Fractl surveyed 343 United States marketing decision-makers in charge of AI visibility and found that the vocabulary agencies use to sell generative search services has run far ahead of the words their customers actually type. The study, sent to press contacts on July 21, 2026, reports that 81% of marketers still say "SEO" when discussing AI search strategy internally, that only 19% have adopted "GEO," and that heavy buzzword use ranks as the single biggest reason buyers write off a vendor.

Agencies pitch generative engine optimization. The trade press debates answer engine optimization. LinkedIn fills with posts about large language model optimization. Yet in Slack channels and search bars, most marketers keep using the same three letters they have relied on for two decades. That is the central finding of new research from Fractl, a growth marketing agency, released on July 21, 2026.

The gap the study documents is not a matter of semantics. According to Fractl, the terms marketers type into Slack, Google, ChatGPT, and vendor requests for proposals increasingly determine which agencies get discovered, trusted, or dismissed before the second slide of a pitch deck. When the language on the capability slide does not match the language in the buyer's search history, the agency selling the newer term risks not being found at all.

What the survey measured

Fractl surveyed 343 United States marketing decision-makers responsible for AI visibility at their organizations. The sample skewed toward practitioners rather than executives: 44% were managers, 30% individual contributors, 14% directors, 10% C-suite, and 2% vice presidents. By industry, 27% worked in B2C or e-commerce, 20% in media or publishing, 19% in B2B technology, 15% in other sectors, 9% in financial services, 7% in healthcare, and 2% in software as a service. Generationally, 48% were millennials, 32% Gen Z, 18% Gen X, and 2% baby boomers. Some totals do not reach 100 because of rounding.

The questions covered three areas: which terms marketers use in daily work, how much of their budget is moving toward AI search, and what makes them trust or reject a vendor pitching generative search services.

The vocabulary gap in numbers

The headline figure concerns internal language. According to Fractl, 81% of marketers still use "SEO" when discussing AI search visibility strategy with their teams. Fewer have shifted to newer acronyms: 19% use "GEO," 15% use "LLM optimization," and 10% use "AEO."

One term occupies the middle ground. Nearly half of marketers, 48%, use "AI search optimization" internally, a plain-English label that Fractl describes as the closest thing the industry has to a consensus. It is also the phrase marketers most often type when searching online for help. When hunting for an agency or tool, 46% would search "AI search optimization" and 24% would search "SEO," meaning 70% land on one of those two. "GEO" captures just 12% of searches, and "AEO" only 3%.

Adoption splits along seniority and function. C-suite marketers use "GEO" (28%) and "AEO" (17%) at roughly three times the rate of individual contributors (9% and 3%). By discipline, SEO specialists use "GEO" most at 29%, followed by performance marketers at 27%, growth at 24%, content at 14%, and brand at 13%. By vertical, B2C and e-commerce marketers default to plain "SEO" when searching at 33%, the highest of any group, while media and publishing leans hardest toward "AI search optimization" at 50%.

Half the industry is looking up the words

Public-facing pitches have made the new vocabulary feel established. The survey suggests otherwise. According to Fractl, 50% of marketers have looked up an unfamiliar term after seeing it in a colleague's or competitor's content.

Formal adoption remains a minority position. Only 27% of marketing teams have officially adopted any terminology beyond "SEO" for AI-related search work. Another 42% have explicitly declined to adopt new terms, and 31% are still debating. That leaves what Fractl characterizes as a loud minority on the side of the rebrand and a quiet majority that has not moved.

The reaction to jargon in a pitch is conditional rather than uniform. When a vendor uses "GEO" or "AEO," 42% of decision-makers say their reaction depends on context, and the acronym only works if the vendor explains it well. Another 30% read it as a signal of innovation and expertise, while 22% say it has no impact on how they perceive the vendor. A smaller group, 7%, actively penalizes vendors who lean on the new acronyms, rating them less trustworthy.

Adoption climbs steadily with rank. According to Fractl, 15% of individual contributors say their team has officially moved beyond "SEO," compared with 30% of managers, 36% of directors, and 36% of C-suite professionals. The rollout is top-down and still in progress, and even the leaders driving it are catching up: 56% of C-suite professionals have looked up a term they did not recognize, the highest rate of any seniority group.

One generational finding inverts a common assumption. Gen Z marketers, generally regarded as the most fluent, are the most likely to have looked up an unfamiliar AI search term after encountering it, at 59%, versus 45% for millennials and 46% for Gen X. The generation presumed most current is doing the most catch-up.

