Let me tell you what happened to HubSpot.
For over a decade, HubSpot was the undisputed gold standard of SEO. They built their entire business on content, hundreds of thousands of blog posts optimized to rank for every marketing and sales keyword imaginable. It worked brilliantly. At peak, their blog was pulling 13.5 million organic visits per month.
Between late 2024 and mid 2025, they lost 70–80% of that traffic. The rankings barely moved. The traffic evaporated anyway.
HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan eventually told analysts exactly what happened: AI Overviews are giving users answers directly, and fewer people are clicking through to websites. The content didn't fail. The model failed. SEO was built for a world where users needed to click a link to get an answer. That world is shrinking fast. (Source)
And here's the part of the HubSpot story nobody talks about enough: their revenue still grew 22% that same year. Because their product pages held steady, their AI citations increased, and the visitors who did arrive were higher-intent than before.
That's the tension at the heart of the SEO vs. AEO debate and why "which one do you need?" is actually the wrong question.
A Pew Research study tracking 68,000 real Google searches from 900 US adults in March 2025 found something stark: when an AI Overview appeared in search results, users clicked through to a website only 8% of the time. Without an AI Overview, that number was 15%. One study. Half the clicks.
And it gets more specific: only 1% of users clicked the sources actually cited inside the AI Overview. Meaning even being cited doesn't guarantee a click. But here's what it does guarantee: the user hears your name, absorbs your answer, and starts forming an opinion about your brand before they've visited your site once.
That's the game shift. Search is no longer just about earning the click. It's about what happens in the answer layer before the click.
Traditional SEO services:
technical audits, keyword research, on-page optimization, link building; aren't dead. But they're no longer sufficient on their own for most businesses.
Here's where SEO still dominates without contest:
Transactional queries. HubSpot's own post-mortem confirmed this: transactional search has remained relatively unchanged by AI disruption. When someone searches "buy project management software" or "CRM pricing comparison," they want to visit a site, compare, and decide. AI Overviews appear far less frequently on these queries, and featured snippets in position zero still achieve a 42.9% CTR, higher than the standard #1 result.
Deep product and service pages. Pages that explain exactly what you do, with technical specificity, continue to rank and convert. What took the HubSpot hit was their broad informational content, posts about famous quotes, cover letter templates, things with zero relevance to their CRM product. Their product pages were fine.
Brand authority building. Backlinks, domain authority, and topical depth still feed directly into whether AI systems trust your content enough to cite it. SEO and AEO aren't separate pipelines, the authority you build through SEO is what makes AEO possible.
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content so AI platforms can extract, cite, and recommend your brand in their generated responses.
The surface difference from SEO is visible. SEO optimizes for a ranked link. AEO optimizes for the answer itself. But the deeper difference is in what each service measures as success.
An SEO agency measures rankings and clicks. An AEO service measures citation share, how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers for the queries your buyers are asking.
Practically, AEO services focus on:
Most "SEO vs AEO" comparisons give you a table with tidy boxes. Here's the honest version:
SEO wins when: Your buyers are searching for something specific they want to compare themselves. E-commerce, low-cost purchases, "shopping around" intent. Transactional queries with clear commercial intent. Any scenario where the user actively wants to visit multiple sites before deciding.
AEO wins when: Your buyers are asking AI for a recommendation, shortlist, or explanation. B2B services, SaaS, high-ticket professional services. Complex queries where the buyer wants a synthesized answer, not ten tabs open. This is where the research is clearest AI search visitors convert at 2x to 27x the rate of traditional organic visitors across published studies, precisely because they arrive pre-educated.
The scenario most people are actually in: Both are relevant, but they're not getting equal attention. Most businesses have years of SEO investment and near-zero AEO infrastructure. The gap isn't which one to choose, it's that one of them is almost completely missing.
The reason to run both isn't risk management. It's that they feed each other.
AI systems cite content they trust. They learn to trust content that ranks well in traditional search, gets cited across credible third-party sources, and is structured in a way they can extract cleanly. That means your SEO authority directly increases your AEO citation probability. And content optimized for AI extraction, answer-first structure, schema, FAQ sections, also performs better in featured snippets and traditional SERPs.
HubSpot's own recovery strategy reflected this: they didn't abandon SEO, they refocused it. Deep, expert-backed content on their actual area of authority. Transactional pages sharpened. And a deliberate push to be cited in LLM responses, which they now claim to win more than any other CRM platform.
The practical hybrid sequence for most businesses: build the SEO foundation first (high-quality content, backlinks, technical health), then layer AEO on top (answer-first formatting, schema, entity consistency, Reddit/community presence). Not one or the other. In that order.
If you're evaluating whether to add AEO services to your current SEO investment, ask one question first:
Where are your buyers doing their research and are you present there?
If your ideal buyers are typing 20-word questions into ChatGPT or Perplexity and asking for vendor recommendations in your category, the answer is clear. An SEO agency optimizing your blog posts for Google isn't reaching those people. They've already moved.
The agencies and marketing teams winning in 2026 aren't the ones who chose SEO or AEO. They're the ones who noticed the shift early enough to be in both rooms when the buyer is making up their mind.