Most marketing teams paying for AI search visibility work still describe that work as SEO. Fractl, a content marketing agency, surveyed 343 U.S. marketing decision-makers and found that 81% use the label SEO for their internal AI search strategy even as GEO and AEO circulate in agency pitches and conference panels. The survey was conducted and published by Fractl co-founder Kelsey Libert, so the figures below describe what one vendor’s research found among its respondent pool, not an independently audited industry census.
The budget data matters more than the vocabulary fight. Marketers surveyed allocate an average of 24% of their combined search and content budget to AI search visibility, and 82% have committed at least some funding to it. That is a meaningful reallocation of spend toward a category many teams still cannot name consistently, and it suggests money is moving faster than terminology can catch up to it.
Seniority splits the naming habit further. According to the survey, directors and C-suite executives reach for GEO and AEO about three times as often as the individual contributors below them, yet those same senior leaders were also the most likely group to say they had looked up a term they did not recognize. Read together, those two figures point to executives adopting category language from board decks before their own SEO, content, and analytics teams have settled on shared execution steps.
Platform prioritization is similarly uneven. ChatGPT led, named by 34% of respondents as their priority platform for AI search visibility. Gemini took 16%, Claude 6%, and Microsoft’s Copilot or Bing AI 5%. Perplexity, despite the attention it draws in SEO discussion, was named by just 1%, and 14% of teams reported no target platform at all. A vendor pitching a platform-by-platform program is selling to a market where most buyers have not yet picked a platform to prioritize.
Vendor evaluation criteria undercut the case for leading with acronyms. What buyers rated most credible was a case study carrying results they could measure and verify, picked by 34% of respondents, compared with 9% for terminology fluency, meaning case studies outpolled fluency with acronyms by roughly four to one. Clear methodology and demonstrated team expertise added another 37% combined. On the other side of the ledger, 36% of marketers named heavy buzzword use without explanation as their top vendor red flag, ahead of missing case studies (21%) and vague performance claims (20%).
The survey does not measure whether ranking position, citation frequency, or traffic actually shifted for these marketers’ brands, so it cannot say whether current AI search spend is producing returns. It measures buyer behavior and vendor perception, not ranking outcomes.
For search teams building a pitch or a budget request in the next quarter, the practical read is narrower than the naming debate suggests: lead with a documented before-and-after case study and a stated testing methodology, use GEO or AEO only when the term is immediately defined, and confirm which AI platforms your specific buyers actually query before committing budget to a platform-specific build-out.
Search Engine Land published this analysis, written by Fractl co-founder Kelsey Libert, on August 24, 2026, citing Fractl’s survey of 343 U.S. marketing decision-makers.
