The State of AEO / GEO in 2026: CMO Investment Report

Generative AIGenerative AI
Generative AI is a class of AI that creates content like text, images, and code rather than analyzing existing data, powering tools like AI search.
Learn more and answer engines have redefined digital discoverability, giving users more direct pathways to find brands, compare solutions, and drive purchase decisions.

For enterprise brands that rely on traffic, engagement, and conversions, this shift requires a new approach. That’s where AEO and GEO come in. While the fundamentals of SEO are the same, the definition of digital success has evolved. It’s not about clicks and matching keywords anymore; it’s about establishing brand authority and ensuring your domain is cited and your brand is mentioned in AI search.

This investment is already accelerating fast, with enterprises allocating an average of 12% of their digital budgets to AEO / GEO in 2025. Plus, initial reports indicate that visitors who come from LLMs convert at twice the rate in one-third the number of sessions compared to traditional channels, validating AI visibility as a critical new performance channel.

The message this sends to executives is clear: If you aren't investing in AEO / GEO now, you're already behind, and the window for catching up is closing fast. To help you adapt to this opportunity and optimize your investments for 2026, we surveyed over 250 digital marketing leaders and C-level executives to uncover actionable insights, new measurement standards, and shifting investment and strategic priorities.

This research features exclusive insights and perspectives from today's leading voices in AEO / GEO, SEO, and digital marketing, including:

• Lindsay Boyajian Hagan, VP of Marketing & Co-Head of Revenue at Conductor
• Greg DiMedio, SEO & AI Search Strategy Lead at Taylor Corporation
• Pat Reinhart, VP of Services & Thought Leadership at Conductor
• Eli Schwartz , Author of “Product Led SEO” and Consultant
• Aleyda Solís , Founder & International SEO Consultant, Orainti

Data & methodology

To establish the current state of AEO / GEO and map the definitive trends, disruptions, and strategic priorities for 2026, we surveyed over 250 C-suite leaders, VPs, specialized AEO/GEO/SEO leaders, and senior content directors who directly manage their brand’s AEO/GEO/SEO efforts.

CMOs and digital leaders were exclusively sourced from enterprise-level organizations (500+ employees) across 12+ industries in the U.S.

73% of CMOs and digital leaders classify their AEO / GEO programs as advanced or very advanced, signifying the integration of the new category within their broader digital strategy.

It’s important to note that throughout the report, we speak to the concept of AEO/GEO maturity to further segment the data. Below is a brief overview of the levels CMOs and digital leaders could choose from to determine their AEO/GEO maturity:

• Low AEO/GEO maturity: Organizations that are piloting an AEO/GEO initiative, but have so far made limited investments in their strategy.
• Medium AEO/GEO maturity: Organizations where AEO/GEO is integrated into the broader digital marketing strategy with adequate investment.
• High AEO/GEO maturity: Organizations where AEO/GEO is a core digital priority with enterprise-wide adoption and strong investment.

Top takeaways

On AEO / GEO impact in 2025

97% of CMOs and digital leaders reported AEO / GEO had a positive impact on the marketing funnel in 2025.

This confirms that the shift towards a more personalized and intelligent search experience is benefiting brands as well as users. This finding is backed up by the fact that traffic from AI tends to have higher intent than traditional organic traffic, converting at twice the rate and in one-third the number of sessions compared to other site traffic sources.

While AI is fundamentally changing where customers discover and engage with brands, 97% of marketers are seeing this as fuel for growth, not friction.

The brands winning right now aren’t the ones with the most traffic; they’re the ones showing up in AI answers with the right content at the right moment in the customer journey.

For enterprises, AEO / GEO will transition from an emerging new channel to a core, non-negotiable principle of overall digital strategy. Leaders who already integrated AEO / GEO into their strategies are now focused on scaling its impact, solidifying the trend that proactive investment is a big competitive advantage in the AI-powered search landscape.

