Is SEO dead now that everyone uses AI?

No. Some searches do send fewer clicks now, so the people saying SEO is dead aren't making that part up. But Google and Microsoft both say their AI answers are built on the same foundations as ordinary search, and neither says those foundations have stopped mattering. Where the two part company is over what to call the work and how to measure it, and that disagreement turns out to be the most useful part of the whole debate.

This is part of our series marketing myths, checked, which tests what small and medium businesses are told against what the people who run the systems actually publish.

The true part: fewer clicks from some searches

The best measurement we found is American. Pew Research Center analysed the browsing of 900 US adults who agreed to share it. In March 2025, people who saw an AI summary on a Google results page clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of visits.

In the UK, Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 says about 30% of searches now show AI Overviews, and that ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million a year earlier. So the shift is real, and it's happening here.

What those figures don't show is that search has stopped mattering. They show that the answer now often arrives before the click, which changes how search pays off. It doesn't end it.

Google's view: it's still SEO

Google's guide to its generative AI features asks whether SEO is still relevant, and answers: "In short, yes!" The reason it gives is that its AI features "are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems" and draw on pages from its search index.

Then it takes on the new vocabulary. It notes that "AEO" and "GEO", short for answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation, are terms "you may see used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences", and gives its view of them: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The guide goes further, telling readers to "Prioritize effective SEO strategies over 'AEO/GEO hacks'". For Google Search, it says, you can ignore tactics such as "chunking" content into small pieces, creating AI text files such as llms.txt, or "pursuing inauthentic mentions". And it points anyone considering outside AEO or GEO services to its guidance on evaluating SEO advice.

Google's separate page on AI features and your website says the same in fewer words: nothing extra is needed to appear in its AI answers, and no special markup either.

Microsoft's view: GEO is a practice of its own

Microsoft describes the same shift differently. In February 2026 Jordi Ribas, its corporate vice president for Search and AI, wrote on the Bing blog that grounding, the process that connects an AI answer to current web pages, "is driving the emergence of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the practice of understanding how content participates in AI-driven experiences". He added: "In an AI-first world, visibility is no longer defined only by rankings or clicks." And he described the new reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools as "a first window into a broader GEO toolset".

Bing's webmaster guidelines keep the two terms side by side. Their first section is headed "SEO Fundamentals Still Apply to Grounding and AI Experiences", and says Bing and Copilot "rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search". Later they define GEO as work that "focuses on content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses", and warn that "SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences". They also note that "A decline in clicks does not always indicate a loss of visibility."

Where they genuinely disagree

It's tempting to say the two mean the same thing in different words. On the foundations they do: both say their AI answers draw on the same crawling, indexing and ranking as ordinary search, and neither promises anyone a citation. But three of the differences are real.

The name, and what it suggests you should buy. Google folds the work into SEO and warns against "AEO/GEO hacks". Microsoft names GEO as a practice in its own right, and is building tools for it. So if someone offers you a separate GEO service, Google's position is that there's nothing separate to optimise for on Google, while Microsoft's is that there's something distinct to understand and measure.

What counts as success. Microsoft says outright that visibility is no longer only rankings or clicks, and that being cited in an answer counts. Google now reports AI visibility too: Search Console's generative AI performance report, rolled out to all sites on 31 August 2026, shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. But Google presents that as part of Search performance, not as a separate discipline.

How much of the work is new. By Google's account, very little: write useful, original pages and let its ordinary systems do the rest. By Microsoft's, enough to deserve its own name and its own tools, even though its guidelines put the same SEO fundamentals first.

Our own reading is that, for a small or medium business, the difference is about measurement rather than method. Both engines say their AI answers draw on the pages their search already finds and ranks, so the work itself is the same. What changes is that you should now count citations as well as clicks.

What the other assistants say

Very little, beyond asking to be let in. OpenAI says site owners should allow its search software, OAI-SearchBot, "in order to appear in search results". Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot "prevents our system from indexing your content for search optimization". Perplexity says PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity". Not one of the three publishes how it decides which sources to cite. Search is also only one channel, and we take the others in turn, from reviews to email, in what AI actually changes about marketing your business.

What to do

1. Keep the foundations. That means pages search engines can read and list, one clear page for each service, and the answer near the top of each. Bing says much the same in its webmaster guidelines: pages focused on one topic, with the key information near the top, are easier to select. If important pages are missing from Google or Bing, work out why before anything else.
2. Show you know what you're talking about. Named authors, real examples and first-hand experience are exactly what Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content asks about. Thin articles written only to chase a keyword are losing their value. If an AI can sum up your page in one line without leaving anything out, the page probably wasn't adding much.
3. Get mentioned elsewhere. Reviews, press and links from respected sites all help. For local results, Google lists reviews and links among the things that make a business prominent.
4. Let the search software in. Check that your robots.txt file, which tells search engines which pages they may visit, allows Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, unless you've made a deliberate choice about which AI bots to block and which to let in.
5. Count citations as well as clicks. Open Search Console's generative AI performance report and Bing's AI Performance report, and write the numbers down each month. Keep an eye on enquiries from unpaid search, on how often people search for your name, and on whether AI assistants mention you when asked about your category.
6. Don't pay for hacks. Google says Google Search ignores llms.txt files, and that there's no need to break content into small chunks for AI. So ask anyone selling GEO what they'd do that isn't SEO, what evidence they have that it works, and whether they're promising more than paid AI visibility packages can deliver.
7. Decide with your own numbers. Whether SEO pays depends on your own searches and margins, and you can work out whether SEO is worth it for your business from both.

A quick check

• My important pages are indexed on Google and Bing.
• My robots.txt file lets the search software in.
• I've looked at Search Console's generative AI performance report.
• I've looked at Bing's AI Performance report.
• I measure enquiries, not just clicks.
• Nobody is charging me for llms.txt files or chunked content.

What nobody knows yet

Three gaps remain. The Pew figures come from 900 US adults in March 2025, and Ofcom measures how often UK searches show AI Overviews rather than how often people click, so we couldn't find an independent UK study of clicks. We found no published evidence that the tactics sold as GEO, over and above ordinary SEO, get a site cited more often, and Google lists the best-known of them among the tactics you can ignore. And OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish how to let their software in, but not how they decide which pages to cite, so anyone who claims to know is either guessing or selling.

So SEO isn't dead. The clicks are thinner on some searches, and the two biggest engines can't agree on what to call the work, but the sensible response to both is to count citations as well as clicks, not to buy a second service. If you'd like to know where your site stands, our SEO audit and first fixes costs a fixed £2,500: a technical audit with the most important fixes actually made, the searches worth going after, and improvements to your most important pages.