For more than a decade, the answer marketers gave to the question of SEO or PPC was something like, “That depends on what your goals are. It’s SEO if you’re budget-strapped, patient, or wanting traffic that lasts. It’s PPC if you want a quick pathway to clients. And if you’re not budget-strapped, you really want to do both.”
Unfortunately, that advice doesn’t hold up today. AI has fundamentally changed search.
AI answers questions directly – without a click. “Without a click” means the question has to evolve from SEO vs PPC to something more like, “How do I get in front of my ideal clients now?”
The Old SEO vs PPC Comparison Isn’t Today’s Problem
If you’ve researched this comparison, you’ve read the same advice I’ve summarized a million times. This framing only makes sense when your competition was only other websites. You ranked, or you didn’t. You bid, or you didn’t. Either way, your goal was to interact with a human who would click.
Since AI is so widely used, there are fewer and fewer clicks happening. AI answers the question upfront. You don’t have to do any research on your own. AI’s there to save you that time and effort.
So now the question shifts to, “How do I get AI to notice me?” This is an entirely different question from the old one.
Why Is This Shift in Search Being Missed?
Because it’s been a gradual shift from search to AI. You may be fully aware of the shift and even enjoy using AI, but you may not be thinking about how it’s impacting your marketing and ability to reach your ideal clients.
SparkToro found that in the first four months of 2026, more than 2 out of 3 (68.01%) of Google searches ended without a click.
On top of that, the AI providers haven’t really been telling anyone how to get found using their system because they’re still figuring it all out, too. Although even if they did start providing guidelines on how to be more likely to be found on their platform, there are so many of them out there that it’s still unclear if and when there’s going to be a winner.
The thing is, no one can continue waiting to see what’s going to happen with AI. You’ve got to start adapting now or be left behind.
The pace of change has NEVER been this fast, and all indications are that it will continue accelerating. If you don’t start working with the new AI rules, you and your business will fall by the wayside.
Does This Mean SEO and PPC Are Dead?
No, at least not yet.
For narrow, local, transactional searches, like “local plumber” or “closest restaurant”, the rules about SEO still mostly hold. People on my team who manage city-page SEO for local service businesses are seeing that things are still working pretty well.
For PPC, ads still work. It’s just less certain that your ad will be chosen by the AI running on the platform you’re advertising on. And that’s because you can’t control the algorithm that decides whose ad shows when and to whom. You also can’t control the changing PPC rules on each platform, which are often AI-driven.
But the thing to keep in mind is that you can have excellent content, technically sound SEO, and a healthy ad budget, and still never get chosen as an AI source. Getting found has become much less about where you rank and more about whether you get selected at all.
This, in and of itself, changes what the first of the seven profit levers, generating the right leads, even requires of you.
What Following the Old Rules Looks Like
I have a client who’s worked with me for about a decade now. They’re a coach, and we’ve worked on the marketing side of their business the whole time.
When we started, it was simple. They wanted SEO.
Last year, it was obvious that their SEO wasn’t working the same. Their first choice was to upgrade their website because it was built on old technology and had lots of different pieces cobbled together over almost 20 years. Some of those pieces weren’t used anymore. And some were broken.
After that huge effort to clean and modernize their site, they were still losing traffic month over month.
Finally, after losing almost 75% of their traffic, they agreed to adjust their plan from just SEO to incorporating AEO and GEO. Their traffic seems to have bottomed out and started to gain traction.
A website that’s been active for 20 years is a big piece of real estate to shift. But it can still be done.
No matter where you are with your online presence, it’s time to start examining how your marketing must evolve to remain relevant now that AI is the gatekeeper.
Likely, you’re already losing SEO and PPC traffic to AI. Schedule a 15-minute call to find out how much traffic you’ve lost, if any, so you can start putting together your plan for working with the new AI rules.
About the Author
Karen Finn, PhD is an author and business growth strategist. Download a copy of her book, The Business Growth Plan, to get insight into the low-cost and no-cost strategies she uses with her clients to 2x-3x their revenues.