On AEO / GEO investments and budgeting

56% of CMOs and digital leaders made a significant or high investment in AEO / GEO in 2025.

But an overwhelming 94% reported plans to increase their AEO / GEO investment in 2026.

Which means even the brands that already invest significantly in AEO / GEO still don’t think they’re doing enough to optimize their brand’s presence in AI, while the brands that made minimal investments are rushing to catch up.

Looking at this data, it's clear that AEO/GEO has moved from initial adoption to essential solution, with 94% of CMOs planning to increase investment in 2026. This speaks to a fundamental shift in how enterprise brands approach discoverability.

CMOs who aren't already reallocating budget and resources toward AI search experiences risk falling behind competitors who are capturing visibility in the channels where their customers are increasingly starting their journey.

On AEO / GEO technology use

51% of CMOs and digital leaders leverage a fully integrated AEO / GEO platform.

• Organizations with high AEO maturity are nearly 6x more likely to use a fully integrated AEO / GEO platform than a low-maturity organization.

Translation: Brands with high AEO / GEO maturity understand that relying on point solutions isn’t sustainable for brands looking to measure and optimize their brand presence and AI visibility at scale.

Success in AI search requires agility. Having data and workflows split across multiple tools isn’t agile; it’s restrictive. A fully integrated AEO / GEO platform unifies the data that organizations need to understand their performance and optimize at speed.

On top AEO / GEO strategies and challenges

The biggest AEO / GEO challenges CMOs and digital leaders faced in 2025 were around creating AI-search optimized content at scale and difficulties measuring the ROI of their AEO/GEO efforts.

The three most significant 2025 AEO/GEO challenges reflected here ring true for our organization. For content at scale, we need to do more to have repeatable, answer‑first content and not ad‑hoc posts.

It's taken time, but we have been moving beyond traditional SEO metrics and understanding how to measure AI visibility and journey mapping.

Finally, we do see tracking LLM/AI bot monitoring and alerting as a priority and something to build on with Conductor Monitoring in 2026. We expect to lean on Conductor for best practices for LLM monitoring.

I would have expected the biggest challenge across all cohorts to be the difficulty of measuring impact/ROI, since this is one of the key shifts from traditional search.

In AI search, impact can’t be measured by traffic and conversions alone; visibility, mentions, and sentiment are just as critical to evaluating the success of your marketing efforts now.

Nonetheless, it’s encouraging to see that digital marketing leaders are thinking about their content’s crawlability in AI bots.

But CMOs and digital leaders also understand that scaling AI content generation is about more than just content quality. It’s about ensuring that content is being properly crawled by AI bots and LLMs, because it doesn’t matter how much content you generate; if LLMs can’t crawl it, it will be invisible in AI search.

The top content strategies that CMOs and digital leaders are prioritizing align with these challenges.

The top two content strategies CMOs and digital leaders are prioritizing are scaling AI content generation, but also optimizing their use of structured dataStructured Data
Structured data is the term used to describe schema markup on websites. With the help of this code, search engines can understand the content of URLs more easily, resulting in enhanced results in the search engine results page known as rich results. Typical examples of this are ratings, events and much more. The Conductor glossary below contains everything you need to know about structured data.
Learn more and Schema to make it easier for LLMs and AI bots to crawl and understand their content.

I’m seeing many organizations lean into AI content generation strategies, but I believe this will change in 2026 as Google and other LLMs push back against low-quality content with an AI version of Google’s previous Helpful Content update.

From my conversations with leaders, I’ve learned they are also somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of mass amounts of AI content, but are afraid of being left behind if they don’t do this.

How to stay ahead in 2026

To successfully bridge the gap between traditional SEO and high-intent, AI-driven visibility, you need industry insights and market data from marketing leaders and execs to ensure you’re investing wisely.

Access the complete 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report for the full executive survey analysis.

• As an added bonus, the report is in a fully editable PowerPoint format, allowing you to easily pull slides and charts into internal decks for conversations with executives about AEO / GEO investments and strategies.