Which parts of SEO still bring in enquiries and sales now that AI answers many searches, which have stopped paying, and how to shift your SEO budget to match.
Search engine optimisation (SEO), the work of getting your site found in search results, has been declared dead many times. This time something real has changed. Google's AI Overviews summarise answers at the top of many results pages, and AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity answer questions directly, often by searching the web and citing a few sources.
What's broken for good is the volume strategy: publishing large numbers of general 'what is' and 'how to' articles to collect traffic, along with any tactic designed to trick rankings. What still works is the foundation and the commercial end: a technically sound site, strong pages for the products and services people search for when they are ready to buy, local search, and content built on real experience. What's new is generative engine optimisation (GEO), sometimes called answer engine optimisation, which means making sure AI answers mention and cite your business.
If you pay for SEO, the useful question is which part of that spend falls into which group. This article gives you a way to sort your SEO activity into keep, stop and start, so the money goes where it can still bring in enquiries and sales.
For years, a common SEO plan was to publish hundreds of articles answering simple questions, each aimed at a keyword with search volume. It worked because every answer needed a click. Those are now exactly the questions an AI Overview answers on the results page, and when a summary does send visitors, they go to the handful of sources it links to, not to the twentieth article saying the same thing. AI has not made good content less valuable; it has made content that says nothing new close to worthless.
Scale has also become a risk. Google's spam policies treat 'scaled content abuse', producing many pages mainly to rank rather than to help people, as a violation whether the pages are written by people or by AI. Location pages that differ only by the town name, and near-identical articles built from one template, carry the same risk.
Some tactics were weak long before AI and are now simply wasted money: buying links, stuffing pages with keywords and writing for search engines instead of readers. If any of your SEO budget still goes to these, stop that first.
AI has not made good content less valuable; it has made content that says nothing new close to worthless.
AI Overviews draw on Google's normal search index: to appear as a link in one, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Google's own documentation says there are no additional requirements beyond that. The basics have not lost value; they now decide whether you can appear in two places instead of one.
A strong service or product page answers what a buyer needs in order to decide: who it is for, what is included, what it costs or what drives the price, how the process works and what other customers say. Many commercial pages stop at a description and a contact form; covering all of these gives searchers and AI tools alike a complete answer to quote.
If you sell in several countries, give each market its own commercial pages, written for local buyers, prices and terms rather than translated word for word. Add hreflang tags, the code that tells Google which language version to show to whom, so each country sees the right page.
Google's guidelines for its human quality raters describe what it wants to reward as E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is not a single score you can optimise, but it is a useful test for any page you publish: does it show that someone with real experience wrote it, and would a sceptical buyer trust it?
Nobody outside the AI companies knows exactly how assistants choose their sources, so treat any promise of guaranteed placement with caution. What is clear is that an assistant can only cite pages it can read, and that it builds its picture of your business from everything it finds: your site, directories, review platforms and articles that mention you. GEO is mostly about making that picture accurate, consistent and easy to quote.
Look at which sources the assistants cite when they answer questions about your category. If the same comparison articles, directories or review platforms keep appearing, an accurate and complete listing there may do more for your visibility in AI answers than another article on your own site.
Measure it simply. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google the questions your buyers ask, and note whether you are mentioned and who is. In GA4, Google Analytics 4, some visits from AI assistants appear as referral traffic from their websites, which gives you a rough trend.
Put every SEO activity you pay for into one of three groups. Keep what builds the foundation or serves buyers close to a decision. Stop what produces volume for its own sake, and start what makes your business easier to find, cite and trust in AI answers.
Say you spend €3,000 a month on SEO: €2,000 on eight general blog articles, €500 on bought links and €500 on technical upkeep. A rebalanced plan might keep €500 for technical work, put €1,500 into two or three strong commercial or experience-based pages, and spend €1,000 on earning mentions in trade media, directories and review platforms. The bought links stop completely, and the right split for you depends on where your site is weakest.
Expect the shift to change what your reports look like. Fewer articles will mean fewer new pages and possibly less total traffic, while the pages you do publish should bring more enquiries each. Agree that trade-off before you start, so nobody reads a falling traffic graph as failure.
Organic traffic on its own is now a weak measure of SEO, because an AI Overview can keep a page visible while its clicks fall. Judge SEO on what it produces for the business instead, using a small set of numbers you review every month.
Track enquiries and sales from organic visitors, which GA4 records as key events, its name for the actions you count as conversions. In Search Console, Google's free reporting tool for your site's search performance, follow impressions and clicks for the commercial searches you care about, and the number of searches for your company name, which should rise if more people are meeting you in AI answers and elsewhere. Add the monthly AI check above, and you have a picture that traffic alone can no longer give you.