The GEO/AEO Market in 2027: A Forecast

The Click That Does Not Happen

Search used to have a simple scoreboard: did they click your page? The last two years have broken that. Google, ChatGPT, and the other answer engines now try to settle the query on the results screen. The company that used to win the visit can lose the customer without ever seeing a session in analytics.

Researchers noticed the shift before most agencies did. In 2024, Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues named the practice of writing for those answers at KDD. They called it generative engine optimization, GEO. On a benchmark they called GEO-bench, black-box edits to a page raised visibility in generative-engine answers by as much as 40 percent. That is the upside vendors sell. The rest of the record is about how thin the prize is once the answer is already on the page.

Who actually gets cited is a narrower fight. In 2026, Rahul Vishwakarma, Shushant Kumar, and Ratnesh Jamidar took that question to SIGIR. They ran 252,000 paired trials across six language models. Topical relevance and list position decided who was cited first. Price facts and recent timestamps helped, consistently. The models still reward being the obvious source, not the loudest one.

Google's AI Overviews make the click itself scarce. Athena Chapekis, Anna Lieb, Sono Shah, and Aaron Smith watched a representative panel of about 900 U.S. adults. People clicked a search result on 15 percent of visits when there was no Overview and on 8 percent when there was one. They clicked a citation inside the Overview on about 1 percent of those visits. They ended the session on 26 percent of Overview pages, against 16 percent without one. That is not a rounding error. It is roughly half the click, gone.

Stephanie T. Wang, Jeffrey Gleason, Yakov Bart, Christo Wilson, and Danaé Metaxa ran a preregistered field experiment with 1,100 people. An AI Mode-only Google experience cut publisher click-through by 18.8 percentage points. Haofei Xu, Umar Iqbal, and Jacob M. Montgomery crawled 55,393 trending queries from March 13 to April 21, 2026. Overviews appeared on 13.7 percent of queries and on 64.7 percent of questions. Almost 30 percent of the domains cited in those Overviews were not on the first page of classic results. Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen, as Xu, Iqbal, and Montgomery cite them, found a 38 percent drop in organic clicks and a 33 percent rise in zero-click searches.

The practical implication is ugly and simple. If the answer appears on the results page, most people will not visit you. GEO is still a ranking problem. The ranking that now decides whether you are seen is your position in ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and the other answer engines, not only your position in the blue links under them.

Two Markets, Two Sizes

QY Research puts AEO tools and services at about $0.18 billion in 2023, $0.53 billion in 2024, and $1.11 billion in 2025. It projects about $9.1 billion in 2031, a 42 percent annual rate from 2025. In its 2025 split, generative-AI AEO is about 79 percent of revenue, and large enterprises about 64 percent of spend.

MarketsandMarkets uses a tighter definition of generative engine optimization: $390 million in 2025, reaching $4.25 billion in 2032 at 41 percent a year from 2026. For 2025 it splits the market $164 million in North America, $101 million in Europe, $86 million in Asia Pacific, and $39 million in the rest of the world.

SEO services dwarf both. Mordor Intelligence estimates $74.9 billion in 2025, $83.98 billion in 2026, and $148.86 billion in 2031, growing 12.12 percent a year. Even QY's 2031 AEO number is still a sliver of that.

Our read is that the gap is real and also a trick of the books. A lot of what companies now call GEO or AEO is still sold, staffed, and invoiced as SEO. The same people who used to chase blue-link rankings now try to appear in AI-generated commercial recommendations, often on the same retainer. Published GEO/AEO market figures count the work that has been carved out as its own line. They miss the larger pile that still sits inside SEO services. That is one reason the SEO number stays huge while the GEO number looks like a niche. The work is blending faster than the market reports can split it.

The two firms are not describing the same basket. We would use them as a range, not pick a winner. Either way this is still small next to SEO services, which is why we think GEO/AEO spend arrives as a line inside SEO retainers before it becomes its own category at most firms.

The GEO/AEO Market: A Forecast For The Next Five Years

This section is our forecast for the GEO/AEO market over the next five years, 2026 through 2031.

Our base case is that service and tool spend grows at something close to the 40 percent a year both QY Research and MarketsandMarkets published. QY's AEO path is 42 percent a year from 2025. The MarketsandMarkets GEO path is 41 percent a year from 2026. That is much faster than SEO services, which Mordor Intelligence puts at 12.12 percent a year. We do not think GEO replaces SEO in this window. We think it rides on top of it. A mid-market firm that already spends on SEO will start seeing an AEO or GEO task in the same statement of work. It will not see a separate $9 billion industry land on its accounts-payable desk.

