Marketing leaders expect Website positioning and AI search to grow side by side, a minimum of within the short term, in accordance with recent research from mobile analytics and marketing tech firm Branch.
Branch’s AI Search and Discovery Enterprise Benchmark Report, based on a survey of 300 enterprise, marketing, growth, and digital leaders across six industries, concluded that leaders don’t expect AI search to exchange Website positioning, and that each channels will proceed to grow.
The leaders project that the proportion of website traffic from traditional Website positioning will grow from 45% to 53% in 2026 — an eight-percentage-point increase, the 20-page report noted. At the identical time, they expect the proportion of website traffic from AI search to grow even faster, jumping from 35% to 50%.
“This shift is dramatic,” the researchers wrote. “Only 26% received over half their traffic from AI search in 2025, but by the top of 2026, 49% expect to hit that threshold. That’s nearly doubling in a single 12 months.”
Nonetheless, they added: “These projections assume AI search will drive traffic the identical way traditional search does, which is unlikely.”
“As AI platforms deliver more complete answers directly of their interfaces, the connection between discovery and website visits is changing,” they continued. “Leaders are managing each channels now, not selecting between them — and meaning tracking more touchpoints, mapping more complex customer journeys, and solving attribution challenges that didn’t exist a 12 months ago.”
Website positioning Evolves Into GEO
“AI search won’t replace Website positioning, but it’ll absolutely demote old-school Website positioning from king to at least one a part of a much bigger system,” maintained Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst at SmartTech Research, a technology advisory firm in Las Vegas.
“Website positioning still powers discoverability on the index and content layer, but AI optimization now sits on top of it, translating brand authority, structured content, and relevance into model-readable signals and synthesized answers,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Even Branch’s own framing isn’t ‘Website positioning is dead,’ but that marketers are moving from Website positioning to [AI Overview], which is a meaningful expansion reasonably than a clean substitute,” he said.
AI search won’t kill Website positioning, but it’ll evolve it into GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — predicted Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.
“Traditional Website positioning focused on site structure and keywords to rank in a listing,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “GEO focuses on brand authority, sentiment, and ‘citability.’ The goal isn’t any longer simply to be ‘found,’ but to be the definitive source that the AI chooses to incorporate in its synthesized response.”
AI won’t replace Website positioning a lot as absorb and transform it, contended Molly McKinley, founding father of Redtail Creative, a marketing and strategic communications consultancy in Raleigh, N.C.
“Traditional Website positioning optimized for algorithms that ranked pages,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “GEO optimizes for algorithms that synthesize answers. The underlying logic is analogous, similar to being probably the most credible and well-structured source on a subject, however the signals that establish credibility have shifted.”
“Third-party validation and earned media matter more now than they did in a pure keyword world,” she said. “The brands that understand this earliest can have an actual head start, however the ones chasing shortcuts will find themselves invisible in ways which can be much harder to diagnose than a dropped rating.”
Complementary Technologies
Website positioning and GEO aren’t nearly as far apart because the hype would have us consider, argued Peter Sloterdyk, chief marketing officer for Gist, of San Francisco, an AI-based writing assistant program.
“They complement one another, and each are still wildly vital,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “While conversational AI engagements will most actually turn into the default for consumers within the not-too-distant future, I don’t yet see a world where the Website positioning best practices we’ve embraced during the last twenty years disappear. Content is once more ruling our sphere, because it influences each Website positioning and GEO performance.”
Channing Ferrer, chief revenue officer and Americas CEO of Brevo, a world customer-engagement and marketing-automation platform, agreed that AI won’t replace search, but added it’ll absolutely change what effective Website positioning looks like.
“Traditional Website positioning continues to be foundational because AI systems are sometimes drawing from the identical underlying web content ecosystem that search engines like google and yahoo index,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “But AI discovery introduces a brand new layer marketers now need to take into consideration, whether their content is crawlable, rankable, comprehensible, attributable, and useful inside AI-generated answers.”
Much of AI search optimization is just good Website positioning, asserted Ryan W. Bailes of Bailes Zindler, in Tyler, Texas, a digital agency that builds web sites, Website positioning programs, and paid media campaigns for businesses.
“It continues to be vital to take care of your website’s crawlability, indexation, content quality, authority, internal linking, and technical health,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Now, it’s also vital to make sure machines can easily read your content by including schema, Open Graph, content structure, consistent messaging, product feeds, and some other relevant information you may provide,” he said. “Brands succeeding in AI search aren’t abandoning Website positioning. They’re adapting to the brand new AI reality.”
Latest Search Paradigm
The Branch report explained that traditional search has been the muse of digital acquisition for greater than 25 years. Organic search traffic, search engine marketing best practices, and Google’s dominance have shaped how businesses take into consideration discovery, visibility, and customer acquisition.
But AI search and enormous language model experiences are making a recent discovery paradigm, it continued. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and other AI platforms are changing how people find information and the way brands get discovered.
For the primary time in a long time, the foundations of search are changing, it added.
“The brand new paradigm is forcing brands to rethink how they show up online,” observed Anne DeSpain, founding father of DeSpain Consulting, an AI operations and workflow automation consultancy in Park City, Utah.
“Website positioning became a really strong skill set and somewhat formulaic, to the purpose where it was getting easy to game the system,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “The shift is requiring brands to be more authentic about storytelling, because LLMs reward authoritative, well-structured content over keyword-stuffed pages.”
“In case your brand doesn’t have a transparent, credible story backed by real substance, you’re not getting surfaced,” she said. “AI platforms are also more selective, so the stakes are higher now. In traditional search, you would possibly rank on page two. In AI search, you’re either there within the output, otherwise you’re not.”
“As an industry trend, AI search will indeed change Website positioning as we realize it, but that shouldn’t scare consumers or businesses,” added Eli Clemens, a policy analyst on the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a research and public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
“Today, if you desire to read an internet recipe, you sometimes need to scroll through large amounts of HTML content to get to the recipe itself,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “Some consumers like the additional content and a few don’t, however the important reason why online recipes are designed that way is Website positioning-driven incentives.”
“AI-driven discovery can synthesize the entire extra content or get just the essential recipe to the buyer, whichever one the buyer wants,” he said. “From a consumer perspective, that is best technology. For businesses that depend on seek for marketing, there may be uncertainty and the necessity to adapt, but additionally a transparent opportunity to construct recent strategies around model optimization, each for being cited by models and for being incorporated into models’ inference process.”