Insights / Visibility & Authority
How much should you invest in SEO and AI visibility?
Skip the fixed budget split. Six questions about how your business wins work will tell you more.
There’s a new acronym in your inbox. GEO, generative engine optimization. It usually arrives with a monthly price attached.
You’ve been paying for SEO. Maybe it’s working, maybe it’s a mystery. Now someone says you need both, and they have a tidy split ready: most of the money here, the rest there.
A fixed split is easy to sell. It’s also a guess. It doesn’t know how your customers find you, how long they take to decide, or what a new client is worth to you.
The same percentage can be too much for one firm and nowhere near enough for the one down the street.
The real question isn’t GEO or SEO. It’s how much search and AI visibility can do for the way your business actually wins work.
First, separate two budgets
Your total marketing budget is everything you spend to win and keep customers: ads, events, sales materials, your website, software, and the hours your team puts in.
Your organic visibility budget is the slice spent on being found and described accurately without paying per click. Clear service pages, technical health, business profiles, a steady review process, proof buyers can verify, and the time it takes to keep all of it current.
AI visibility lives mostly inside that second budget. The tools that write answers draw on much of the same evidence search engines do, so the work overlaps heavily. Here’s how SEO, AEO and GEO fit together. Funding a separate GEO program on top of weak foundations usually pays twice for the same work.
Six questions that set the number
Map how customers find you now.
Referrals, search, LinkedIn, a sales team, events, repeat clients. Ask your last twenty new clients how they first heard of you and what they checked before calling. Your acquisition mix tells you which job visibility has to do.
Check whether people search for what you sell.
Look at the queries in Search Console and at keyword research for your services and area. If plenty of people search every month, being absent is expensive. If almost nobody does, ranking is a small prize, and the money belongs in credibility.
See where you already stand.
Do you rank for anything that brings enquiries? Do AI tools name you, and describe you correctly? Starting from nothing costs more than defending a position you already hold.
Count the length of your sales cycle.
A homeowner with a leak decides today. A plant manager choosing a supplier may take six months and involve four people. Long cycles mean visibility supports validation more than introduction, and the payback takes longer to show.
Make sure the website can convert.
More visibility pointed at a site that doesn’t explain what you do, or hides the next step, buys you more visitors who leave. Fix the site’s job first. Start with what your website needs to do.
Do the economics, then decide how you’ll measure.
What is a new client worth over a year? How many extra clients would justify the spend? How long can you wait? Then agree on what you’ll track: enquiries, qualified leads, assisted conversions, and what AI tools say about you, not just rankings.
Two illustrations, not benchmarks
Say you run a residential renovation firm. People search for kitchen and basement renovations in your area every day, compare a few companies, and call. Search is a primary way you get introduced. Organic visibility can reasonably take a large share of your marketing budget, as long as the site turns visitors into calls.
Now say you run a 15-person engineering consultancy. Most work comes through referrals and a short list of known clients. Hardly anyone searches for exactly what you do. But every prospect checks you before the first meeting, on your site, on LinkedIn, and increasingly by asking an AI tool. Your visibility budget is smaller and goes to clear service pages, proof, accurate profiles, and a consistent story so search and AI describe you correctly. More of the total goes to relationships and sales support.
Neither is a ratio to copy. They’re the same questions, answered differently.
The opportunity should set the investment, not the popularity of the acronym.
What AI changes, and what it doesn’t
It doesn’t change the foundation. A site machines can crawl, pages that say plainly what you do and for whom, business details that match everywhere, and proof other people can confirm. That work serves search and AI at the same time.
It does change measurement. Ranking well on Google doesn’t guarantee an AI tool will name you, and AI answers vary by platform, by wording and between runs. You test repeatedly and look for patterns. And you measure your own results. Claims that AI visitors convert at some fixed multiple of search visitors aren’t a basis for your budget. Here’s how to measure when fewer people click.
When to spend less, and when to spend more
Spend less, or fix something first, when tracking is broken, the site can’t convert, demand is thin, or nobody has time to supply the expertise good content needs.
Spend more when demand is proven, you’re absent where buyers look, a client is worth a lot, and competitors are being named in answers where you aren’t.
Nobody can promise rankings or AI mentions. What you can do is put money where the evidence says it can help, and check whether it did.
Don’t start with a split.
Start with how customers find you.
Then fund the part that’s missing.