#20. Weekly Round Up. AEO, GEO are nothing without SEO? — AI For Newsroom

Hello, this is Sergei.

I’m preparing for two workshops next week — in Riga and Berlin — and have been going through a number of reports and studies on AI search, AEO, and GEO.

For example:

This (by Seer)
This (by Marfeel)
This (by Conductor)
This (by Ahrefs)

Despite being just ~1% of traffic today, AI search could surpass traditional search by early 2028, according to Semrush — assuming current growth trends hold.

And there is one thing that looks very important for news media (especially for small, local and niche).

AI visibility ≠ Google ranking.

Ranking #1 on Google gives you only a 33% chance of appearing in AI Overviews.
Around 28% of ChatGPT’s top-cited pages have zero Google visibility.
Overlap between AI answers and Google results is surprisingly low.

In simple terms: different rules apply.

To be visible in AI answers, content needs to be:

clear and well-structured
direct in answering questions
fact-based and properly sourced

Recency also matters more than expected.

85% of AI citations come from content published in the last 2 years
Up to 50% comes from content published this year

This lowers the barrier. You don’t need years of authority — you need relevant, well-structured content now.

And the most important part:

Up to 80% of AI-cited content doesn’t rank in Google’s top 100
Only a small share comes from top search results

AI systems don’t prioritize domain authority. They prioritize extractable, precise answers.

Which means a small newsroom can compete. A single well-structured, clearly sourced article can outperform larger publishers — if it answers the question directly.