49% of marketers plan to deprioritize SEO, Typeface survey finds
Nearly half of more than 500 marketing leaders surveyed by Typeface say they plan to deprioritize or stop investing in traditional search engine optimization as AI-driven discovery grows, according to a new report from the Palo Alto company. The Typeface Signal Report: The AI Visibility Gap, published October 14, 2026, surveyed senior marketers at the director-to-vice-president level across the US and UK, spanning sectors including construction, education, finance, insurance, real estate, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, professional services, retail, and software. The findings matter directly to search marketers, agencies and freelancers who rely on organic SEO work, since a shift of this scale would reshape where enterprise budgets flow over the next two years.
The report says 44% of respondents plan to increase investment in answer engine optimization, the practice aimed at getting brands cited in AI-generated answers, over the next 12 to 24 months. Separately, 49% plan to deprioritize or stop investing in traditional SEO. The report does not clarify whether those two groups overlap, nor does it separate marketers planning to scale back SEO from those planning to abandon it entirely, a distinction with real consequences for in-house search teams and agencies.
Beyond the headline figure, the report finds confidence running well ahead of operational readiness. Some 90% of leaders say their teams are prepared to influence how AI describes their brand, and 97% expect AI to be among the top three discovery channels by 2030. Yet only 39% say their content lifecycle, from creation through measurement, actually runs in a connected, shared workspace. Ownership of AI visibility is similarly fragmented: 28% assign it to brand marketing, 22% to content marketing, 19% to SEO, 17% to performance marketing and 14% to PR.
Tactically, 45% of marketers say they are making site changes specifically for answer engines, 39% are publishing more press releases to be referenced in AI answers, and 68% say they are building content experiences meant for AI systems that humans will likely never see. Many admit skepticism about these tactics even as they use them: among those who call press releases an overhyped approach, 48% say their organization does it anyway.
The report's most pointed finding concerns brand sameness. By a 62% to 61% margin, respondents say brands are sacrificing content quality and brand authenticity in pursuit of AI citations. Typeface's report argues that once every brand runs identical optimization plays with identical tools, those plays stop differentiating anyone, and output converges across competitors.
Typeface founder and chief executive Abhay Parasnis framed the issue around personal AI agents rather than chatbots, saying enterprises must ensure agents understand their brand through the same context and standards given to employees, rather than simply optimizing harder for machines.
Impact
The disclosed methodology is thinner than Typeface's earlier survey from June, which specified more than 200 VP-level marketers polled online in May 2026. The new report gives no exact sample size, fieldwork dates, panel provider, country split or margin of error, and several subgroup findings, such as results for teams using automated prompt monitoring or building the most machine-only content, carry no stated subgroup sizes.
Typeface also has a commercial stake in the report's conclusions. The company sells itself as an "Orchestration Engine" for enterprises, and the report's central recommendation, a shared foundation of brand values and approved messages feeding every team and AI agent, mirrors products it already sells under the names Arc Graph, Arc Fabric and Arc Loop.
The findings sit awkwardly against other industry data. Adobe research published in April found 98% of marketers lacked a documented AI optimization roadmap, contrasting with Typeface's 90% readiness figure, though the two surveys asked different questions. A June Semrush study found 45% of marketers could not properly measure AI answer visibility, and only 36 of more than 1,200 tracked brands appeared in every platform's top 100 list every month. An August framework from the Interactive Advertising Bureau found only 16% of brands systematically track AI visibility, even as more than 20 vendors sell measurement tools that often disagree on the same brand.
A pitch email accompanying the report also contained errors, referring to "traditional AEO" instead of SEO in one instance and citing 63% instead of the report's stated 61% on brand authenticity.
What to watch
Search marketers and agencies should watch whether the 49% figure translates into actual budget cuts, freezes or simply slower growth, since the report does not specify a baseline or dollar amount. Worth tracking too is whether brand marketing, content, SEO, PR and performance teams consolidate ownership of AI visibility work, given that collaboration remains the exception: only 30% of surveyed teams report working with shared tools and shared metrics. As a senior editor covering this space daily, it's also worth monitoring whether measurement tools mature enough to distinguish genuine AI-driven discovery gains from guesswork, since 52% of respondents currently build prompts from their existing top search terms and 50% admit to simply guessing.
Even as many teams shift budgets away from search, auto backlink tool marketers may find their link-building shortcuts matter less if AI-driven discovery keeps reshaping how audiences find content.
Even as many teams shift budgets toward AI content, an seo backlinks builder marketers rely on can still deliver measurable authority gains that justify continued investment in search.
Even as budgets shift, marketers who still want to get backlinks seo remains one of the most reliable ways to build lasting authority.
Source: PPC Land
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