Survey of 250 Enterprise Leaders Reveals Near-Unanimous Verdict on AEO Investment in 2026

Conductor surveyed over 250 top digital leaders, from CMOs to VPs and Senior Directors at enterprise companies, and found the verdict on answer engine optimization nearly unanimous: 97% reported a positive impact from AEO/GEO in 2025, and 94% plan to increase their investments in 2026.

Of those surveyed, 56% made significant AEO/GEO investments in 2025, while 38% put themselves in a mid-range investment category. On average, about 12% of digital marketing budgets are now allocated to AI visibility and optimization. The gap between last year's spend and this year's planned increase is stark: even organizations that already invested heavily don't believe they've done enough.

"Looking at this data, it's clear that AEO/GEO has moved from initial adoption to essential solution, with 94% of CMOs planning to increase investment in 2026," said Lindsay Boyajian Hagan, VP of Marketing and Co-Head of Revenue at Conductor. "This speaks to a fundamental shift in how enterprise brands approach discoverability."

Boyajian Hagan noted that her team was now having conversations with more of the C-Suite than ever before, a clear signal that brands are alarmed by the collapse in traffic and scrambling to respond. That pressure is also reshaping how enterprises staff up: the report details strategies, roles, and technologies leaders are prioritizing, from hiring prompt engineers to adopting integrated AEO/GEO platforms.

According to a Search Engine Journal preview of the report, 93% of leaders are building AEO/GEO capabilities in-house, pointing to a structural consolidation of these functions rather than continued reliance on outside vendors or point solutions.

The technology maturity gap is sharp. The research highlights a clear maturity gap: roughly half of respondents are already using integrated AEO/GEO platforms, and those organizations are far more likely to report strong performance and clarity around ROI, while less mature teams are still stitching together point solutions and struggling to measure impact. Conductor's own data puts that gap in starker terms: organizations with high AEO maturity are nearly 6x more likely to use a fully integrated AEO/GEO platform than a low-maturity organization.

The performance case for that investment comes down to traffic quality as much as volume. Conductor's report claims that AI referrals make up only about 1% of traffic at the aggregate level, yet the platform argues the intent signal is disproportionate, with AI-driven visitors converting at twice the rate and in one-third the number of sessions compared to other site traffic sources.

AEO/GEO ranked as the number one strategic marketing priority for 2026, prompting Conductor CEO and co-founder Seth Besmertnik to note that "AI search has moved from a future-facing initiative to a long-term strategic commitment. Early leaders are not just investing more; they are accelerating faster, and that creates an advantage that becomes harder to overcome."

Respondents cited data quality and trustworthiness of AI visibility insights as the top technology challenge facing AEO/GEO programs, reflecting concern that scraping-based approaches are fragile and insufficient for measuring performance in closed, rapidly evolving AI systems. C-suite leaders most frequently cited scaling AI-optimized content as their top challenge, while marketing and AEO leaders emphasized ensuring that AI systems can reliably crawl and access content in the first place.

Pat Reinhart, VP of Services and Thought Leadership at Conductor, noted that most organizations allocated around 12% of their digital marketing budgets to AEO/GEO in 2025, and that competitive organizations are pushing that figure closer to 15% or above in 2026, particularly those with higher AEO/GEO maturity. The implication: organizations treating AEO/GEO as a short-term experiment will find the gap increasingly expensive to close as AI-driven discovery matures.