Most marketing teams have not renamed the work everyone in this industry now argues about. According to a Fractl survey of 343 marketing decision-makers based in the United States, 81 percent still say “SEO” internally when talking about AI search strategy, and only 19 percent have picked up “GEO.” Forty-two percent of teams say they have looked at the new terminology and deliberately kept “SEO.” That is a rejection, not a lag.
The mismatch is sharpest at the exact moment a sale depends on it. Asked how they would search for an agency or a tool, 46 percent of respondents said “AI search optimization” and 24 percent said “SEO,” a combined 70 percent. GEO accounted for 12 percent of that search behavior, and AEO for 3 percent. An agency built around ranking for “GEO” is building around a term most of its own prospects never type into a search bar.
This publication runs GEO, generative engine optimization, the practice of optimizing for LLM-driven answers, through its coverage on a near-daily basis. Fractl’s numbers are a reasonable check on that habit. Writing about a term constantly is not the same as buyers searching for it, and this survey says the two have pulled apart.
The more useful finding for anyone selling this work concerns what actually costs them the deal. Leaning on buzzwords without explaining them tops the list of vendor red flags, named by 36 percent, ahead of missing case studies at 21 percent and vague performance claims at 20 percent. Among C-suite respondents specifically, 33 percent point to “repackaged SEO with new AI branding” as their top red flag, a rate more than double the 14 to 15 percent recorded among everyone else surveyed.
Trust runs in the opposite direction from jargon. Case studies backed by measurable, verifiable results are the leading credibility signal at 34 percent, chosen roughly four times more often than fluency with the newest terminology, which sits at 9 percent. A buyer deciding who gets the retainer is reading the results section of the deck, not the glossary page.
The survey also cuts against the assumption that AI search features are quietly bleeding organic traffic. Nearly three in ten respondents, 29 percent, told Fractl their traffic climbed by a moderate or significant amount over the past twelve months because of AI search features. A smaller share, 19 percent, watched traffic fall over that same stretch. The balance tilts toward gains, not the wholesale collapse many GEO pitches are built to fix. This is a self-reported impression, not a clickstream measurement, and it should be read with that limit attached.
Two caveats belong alongside every number here. Fractl is a growth marketing agency with a direct commercial interest in how this market names and prices its own services, and the underlying data is 343 people describing their own word choices, not observed vendor-selection behavior. A survey respondent saying they would search “SEO” is not the same as logged search-query data proving they did.
None of that erases the operational takeaway. An agency that has spent the past year rebuilding its own site copy around “GEO” is optimizing for a term roughly one in eight prospects will type. That leaves “AI search optimization” and “SEO,” the terms seven in ten prospects actually use, thinner than they should be. The fix is not abandoning the discipline. It is separating the label from the work. Keep GEO for trade-press shorthand and internal capability naming, put case studies and plain-language results on the pages meant to be found, and brief anyone pitching a C-suite buyer to lead with proof before terminology. That is the exact split this data says the C-suite is screening for.
PPC Land reported these findings on July 21, 2026, drawing on a study released the same day by Fractl, a growth marketing agency that surveyed 343 US marketing decision-makers.
