Do I Need to Stop Doing SEO for LLM SEO in 2026?

Do I Need to Stop Doing SEO to Do LLM SEO?

No. LLM SEO adds a layer rather than removing the fundamentals that make a site discoverable and credible.

But the relationship between the two is looser than it was, and that is the part most advice misses. When SE Ranking studied Google AI Overviews in July 2024, 93.67% of the 7,475 cases it found linked to at least one domain that also ranked in the top ten. Near total overlap.

Ahrefs re-ran a comparable question on a much larger set in early 2026: 863,000 keyword results and four million AI Overview URLs. It found 37.9% of cited URLs ranked in the first ten blocks, down from around 76% in July 2025. The reason it gives is query fan-out. Google breaks the question into sub-queries and pulls sources from those results, where far fewer pages compete.

Those studies count slightly different things, so treat the pair as a direction rather than a clean before and after. The direction is consistent, and it has a practical consequence. Ranking still helps a page get considered. It no longer predicts whether the page gets used.

That is why the two layers need separate jobs and separate reporting:

Neither column works well on its own.

Why Does the SEO vs GEO Question Keep Coming Up?

Because a lot of people are now paid to raise it. Digiday reported in March 2026 that a cottage industry of GEO vendors had grown up over the previous year, with $227 million invested into AI visibility tracking tools and one executive fielding pitches every 24 to 28 hours.

The practitioners quoted in that piece were blunt about the replacement pitch. uSERP's Jeremy Moser told Digiday that "the 80/20 of GEO is simply just good traditional SEO," and that a vendor unwilling to say so is selling something else. Amsive's Lily Ray described agencies pitching businesses to fire their SEO team without understanding that SEO feeds most of the information those engines draw on.

The argument that keeps surfacing runs like this:

1. Traditional SEO was built around rankings and clicks.
2. AI answers change how information reaches a buyer.
3. Therefore traditional SEO is obsolete.

The first two are true. They do not produce the third. Our guide to what a vendor label tells you covers how to test a pitch that leans on the acronym.

Which Layer Is Actually Broken?

This is the question worth spending time on, because several different failures look identical from the outside. Low AI visibility can mean a crawl problem, an authority problem, a structure problem or a measurement problem, and each needs a different fix.

Audit five things before moving any budget:

• Technical access: are the commercial pages crawlable, indexable and internally linked?
• Authority: is there enough credible topical and external support to be considered at all?
• Answer structure: does an important passage still make sense lifted out of the page?
• Entity consistency: are the organisation, services, authors and evidence described the same way everywhere?
• Measurement: do you know which engines, prompts and competitors you are tracking?

The second point is where most replacement pitches fall down. Our analysis of what backlinks contribute to AI citation sets out the two-gate version: referring domains help a page reach the pool an engine considers, and stop mattering much once it is in there. Related, our read on GEO and SEO pipeline speed found citations can appear within weeks, but only where authority already exists.

When Does Cutting SEO Spend Make Sense?

When a specific activity has stopped producing value, and the function it performed is still owned by someone.

Budgets are already moving, though not wholesale. Scribewise surveyed 205 United States executives and marketing managers, reported by Digiday, and found 55% had budget allocated to GEO, with 70% of those putting GEO at 11% to 20% of the total. The reporting describes mostly reallocation rather than new money. Scribewise is an agency in this market, so read it as a directional signal on behaviour rather than a market census.

Reallocation is fine. Removing a function without replacing it is not. The distinction:

Cut ineffective activity, not the job it was meant to do. Where the two layers overlap in practice is set out in our comparison of GEO retainer and SEO retainer.

How Do You Measure the Two Layers Separately?

Against a fixed prompt set, per engine, repeated over time. One blended AI visibility number is close to useless, because the engines do not behave alike.

Qwairy analysed 118,101 AI answers and 669,065 citations across eight providers in the third quarter of 2025. Perplexity averaged 21.87 citations per question. ChatGPT averaged 7.92. Microsoft Copilot averaged 2.47. That is close to a ninefold spread in how many sources get named at all, before anyone asks whose sources they were.

A brand can therefore look healthy on a blended score while being absent from the one engine its buyers use. Reporting that survives scrutiny names four things:

• The engines, individually, not as one aggregate figure.
• The prompt set, held stable so periods can be compared.
• The run count, because a single pass through a prompt is noise.
• The baseline, dated, so improvement is measured against something.

Intelligent Resourcing's generative engine optimisation service publishes the engines it tracks and what the engagement reports, which is the same test any provider should pass.