What has actually changed?
The click is no longer guaranteed. AI Overviews answer many questions directly on the results page, and assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity answer them in chat, so a buyer can go from question to shortlist without visiting a single website. Site owners see the symptom as impressions holding steady while clicks drift down. The question changed shape: not "do we rank" but "are we in the answer".
None of this makes search small. It makes the results page a different kind of surface, where being quoted matters as much as being listed. The shift also lands unevenly: categories built on research questions, healthcare, services, B2B, feel it first, while navigation and brand searches barely move. Your exposure depends on how many of your buyers' questions can be answered without you.
What still depends on solid SEO?
More than the obituaries admit. AI engines discover and read the web through crawling and indexing, the same plumbing SEO keeps healthy: a site that search engines cannot crawl is a site AI engines cannot cite. Transactional and navigational queries still convert through classic results, local packs still drive calls and visits, and the authority signals SEO builds feed the sources AI engines draw on. Killing your SEO budget to fund AI visibility would sabotage the foundation the new layer stands on. Rankings also remain the cheapest proof of relevance an engine can read.
Where should the effort shift?
Toward work that serves both surfaces at once. Answer-shaped content, one real buyer question per page with the answer up front, ranks in search and gets quoted in AI answers. Structured data helps rich results and machine readability together. Consistent business facts across the web serve local SEO and engine trust identically. The overlap is large, which is the practical point: the shift is less about new budget than about pointing existing work at questions buyers actually ask, in both of your market's languages. Where AEO differs from SEO is the scoreboard, not most of the labor.
How do you decide what your business needs?
Measure both surfaces and let the results allocate. Check your rankings the way you already do, then run your buyers' questions through the four major AI platforms and see whether you appear inside the answers. Strong rankings with absent AI mentions means your next effort goes to sources, structured data and answer-shaped content. Weak in both means fundamentals first. Your AI visibility baseline is the missing half of the picture, and an AI Visibility Audit establishes it in both languages with a score you can track against your SEO reports. Give the comparison a fixed cadence, monthly or quarterly, so the two scoreboards trend side by side instead of being argued about from memory.