Budgets are moving, unevenly

The money is shifting even as the language lags. According to Fractl, marketers now route an average of 24% of their search or content budgets to AI visibility. A large majority, 82%, have allocated at least some budget, and 43% are spending more than 20%. On the other side, 18% have allocated nothing at all.

The distribution varies sharply by sector. Financial services leads on commitment, allocating 39% of search or content spend to AI visibility on average, nearly double the 19% figure for B2C and e-commerce, and ahead of media and publishing at 24%. That same vertical leads on traffic gains, with 42% of financial services marketers reporting increases from AI search features, a pattern Fractl attributes to AI assistants leaning on authoritative finance sources when generating answers.

By function, the teams closest to measurement are moving first. SEO specialists devote 31% of their budgets to AI search visibility and performance marketers 32%, while content and brand teams spend the least at 20% and 21%.

The claim that AI Overviews destroyed organic traffic does not hold up in the data. According to Fractl, 29% of marketers report moderate or significant traffic gains from AI search features over the past year, while 19% report declines, a ratio of roughly three to two favoring gains rather than universal damage. Exposure tracks with size. Organizations with more than 5,001 employees report the highest traffic decline rate at 26%, compared with 17% for small businesses of 1 to 50.

The single biggest operational challenge is not ranking or measurement. Asked what worries them most, 28% of marketers named "keeping pace with how rapidly the landscape is evolving," well ahead of measuring performance at 17%, identifying which platforms to prioritize at 15%, and the absence of industry standards at 13%.

Which platforms marketers are chasing

When asked which AI platform they are prioritizing for visibility, marketers named ChatGPT Search first at 34%, ahead of Gemini at 16% and Copilot or Bing AI at 5%. Another 23% are focused on Google AI Overviews, and 14% report no platform focus yet.

Perplexity is the outlier. Despite heavy coverage in industry commentary, just 1% of marketing teams prioritize it. ChatGPT focus rises with seniority, from 29% of individual contributors to 42% of the C-suite, and peaks among SEO specialists at 46%.

That platform ranking sits inside a fast-moving competitive picture PPC Land has tracked closely. Similarweb data reported in June 2026 showed ChatGPT's worldwide share of generative AI website traffic falling to 52.7%, down from 76.4% a year earlier, as Gemini and Claude gained ground. The volatility runs deeper than share: citation sets change roughly 50% monthly with only 11% overlap between platforms, a churn rate that makes any single week's data a shaky foundation for strategy.

Case studies beat acronym fluency by four to one

The survey's clearest message for vendors concerns what buyers actually reward. Asked to name the single most important credibility signal when evaluating an AI search agency or tool, decision-makers ranked case studies with measurable, verifiable results first at 34%, followed by clear methodology at 22%, team expertise at 15%, client testimonials at 9%, terminology fluency at 9%, thought leadership at 6%, and platform partnerships at 5%.

Case studies are chosen nearly four times more often than terminology fluency. According to Fractl, 71% of decision-makers weight case studies, methodology, or team track record as their top signal. The fundamentals of vendor evaluation, the study argues, have not changed in the AI era.

Terminology fluency is what Fractl calls an entry-level trap. It is weighted most heavily by 17% of individual contributors, dropping to 6% among managers, 6% among directors, and 3% among the C-suite. An agency selling to senior buyers by leading with acronyms is pitching to the 3% of decision-makers who care.

What buyers reward in credibility, they punish in red flags. Heavy use of buzzwords without clear explanation is the single biggest red flag at 36%, ahead of no case studies at 21%, vague or unsubstantiated performance claims at 20%, repackaged SEO services with new AI branding at 16%, and guaranteed rankings at 7%.

Senior buyers register a different objection than junior ones. Among C-suite leaders, 33% point to "repackaged SEO with AI branding" as their top red flag, more than double the 14% to 15% rate among individual contributors, managers, and directors, and only 17% pick buzzwords. The question senior buyers ask, in Fractl's framing, is not whether a vendor knows what GEO means but whether the deck is last year's work edited with find-and-replace.

The customer is also the test bed

The market has a recursive quality. The marketers being sold AI visibility services are also the heaviest users of the tools those services aim to appear inside. According to Fractl, 66% of marketers have personally used an AI search tool such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini to research or evaluate a marketing vendor or agency.

The rate climbs among the functions closest to the work. SEO specialists lead at 89%, followed by performance marketing at 84% and C-suite leaders at 81%. Growth and demand generation sit at 61%, with content and brand at 59% each. Senior buyers use these tools at a 19-point premium over individual contributors, 81% versus 62%, adopting them faster than their own teams.

