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PMG, among the largest independent marketing agencies in the world, is now telling clients to test generative engine optimization with budgets equal to 1.5 to two times what they currently spend on search, according to Matt Allfrey, the agency’s head of SEO for EMEA.
That advice is no longer unusual. A Semrush survey published in June 2026, which polled nearly 500 marketing professionals, found that 38% of respondents plan to invest in AI search optimization, slightly ahead of the 36% who intend to put money into traditional SEO. It marks a subtle but important turning point for a field that, only two years ago, largely viewed generative engine optimization as an experiment. The same study found that 85% of marketers believe AI has already reshaped the way they approach search.
In recent weeks, Google has rolled out a string of announcements that, collectively, signal the biggest overhaul of Search since the product was created. The company has changed the way its AI search features surface information from across the web and, for the first time, released official guidance on how businesses can adapt their content for this new search experience. For entrepreneurs and digital marketers, these changes are no longer background noise — they are central to being found online.
Search is becoming an answer engine
In early May, Google unveiled updates to AI Mode and AI Overviews, the artificial intelligence-powered features now layered above conventional search results. The updates include suggested follow-up questions at the end of AI-generated responses, website previews that appear when users hover over links, highlighted results from news outlets a user subscribes to and citations positioned directly next to the text they support.
At first glance, these may seem like modest design changes. They are not. They reinforce a much larger shift in Google Search: the AI-generated answer has become the main experience, while the familiar list of blue links has moved into a supporting role. Users now get a summarized response first, then decide whether they need to click through to a website at all.
The impact is already showing up in traffic data. Nieman Lab has reported that search referral traffic has dropped by about 60% for small publishers and 47% for medium-sized publishers over the past two years. That pattern matches what I am seeing firsthand: across nearly every client we work with, Google traffic has fallen sharply, regardless of the company’s sector or the quality of its content.
The challenge, then, is no longer simply how to win back lost search volume. It is how to maintain strong conversion rates as referrals from AI search slowly begin to fill the gap. From what we have observed, users who arrive through an AI recommendation are often closer to making a decision, which can make each visit far more valuable than a typical search click ever was.
Google publishes the rulebook
What makes this moment different from previous search upheavals is that Google is, for once, showing its hand. In mid-May, the company released its first official guide to optimizing for generative AI features — a document that addresses, in plain language, what influences visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and what does not.
The guide’s central message is that optimizing for generative AI search is, from Google’s perspective, still SEO. But it goes further, explicitly debunking several practices sold aggressively under the “generative engine optimization” banner over the past two years. There is no special schema markup that unlocks AI visibility, Google states, and chasing inauthentic mentions of your brand across the web is far less effective than it appears. What the guide consistently rewards instead is unique, non-commodity content — material grounded in genuine expertise that an AI system cannot source anywhere else.
In early June, Google followed up by updating its long-standing guidance on hiring SEO help, adding a new document on evaluating third-party tools and services and explicitly naming GEO and AEO as service categories for the first time. The updated guidance even supplies vetting questions for business owners: Does the provider cite official Google documentation? Is their AI optimization advice aligned with Google’s published guidance? For anyone who has sat through a sales pitch promising guaranteed placements in AI answers, this is a long-overdue corrective.
A winner-takes-all game
Here is what entrepreneurs must understand about the new landscape, and it is the point most coverage misses: AI visibility, far more than classic Google search, is a winner-takes-all game.
In the old model, a business ranking fifth — or even fifteenth — still captured meaningful traffic, because users browsed, compared and formed their own shortlists. That behavior is disappearing. When an AI assistant recommends two or three options in a conversational answer, most users simply accept them. They do not scroll through alternatives, open ten tabs or venture to page two, because there is no page two. The recommendation is the market.
This dynamic means the gap between being cited and not being cited is no longer a difference in degree but a difference in kind. A brand that appears in AI answers compounds its advantage with every query; a brand that does not is, for a growing share of customers, effectively invisible.
Google’s recent changes only sharpen the trend. Features like suggested angles and community perspectives create a handful of additional slots inside the answer — but they remain a handful, contested by everyone in your category.
What entrepreneurs should do now
The practical response follows directly from this logic.
First, read Google’s optimization guide yourself before commissioning any external help. It is short, written for non-specialists, and now serves as the standard against which every GEO pitch should be measured. If a vendor’s recommendations contradict it, walk away.
Second, shift your content strategy from volume to depth and authenticity. The new AI surfaces visibly reward subtopic depth and first-hand experience — original research, real case studies, perspectives only you can provide. Commodity content, which AI systems can synthesize from a thousand interchangeable sources, no longer earns citations, links or trust.
Third, rethink your metrics. If your dashboards still treat raw traffic as the headline number, you are measuring a shrinking game. Track how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers for the queries that matter commercially, and watch the conversion rate of AI-referred visitors. In most cases, you will find fewer clicks doing more work.
Search as we knew it is not coming back, and waiting for the dust to settle is a strategy with an expiry date. The businesses that treat AI visibility as the winner-takes-all contest it has become — and act while their competitors are still mourning their traffic reports — will own the recommendations everyone else is fighting to enter.
PMG, one of the world’s largest independent marketing agencies, now advises clients to pilot generative engine optimization at 1.5 to two times their existing search budget, according to Matt Allfrey, its head of SEO EMEA.
PMG is hardly an outlier. A June 2026 Semrush study of nearly 500 marketing professionals found that more respondents plan to invest in AI search optimization (38%) than in traditional SEO (36%) — a quiet crossover moment for an industry that treated GEO as a curiosity just two years ago. In the same survey, 85% of marketers said AI has already changed how they approach search.
Over the past several weeks, Google has made a series of announcements that, taken together, amount to the most significant restructuring of Search since its inception. The company has redesigned how its AI features present the web to users and, in a notable first, published official documentation explaining how businesses can optimize for the new environment. For entrepreneurs, understanding both moves is no longer optional.
