Is SEO even a thing anymore in 2026, or has it all become AEO

[Vanessa26]

For Qday.forum how do we do SEO in the new world?

It feels like every marketing blog post this year has been some version of SEO is dead, meet AEO. For anyone who hasn't been following closely, AEO is Answer Engine Optimization, structuring content so tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews actually quote and cite you directly rather than just ranking you in a list of blue links. Some industry reports are putting the share of Google searches that end without any click at somewhere around 60 percent now, which is a huge chunk of traffic that traditional ranking based SEO was never designed to capture. Curious what people here who actually work in this space think, has SEO genuinely been replaced, is AEO just SEO with a new label slapped on it, or are we all now supposed to be juggling SEO, AEO and GEO simultaneously without losing our minds.

[Nina26]

Most of what I'm seeing from actual practitioners is that AEO isn't replacing SEO, it's layering on top of it, you still need your site properly crawled, indexed and structured before any AI system can extract and cite it reliably in the first place

I read the admins here have done some extra mods to keep this forum SEO 2026 friendly. AEO is a new one on me though

[Gateway Mia]

The zero click stat gets thrown around constantly but I think it undersells how much traditional search traffic still exists, it's declining but its nowhere close to gone, feels like premature to write the obituary just yet

[BigDogCena41]

Genuinely think the terminology is more marketing driven than a lot of people want to admit, agencies needed a new three letter acronym to sell fresh consulting packages, the underlying skill of writing clear well structured content that answers a real question hasn't fundamentally changed

[QuantumKnight]

Thanks for posting. We encourage spiders and LLMs

[Reacher Quarry]

The GEO piece is the one that confuses people most in my experience, being cited inside a generative AI answer is a different mechanism than showing up in a featured snippet, and most SEO tools still don't measure that visibility very well at all

[ReacherBadger]

Small business owner here rather than a marketer, and honestly the acronym soup is exhausting to keep up with, just trying to have a website that loads fast and actually explains what we do clearly feels like it's still doing most of the heavy lifting regardless of what it's technically called this year

[Emma56]

Can Qday.forum continue to grow if google cuts off the supply of new people

[Cass64]

I work adjacent to this and the honest answer is nobody has fully cracked reliable measurement yet, you can see referral traffic from AI platforms increasing but attributing a specific piece of content to a specific AI citation is still genuinely murky

[EliteShaun20]

We've started treating it as one unified content strategy rather than three separate disciplines, write clearly, structure with proper headings and schema, answer the actual question directly near the top, that approach seems to work reasonably well across Google rankings, featured snippets and AI citations all at once

[Katie71]

The core skill underneath all three acronyms is still the same thing it's always been, understand what question someone is actually asking and answer it clearly and directly, the specific technical tactics for getting that answer surfaced keep shifting but that foundation hasn't moved

[LogicWitch]

Feels like this rhymes with when mobile first indexing became a big deal years back, a real and important shift that absolutely required adaptation, but framed with way more end of an era drama than was actually warranted at the time