The first stop for vendor research has shifted away from traditional channels. When researching AI search partners, marketers turn to AI search tools and peer recommendations through Slack groups, forums, and communities at equal rates of 34% each. Together those two channels account for 68% of all first-stop vendor research. Traditional discovery channels, meaning Google Search, LinkedIn, and trade media, pull a combined 22%, and agency review platforms such as G2 and Clutch get just 8%.

What marketers expect for their own jobs

Beneath the operational questions sits a larger one about the profession. According to Fractl, marketers expecting AI search to eliminate more jobs than it creates outnumber those expecting a net increase by 35% to 10%, a pessimism ratio of three and a half to one. The full picture is more mixed: 24% say the job impact depends on the role or specialty, 21% expect a neutral effect, and 10% are unsure.

The most worried are the newest and the most junior. Among marketers with under two years of experience, 41% expect job eliminations, compared with 30% of those with more than ten years. By seniority, 38% of individual contributors are worried about eliminations against 31% of C-suite professionals.

Views on whether traditional SEO faces obsolescence are less dramatic than trade coverage suggests. A minority, 17%, believe traditional SEO will be largely obsolete within five years. The majority, 53%, expect significant evolution without disappearance, and another 20% believe SEO will remain a core discipline. Most marketers frame the shift as evolutionary: 79% view AI search as an evolution of SEO, describing it either as a mix of new and transferable skills (46%) or primarily an extension of existing SEO (33%).

Why the disconnect matters for marketers

The vocabulary problem Fractl documents connects to a wider pattern PPC Land has covered across the AI search landscape. The evidence base beneath the newer terminology remains contested. A critical survey of 45 studies found that body-only content rewrites can lower a page's presence in the top ten by 16%, even as vendors continue selling citation gains the underlying research does not confirm. That academic caution sits directly against the commercial momentum: budgets are being redirected toward generative visibility on the strength of numbers the survey argues cannot bear the weight.

The confidence gap is equally documented. Adobe research covering more than 500 marketers found that 98% lack a clear, documented, and confident roadmap for AI search optimization, with 74% reporting either no measurable strategy or no awareness of one. Into that uncertainty, agencies are selling acronyms, and Fractl's finding is that the selling motion is misaligned with how buyers evaluate.

Google itself has pushed back on the premise that new terminology signals new practice. In coverage documented on PPC Land, the company's VP of Search argued that "good SEO is good GEO," stating that AI Mode and AI Overviews are built on top of existing ranking systems and require no fundamentally different optimization discipline. That position aligns with what Fractl's respondents report about their own workflows: the skills that win in AI Overviews and ChatGPT Search, meaning clear writing, citation-worthy content, and technical hygiene, are the same skills that have long won in organic search.

The tooling market has moved regardless of the label debate. Microsoft Clarity added a feature on July 9, 2026, showing publishers how much of an AI-generated answer their content supports and where competitors win the citations they miss, offering for free what rival tools charge for. Vendor products, in other words, keep shipping while marketers keep debating what to call the category.

Fractl frames its own conclusion plainly. According to the study, budgets are moving into AI visibility, but they are not moving toward whoever has the loudest glossary. The agencies positioned to win the next round, the research argues, are the ones explaining the work clearly, proving it with results, and skipping the rebrand while competitors relitigate the label.

Fractl disclosed that it is the team behind Fractl Agents, a service building AI workflows for content strategy, which makes the agency an interested party in a market its research describes. The survey covered 343 respondents in the United States only, a sample size that limits how far its percentages can be generalized to global or larger populations.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Fractl, a United States growth marketing agency, surveying 343 United States marketing decision-makers responsible for AI visibility at their organizations.

What: A study finding that 81% of marketers still use "SEO" internally while only 19% have adopted "GEO," that heavy buzzword use is the top vendor red flag at 36%, that case studies outrank terminology fluency as a credibility signal by roughly four to one, and that marketers now route an average of 24% of search or content budgets to AI visibility.

When: The research was released and sent to press contacts on July 21, 2026.

Where: The survey covered marketing decision-makers in the United States across industries including B2C and e-commerce, media and publishing, B2B technology, financial services, healthcare, and software as a service.

Why: The terms marketers type into Slack, search bars, and vendor requests for proposals increasingly determine which agencies get discovered, trusted, or dismissed, and the study argues that the industry's pitch-deck vocabulary has diverged from the language its customers actually use, misaligning how vendors sell with how buyers evaluate as AI search budgets keep growing.