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 genuinely 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