• by Blake Hochberger , July 28, 2026

AI Search optimization — AEO, GEO, or whatever new acronym drops by the time you finish reading this — is a tale of two cities. Either it's an incredibly powerful tool to circumvent the traditional purchase funnel and get your brand directly in front of a buyer, or it's a facade of value dressed in the emperor's new clothes.

I'm genuinely torn.

On one hand, AI search has fundamentally compressed the consumer journey: Ask → Receive → Act. Research, awareness, consideration, and (coming soon) purchase — all in one session. The rise of AI Agents accelerates this further; if you're not visible to agents, you simply don't exist in that journey. That's not hyperbole — it's an inarguable shift in consumer behavior.

On the other hand, investing heavily in AI visibility feels like chasing fool's gold.

Here's my problem: in the race to ‘win’ AI search, what are marketers actually getting? A ‘citation’ alone, for example, doesn't carry impression value. Consumers asking complex questions into ChatGPT aren't forming brand affinity with whoever sourced the answer. And if the promise of AI search is a truncated purchase cycle, doesn't that actually undermine the case for long-term brand building with that user? 

The economics get murkier. Most data suggests 90%+ of AI searches are informational, not transactional — again, for now. Yes, users arriving via AI-completed journeys are more qualified (like auto, they're coming to buy, not shop). But there's always competing capital at play. If it costs ~$5K/month just to measure and attempt to influence AI visibility — before accounting for content creation, tooling, and human capital — how does a brand calculate ROI when there's little direct revenue tied to informational queries?

Then there's the repeatability problem. Rand Fishkin's SparkToro research from early 2026 showed near-zero consistency in which brands get cited for the same prompt — less than 1 in 100. So even if you "win," you probably don't. And most AI-cited content is pulled from off-site sources anyway, making the entire content infrastructure marketers are building to "win" here largely beside the point.

My honest take: AI visibility is a brand investment today (and should be part of your ongoing SEO strategy, not a wholly different effort), not a performance channel. With that in mind, if the value proposition doesn’t actually create brand affinity…then what’s the point? That doesn't make it bad — it just makes it expensive, hard to measure, difficult to attribute, and slow to return. For Fortune 500 brands with capital to test and learn (or perhaps specialized DTC ecom brands in highly competitive categories + niche B2B products with high ACV), exploring this is absolutely worth it. For everyone else — especially performance marketers managing restricted budgets tied to outcomes — I'd argue that same ~$60K/year has a measurably better short- and long-term return invested in proven channels.

In fact, I believe strong brand-building is the actual moat against AI search disruption. And tools like Google's AI Max are going to help more brands accelerate the consumer journey far more efficiently than winning an AI citation lottery.

Am I wrong? Possibly — and often. But before you enter this race, at least be clear on what winning looks like, what you're willing to pay for it, and whether the math actually works.

That's not contrarianism. That's just prudent marketing.

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