If the narrower MarketsandMarkets definition holds, the 2031 market is on the order of $3 billion. If QY's wider AEO tools-and-services definition holds, more like $9 billion. We would be surprised by either a stall back to SEO-like growth or a jump past QY's path. The demand Pew and the click papers describe is already here. Measurement is still too sloppy to unlock enterprise-wide budgets overnight.

What companies should expect is more RFP language about ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews. More retainers that mix classic SEO with work on rankings in AI-generated commercial recommendations. Tools that measure where a brand ranks in those recommendations. And a lot of vendors relabeling SEO as GEO without a method. The scarce skill is ranking in those recommendations, not producing more pages.

Some of this will still be messy in 2031. Different engines will still rank different sources for the same question. Xu, Iqbal, and Montgomery already found that almost 30 percent of the domains cited in Google AI Overviews were not even on the first page of classic Google results. Ranking well in Google will not automatically mean you rank in an AI-generated commercial recommendation. Ranking in one engine's recommendations will not automatically mean you rank in ChatGPT or Gemini.

Being named in a recommendation will also not settle the revenue argument. Teams will still sit in meetings trying to connect an AI ranking to a lead or a sale. The measurement is not there yet, and five years is not long enough to make it clean.

Most visits to company websites will still come from Google, not from ChatGPT or Gemini. Chatbots are already a common way people ask questions. They will not, in the next five years, become the main way customers arrive at a vendor's site.

If you sell into this market, the next five years look like a land grab in a small, fast overlay on top of SEO. If you buy, it looks like paying your SEO shop to care about where you rank in AI-generated commercial recommendations, not only where you rank in classic Google. GEO is still a ranking problem. The ranking that matters now is your position in ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and the other engines that recommend companies. Traditional blue-link rankings still count, but they are no longer the whole game.

We expect GEO and AEO work to keep growing at about 40 percent a year, the rate both QY Research and MarketsandMarkets published, against about 12 percent a year for SEO services. How companies buy it is not one path. Plenty of firms already purchase GEO as its own category, a dedicated engagement rather than a line on an SEO contract. We see enough of that among the shops in this directory to treat it as a real channel, not an edge case. A large share of the work will still be sold inside SEO retainers for years. The two will sit next to each other. Standalone GEO will keep gaining ground. It will not, in this five-year window, be the only way the work is bought.

References

• Agarwal, Saharsh, and Ananya Sen. 2026. "The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment." Working paper, June 17, 2026. As cited in Xu, Iqbal, and Montgomery 2026. https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/sem2026/eco_platforms/agarwal_google_search_aio.pdf.
• Aggarwal, Pranjal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan, and Ameet Deshpande. 2024. "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization." In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 5-16. New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671900.
• Bick, Alexander, Adam Blandin, and David J. Deming. 2026. "The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI." Management Science. As cited in Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI 2026.
• Chapekis, Athena, Anna Lieb, Sono Shah, and Aaron Smith. 2026. "Investigating Click Behaviors On Google Search Result Pages That Produce an AI Overview." arXiv:2608.04831. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04831.
• MarketsandMarkets. 2026. "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Market." Report code UC-TC-1141. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/generative-engine-optimization-geo-market-265868816.html.
• Mordor Intelligence. 2026. "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Market Size." https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/seo-market.
• Pew Research Center. 2026. "Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact." June 17, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/.
• QY Research. 2025/2026. "Global Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Service Market Outlook, Forecast to 2031." https://www.qyresearch.com/reports/5537157/answer-engine-optimization--aeo--service.
• Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. 2026. "Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026." https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2606.15708 and https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.pdf.
• Vishwakarma, Rahul, Shushant Kumar, and Ratnesh Jamidar. 2026. "What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines." In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '26), July 20-24, 2026, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3808445.
• Wang, Stephanie T., Jeffrey Gleason, Yakov Bart, Christo Wilson, and Danaé Metaxa. 2026. "AI in Search Reduces Publisher Referrals Without Improving User Experience: Experimental Evidence." arXiv:2608.18352. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18352.
• Xu, Haofei, Umar Iqbal, and Jacob M. Montgomery. 2026. "Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact." arXiv:2605.14021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14021.