TL;DR: AI is changing SEO and PPC, not killing them. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Intelligence Optimization (GIO) are key. SEO and PPC teams must work together. Use PPC insights to inform SEO (landing pages, schema, mobile design, keywords, negatives, site structure, content). Unified strategies reduce waste and improve results.
There’s a lot of information (and confusion) swirling around when it comes to AI and how it’s impacting SEO and paid media performance. In this blog, we’re going to cut through that noise and take you through exactly what we’re seeing with AI, SEO, and paid media performance. Let’s start with some terms.
GIO (Generative Intelligence Optimization) / GEO (Generative Engine Optimization):
What it is:
GEO is an emerging strategy that optimizes content to be used as a trusted source for AI-generated recommendations in search results. This strategy is about localizing trust signals (like proximity, review ratings, NAP consistency) so that AI and search platforms can confidently surface your brand in location-based or intent-rich generative results (e.g. “near me,” “trusted,” “top-rated” queries).
How it works:
Unlike AEO, which targets long-form answers, GEO prioritizes credibility and topical authority.
Why it matters:
As AI systems replace or augment traditional search results with generated content, GEO ensures your brand’s voice and knowledge are used in the generation itself, whether or not you "rank" traditionally.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO):
What it is:
AEO is a specialized branch of SEO focusing on structuring and enriching long-form content so that it becomes usable by AI-powered search experiences, such as Google’s AI Overviews, featured snippets, Bing’s sidebar summaries, and voice assistants.
This isn’t just about short, FAQ-style answers, it’s about deep content that can be parsed, summarized, and trusted by AI systems to deliver meaningful, multi-sentence insights.
How it works:
It emphasizes clear, structured formats like Q&A, well-written human content, bullet points, and schema markup that make it easy for search engines and AI systems to pull short, authoritative answers from your site.
Why it matters:
As search evolves into a more conversational, answer-driven experience (via Google’s SGE, voice assistants, etc.), AEO helps your brand own the answer, not just rank in traditional blue links.
AI isn’t replacing SEO, it’s reshaping it.
AEO and GEO are technically different from traditional SEO, but all three serve the same goal: optimizing your digital presence to capture user intent.
So, what about paid media? Is it being impacted by AI-driven changes to search? We can’t be completely sure, but we do know that making sure your website still has strong SEO optimization is important. It also might be a good time to ensure that the people on your team in charge of SEO are working with your paid media team to share insights and needs.
If your paid and organic strategies aren’t aligned, you’re not just missing opportunities. You’re likely burning your budget.
Here’s how to break those silos down and build a PPC strategy complimented by SEO.
Today’s ad platforms, including Google Search and Performance Max, are increasingly influenced by post-click behavior. It's no longer enough for a landing page to load quickly, it must deliver a coherent, high-quality user experience that aligns with the intent of the ad. What Google’s AI defines as “relevance” includes many factors such as UX signals like bounce rate, dwell time, and page structure. These are areas where SEO and PPC goals now directly overlap.
Quick wins:
Paid benefit:
Structured data doesn’t just help SEO, it can enrich your paid placements too. Especially in Shopping, Local, and even some text ads. Google pulls data like product price, availability, ratings, and more directly from your schema markup. If this data is incorrect, broken, or missing, your ads may serve less often, or with incomplete information. You don’t want your products to appear next to a competitor and lose out on traffic due to missing star ratings (3 stars is better than none).
Quick wins:
Paid benefit:
For PPC clicks coming from mobile, attention spans are short and users rarely scroll with intent. Rather than designing for traditional desktop or "mobile-optimized" formats, landing pages should be built to match mobile behavior: fast scanning, short dwell time, and action-oriented navigation. This is an area where SEO’s understanding of user behavior should directly influence how paid pages are built.
Quick wins:
Paid benefit:
Not every paid user converts on the first click and that’s alright. But when those users explore your site, they need clear pathways to continue the journey. Strong internal linking, breadcrumb trails, and conversion-oriented site architecture keep the experience smooth and conversion-friendly. These same elements also help Google's systems understand user engagement patterns, fueling better targeting and retargeting over time.
Quick wins:
Paid benefit:
If a page isn’t strong enough to rank, it’s probably not strong enough to convert. Thin, duplicate, or vague content can actively harm your paid campaigns by inflating bounce rates, lowering Quality Score, and misaligning with user expectations. That said, not every PPC page needs to be a full-length SEO blog. Many times a short single block landing page can convert well, it just needs to be clear, relevant, and supportive of the ad experience.
Quick wins:
Paid benefit:
Think of SEO as building the infrastructure AI needs to understand your business. Think of PPC as the distribution layer that ensures you get found, fast, and as a valuable pre-testing tool. PPC provides rich, immediate feedback that can inform what you later bake into your SEO and AEO strategies, where signals are slower and harder to interpret.
When they work together, they don’t just boost visibility, they reduce waste, improve user journeys, and create a data loop that feed smarter strategies on both sides.