2026 Trends: GEO or AEO? It's all semantics

AI search understands humans better than ever. And SEO has to adapt (whatever you want to call it)

AI search has already cropped up twice in our trends for 2026, in our articles on brand and content. It’s no surprise that search is of wide-ranging interest to marketers, given its historical importance.

There are obvious fears about further digital disintermediation for brands. AI Overviews and answer engines will tell customers about the strengths and weaknesses of your product right there in ‘position zero’, and the information won’t necessarily originate from your own content. The result is a dwindling clickthrough rate.

Customers, however, don’t much care whether the brand gets a say. The semantic intelligence of AI search should help them find exactly what they need.

Customers just want answers

This shouldn’t be a big shock to marketers, who have understood for years that doing right by their customers is the route to ranking well (through site performance, architecture and helpful content). The better AI gets at understanding human intent, arguably the less esoteric SEO becomes. That doesn’t mean the death of the discipline, just that marketers cannot succeed without deep knowledge of consumer motivation.

AI search should benefit marketers doing things the right way. That’s those who are building their brand reputation across the internet, not simply churning out bland, keyword focused content or outbidding the competition. Of course, as clicks are falling, it would be foolish to predict the future of Google’s model, but consumers certainly seem to be embracing AI Overviews.

The GEO Mindset Shift

In our new report, The GEO Mindset Shift, we look at how marketers should be adapting. But as a brief summary, there’s a general consensus in the industry that marketers should:

• move from keywords to topic authority (understand the questions that users are asking and answer them with quality content);
• track AI share of voice at a topic level;
• build the entity that is your brand – target mentions via third party validation in the press, affiliates, social media, reviews etc;
• earn citations by providing comprehensive brand information - gaps create the chance of a competitor defining part of your offering;
• create pages that are both machine-readable and human-readable (combine schema markup with well-structured, well-connected and concise content);
• remember the essentials - technical SEO hasn’t changed and content should still be easy to consume;
• engagement over empty traffic - pursue a multichannel approach incorporating video and social;
• craft content that AI likes to recommend - FAQs, free interactive tools and how-to guides.

This is an excerpt from CTI Digital's report, 2026 Trends: Marketing in the Age of AI.