Several clients have asked variations of this question in the last quarter: "We've been spending heavily on SEO. With AI search taking off, should we cut it?"
The honest answer is no. Cut what isn't working — keep what is.
SEO still serves a real purpose. There is a substantial cohort of buyers who go straight to Google, scroll past the AI Overview, and click an organic result. They are smaller than they were two years ago, and they are smaller than they will be next year, but they are real. If you abandon SEO entirely, you abandon them.
What has changed is the marginal return. The first few thousand pounds a month of SEO spend earns you the basics — a crawlable site, decent technical health, content covering your category. That foundation also benefits GEO. The next few thousand pounds, spent chasing rankings for marginal keywords, returns less than it used to, because the AI Overview sits on top of the result you'd be moving up to.
The smarter split for most B2B brands today is to spend the SEO baseline on foundations and intent-rich content, then channel the rest into GEO — citation tracking, entity work, off-site authority, and a content engine engineered for AI citation. That mix is what we run for clients, and it consistently outperforms either approach alone.
The wrong move is to keep doubling down on rankings as if AI Overviews were a temporary novelty. They are not. The right move is to keep doing the SEO that still works, and to add the GEO that increasingly does.