Where SEO is going
AI, AI agents, and the rise of Answer & Generative Engine Optimization — read from 48 months of search demand.
The transition is happening faster than the old discipline is shrinking.
Demand is migrating from optimizing for search engines to optimizing for AI answers — and the shift is accelerating.
Across the four-year keyword panel, general-AI search demand has roughly 3.6×'d since 2022 and is still accelerating at +85% year-over-year. Meanwhile interest in SEO itself peaked in mid-2025 and has since contracted about 30%. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) exploded from essentially zero in 2023 to a clear, named market by 2025 — then plateaued in early 2026 at still-small volumes.
Read together, the trajectory is not "SEO is dying." It is search being abstracted away by an AI answer layer, with the optimization economy reorganizing around influencing that layer. The winners will treat SEO, AEO and GEO as one converged practice — earning citations and mentions inside AI answers — rather than chasing blue links that fewer people click.
The five things to know
Keywords were grouped into themes, monthly volumes summed into trend lines, and momentum computed as rolling 12-month totals, year-over-year change, and distance from peak.
The Great Divergence: AI up, SEO over the top
The single clearest pattern in four years of data is divergence. AI-topic demand climbs almost monotonically and steepens in 2025–26. SEO-topic demand rose alongside it into a mid-2025 peak — then turned down. These are no longer two parts of the same growth story.
AI is ~10× the size of SEO and pulling away; AEO and GEO are real but roughly three orders of magnitude smaller.
SEO interest has peaked
SEO is not collapsing, but the data shows its first sustained downturn. Rolling 12-month demand peaked in the year to May 2025 (~47.7M) and fell to ~33.4M by May 2026 — roughly −30% year-over-year, sloping down about 166K searches per month.
The deeper signal: ranking and citation have decoupled. The overlap between top-10 Google rankings and the sources cited in AI answers collapsed from ~75% in mid-2025 to 17–38% by early 2026. Winning the old game no longer guarantees winning the new one.
AEO and GEO: a discipline is born, then pauses
Both terms were statistical noise in 2023, became measurable in 2024, and scaled through 2025 — GEO running ahead of AEO. Then both peaked in late summer 2025 and plateaued: AEO sits ~17% below its September high, GEO ~45% below its August high. This is the shape of a term crossing from novelty into the working vocabulary of an industry.
The data shows GEO with roughly twice the search volume of AEO — yet practitioners are converging on "AEO" as the standard label. The likeliest read: GEO caught the public imagination as the catchy name, while AEO is winning the boardroom because it maps cleanly to a measurable outcome — getting cited in the answer. Expect the field to collapse toward one or two dominant terms.
AI agents: from hype spike to deployment
Agent-related demand grew ~22× from 2022–23 to 2025–26, ramped hardest through 2024 and early 2025, then turned volatile — peaking around early 2026 before pulling back ~40%. Choppy demand after a steep ramp is the fingerprint of a category graduating from speculation into real, if uneven, deployment. Critically, agents are becoming a consumer of search results: the question shifts from "does my page rank?" to "does the agent choose, trust, and transact with my brand?"
Relative momentum, rebased to 100
Slope, not level, shows momentum — and SEO is the only line trending below where it started. Momentum and size are inversely related: the fastest-growing things are still the smallest.
Five bets worth making
Synthesizing the trajectories with the market evidence — the most probable path, framed as trends worth betting on.
Scenario horizon
So what should you do about it
The window to reposition is now — while interest in AEO/GEO is still in its early-adopter pause and before the mid-market wave arrives. Concrete moves, in priority order.
The value isn't leaving search — it's moving
From "rank for clicks" to "be the answer."
Stop guessing your AI visibility
Rankability tracks your share of model and rankings across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI surfaces — so you can report citations and mentions, not just blue links.
Data & sources
Primary data: Google Keyword Planner export, 3,751 keywords × 48 monthly data points (Jun 2022 – May 2026). The direction of every major claim was cross-checked against current industry research.