Evolving, not dying. Search intent hasn't gone anywhere — people still need to find and hire real businesses — and Google's own ranking signals still feed AI Overviews and AI Mode. What's changed is the destination: increasingly it's the answer itself, not a list of blue links.
Worth knowing: some of the loudest "SEO is dead, only GEO matters now" messaging online has been alleged — by SEO community moderators, not just skeptics — to be organized marketing from GEO-tool vendors with an obvious incentive to make the old discipline sound obsolete. That's a contested claim, not settled fact, but it's a reason to be skeptical of anyone selling a total replacement instead of an addition. The realistic move for 2026 is running SEO and AEO together, not picking one and abandoning the other.
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Full breakdown: Google Just Told You the Quiet Part About \"AEO\"