece. We shared it internally at Media Quest, and the conversation it started was worth having publicly. Some of what he says is correct. Some of it misses something important. And the part it misses matters most for the kind of businesses we work with.
Media Quest is a full-service B2B marketing agency based in Longview, Texas. We have been doing this since 1999. Our clients are not publishers. They are contractors, distributors, service companies, and operators trying to win customers and grow revenue. When you work with businesses like that, the AEO vs SEO debate looks very different from how it looks in a Substack newsletter.
What Eli gets right
The core observation in the article is accurate. The interface has shifted. When someone gets a direct answer from an AI tool, they do not need to click anywhere. A Seer Interactive study tracking over 25 million organic impressions found that click-through rates dropped 61% for queries where AI Overviews appear.
That is a significant drop, and it is concentrated in informational and educational content.
Eli is also right that brand authority is now a prerequisite. Large language models surface the brands they have encountered consistently across the web. You cannot shortcut your way into that position with a technical checklist. And his point about asking customers how they found you is correct. That kind of direct attribution data tells you more right now than a rank report alone.
What the debate is missing
The argument that rankings and keywords no longer exist is where the article loses us, and we think it loses us for a specific reason: it describes one type of business and presents the conclusion as universal.
Google still holds over 90% of the global search market as of late 2025. Google search ad clicks hit a five-year high in Q4 2025, with spend up 13% year over year. SEMrush’s analysis of over 10 million keywords found that real estate and high-intent shopping queries have seen the least disruption from AI Overviews, precisely because those queries carry commercial weight that a text summary cannot satisfy on its own.
The drop in clicks is real, but it is concentrated in informational content: how-to articles, definitions, and general research queries. If your business runs on revenue from those clicks, the ground is shifting fast, and Eli is right to sound the alarm. But that is not every business. For businesses with longer sales cycles, higher ticket values, and decisions that require trust before money moves, the dynamics are different.
Keywords did not disappear. They got longer and more specific.
Users still express intent through language. When someone types a prompt into ChatGPT, they are still telling the system exactly what they need. The format changed. The intent did not.
Research from Nectiv shows that commercial-intent prompts trigger a live web search within ChatGPT over 53% of the time, compared to just 19% for purely informational queries. When someone is trying to buy something or hire someone, ChatGPT searches the web for sources. The signals it uses to decide which sources to pull are the same ones SEO has always been built on: content quality, site structure, and credibility.
AEO cannot exist without a strong SEO foundation underneath it. That is not a controversial point. It is a mechanical one. The two are not in competition. AEO is the next layer you build once the foundation is solid.
For your business, this is a coverage question
Here is what the AEO vs SEO debate consistently overlooks: most of the businesses operating in the wider economy do not win clients through click volume. They win through being found at the right moment by the right person, and then earning enough trust for a conversation to happen.
For those businesses, losing ground in search is not about losing ad revenue. It is about disappearing from the shortlist before the buyer ever picks up the phone.
The data on how business buyers actually behave makes this concrete. A Google and National Research Group study from late 2025 found that buyers now complete most of their vendor research independently, using search engines, AI tools, peer recommendations, and social media, often before ever speaking to a salesperson. The 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that in 95% of cases, the winning vendor was already on the buyer’s shortlist on day one of the research journey.
Read that again. The shortlist is built before anyone talks to a salesperson. It is built during research, across multiple surfaces. And if you are not on it at that stage, you will not win the deal later.
So the question for your business is not “AEO” or “SEO”. The question is: where is your next client looking, and are you there?
If they search Google and you are not ranking, you are off the shortlist. If they ask ChatGPT and your brand has no presence in the data it draws from, you are off the shortlist. And, if they ask a peer and your name never comes up because you have no visibility anywhere, you were never in the running.
Coverage across all three of those surfaces is not optional. You cannot win one and ignore the others.
What we are doing about it at Media Quest
Because we believe this is a coverage question and not a channel-replacement question, we have been building our approach in layers rather than pivoting away from what works.
- We continue tracking traditional search rankings and organic performance. Commercial intent queries still drive real outcomes for our clients, and we are not walking away from that data.
- We have started tracking AI Visibility using tools that show how clients appear across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and similar AI platforms. This has become an important part of our reporting for Advanced SEO clients.
- We have created structured website files for our Advanced SEO clients that help AI systems understand exactly what each business does, making it easier for those businesses to be surfaced as solutions when someone asks a relevant question.
- We added a simple “How did you hear about us?” question to client websites, with options now including AI tools alongside traditional channels. This is the direct attribution data that tells you what is actually working, not just what ranks.
The bottom line on AEO vs SEO
Eli’s piece is worth reading. He is right that the mechanics of AEO and SEO are fundamentally different, and that the old way of measuring success tells an incomplete story.
But the frame of AEO vs SEO as a choice, or even as a priority ranking, is only useful if your business lives and dies by traffic volume. Most businesses do not. Most businesses need to be found, trusted, and remembered on every surface their buyers use during research. That requires search visibility, AI visibility, and brand presence to work together rather than compete.
If you are not sure how visible your business is across search and AI platforms today, that is exactly the conversation we are here to have. Reach out to the Media Quest team, and we will take a look together.
This article was written by the Media Quest SEO Team. Media Quest is a full-service B2B marketing agency based in Longview, Texas, helping businesses across Texas and beyond build their marketing presence since 1999.
Sources
- Eli Schwartz, “AEO is not SEO 2.0”, April 9, 2026. productledseo.com
- Seer Interactive, “AIO Impact on Google CTR”, September 2025. seerinteractive.com
- The Go-To Guy, “How Google Paid and Organic Search Will Work in 2026”. thegotoguy.co
- ALM Corp, “Google Search Ad Clicks Q4 2025 Benchmarks”. almcorp.com
- Dataslayer, “Google AI Overviews and the End of Traditional CTR” (citing SEMrush data). dataslayer.ai
- Nectiv, “What Queries Is ChatGPT Using Behind the Scenes”. nectivdigital.com
- Digital Commerce 360, “Google Survey of B2B Buyers”, December 2025. digitalcommerce360.com
- 6sense, “2025 Buyer Experience Report”. 6sense.com