Question for Marketers: How Are You Balancing Your SEO, GEO, and AEO Efforts?

Academy Study Groups Study Group: SEO
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much the “SEO” landscape has changed. It’s no longer a single discipline. We’re now juggling three core areas:

  • SEO (Classic): Our content, links, and technical foundation.
  • GEO (Local): Our Google Business Profiles and local relevance.
  • AEO (AI/Answers): Our strategy for rich snippets, voice, and SGE.

A few years ago, the split was probably 70/20/10 in favor of classic SEO. Now, it feels much closer to a 50/25/25 split, and in the future, it might be an even 33/33/33.

My question is: How does your team currently allocate resources or focus across these three pillars? Are you still heavily invested in traditional SEO, or are you shifting more toward GEO and AEO?

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I recently put together a deep dive on this evolution with a comparative chart to visualize the shift.

Looking forward to hearing how others are approaching this!

2

Great breakdown, the shift is definitely happening. We’re still anchored in classic SEO, but the balance is changing fast. Local signals and GBP management now take a much larger share of our time, and AEO is becoming its own priority as AI surfaces more direct answers. Our team is roughly similar to your split: classic SEO still leads, but GEO and AEO together now take almost as much attention. The brands seeing the best results are the ones treating these as three parallel disciplines rather than extensions of traditional SEO.

3

Hi @TAnderson56 and thanks for sharing your perspective with the HubSpot Community!
Here are some resources that might be of interest:
- Quick Guide to AEO with HubSpot
- HubSpot’s Early-Signs Guide to AI Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Best practices for answer engine optimization (AEO) marketing teams can’t ignore
I hope it helps!
Have a wonderful weekend! :sun_with_face:
Bérangère

4

We’re seeing something similar. Traditional SEO is still where most of the effort goes because it’s the foundation for everything else, but AEO is becoming a much bigger priority.

One thing I picked up from some of the GEO and AEO content that Intelligent Resourcing shares is that AI visibility isn’t really a separate channel—it’s the result of doing several things well at once: strong content, clear entity signals, structured data, and authority across the wider web. Their approach is heavily focused on becoming the cited answer rather than just winning a ranking.

If I had to split resources today, I’d probably be around 50% traditional SEO, 20% local GEO, and 30% AEO. But the lines are starting to blur because the same work that helps AI systems understand and trust your brand—things like entity verification, answer-focused content, and structured data—also strengthens SEO overall.

So rather than treating SEO, GEO, and AEO as separate teams, I think the future is one visibility strategy that serves search engines, local discovery, and AI answer engines at the same time.