AI Search has quickly moved from an emerging behavior to a critical channel marketers know they need to prioritize. But deciding how much to invest is complicated by a more fundamental problem: AI Search doesn’t fit neatly into the way marketing budgets are structured. Winning visibility across LLMs requires technical SEO, content, digital PR, organic social, influencer and measurement to all work together. Yet most of those capabilities already have their own budgets, owners and objectives. So when a CMO decides to increase investment in AI Search, where should that money actually come from?
Our starting recommendation for large brands is to allocate around 7–10% of digital marketing budget to GEO, depending on category maturity and opportunity. For brands where that isn’t immediately feasible, another starting point is adding roughly 20% to the existing SEO investment to fund the additional capabilities AI Search requires. Our testing show that anything less simply won’t deliver sustained improvement in your brand’s visibility within AI Search.
Neither number is a universal rule. Think of it as enough investment to identify what is stopping your brand from being surfaced and recommended, do something meaningful about it and generate the evidence to decide what the number should become.
Before you throw money at AI Search, check your site’s foundation
AI Search might be changing how people discover brands, but many of the fundamentals behind visibility haven’t changed with it. AI systems still need to be able to find, retrieve and understand your content, which makes strong technical SEO and useful, authoritative content critical prerequisites for GEO. If those foundations are weak, creating a separate AI Search budget while underfunding the infrastructure it depends on won’t get you very far.
That doesn’t mean simply renaming part of your SEO budget “GEO.” Traditional SEO remains part of the foundation, while AI Search introduces a broader network of sources that influence whether a brand appears in an answer (and what the response says). Depending on the category and prompt, those sources include publishers, review sites, Reddit, YouTube, creators and other third-party content alongside your own website. That’s why the 7–10% should be thought of as an investment across the organic media mix rather than a tidy new channel budget. The real allocation decision comes down to which parts of that mix are currently holding your visibility back.
Start with strong technical SEO foundations on your own site, and then build an organic media mix to identify where else you must focus your efforts.
Let your brand’s specific visibility gap decide where the money goes
The most useful place to start isn’t with a predetermined split between content, technical SEO, PR and social. Start by identifying the job to be done by identifying the commercially valuable prompts you want to win and the reasons you’re currently losing in those places.
If AI systems struggle to retrieve or correctly interpret information from your site, more digital PR isn’t going to solve the immediate problem. If your owned content is strong but the editorial sources AI engines trust in your category consistently recommend competitors, producing another batch of onsite articles isn’t going to change those recommendations. And if you’re regularly mentioned but rarely recommended for the prompts closest to a buying decision, the issue may sit with your proposition, sentiment or brand authority rather than visibility itself.
Our approach is to map visibility across priority topics and LLMs, then look at the sources shaping those answers and how much influence a brand can realistically exert over them. This approach allows investment to follow the actual constraint, focusing on the true opportunities. Allocating budget to move Technical SEO initiatives forward will improve crawlability and retrieval. Content investment closes gaps around important questions, comparisons and use cases. Digital PR, creators, organic social and community activity strengthens the third-party signals influencing recommendations. Measurement provides the feedback loop that tells you which pieces are working, enabling you to further focus investment.
Two brands investing the same 7–10% could (and likely should) end up with completely different plans. The budget allocation toward GEO creates room to act. Building the organic media mix diagnoses what to do first, next, and not at all.
Don’t let mentions alone dictate your next investment
Once the investment is live, the temptation is to prove its value with the easiest numbers available. In AI Search, that typically means mentions, citations and overall share of voice. These are all useful indicators, but on their own they can create the same problem we’ve seen across digital marketing for years: optimizing toward the metric that’s easiest to move rather than the outcome that matters.
Not all mentions are equally valuable. A mention for a broad informational prompt isn’t nearly as impactful as being recommended when someone is actively comparing options. That’s why AI visibility needs to be understood through commercial proximity and sentiment, alongside overall mentions and citations. Our measurement framework separates these signals so brands can see whether visibility is increasing in the conversations most likely to influence a customer decision, rather than simply increasing overall.
Over time, that view should connect back to downstream business impact. The goal is to understand whether improving AI visibility changes the behaviors that ultimately matter, then use those learnings to determine where the next dollar goes. That might mean increasing investment because you determine AI Search is becoming more influential in your specific vertical. It could mean reallocating within the existing budget because third-party authority is producing more business impact than churning out another round of onsite content. Or it could mean pulling investment away from tactics that generate visibility without meaningful commercial impact.
7–10% is the starting point, not the answer
There’s no percentage that will remain right for every brand as AI Search evolves. New model launches, your brand’s existing authority, your website’s technical maturity, competitive intensity, and the role AI plays in the customer journey will all shift how much investment is justified.
That’s why the first allocation needs to buy you more than visibility. It should buy you evidence. Start with a meaningful level of investment, establish the prompts and outcomes that matter, diagnose where you’re showing up poorly (or not showing up at all), and fund the interventions most likely to change that. Then let what you learn determine whether 7–10% becomes more, less or simply gets spent differently.
The question isn’t just how much of your budget should go to AI Search. It’s what would have to be true for AI to choose your brand when your target customer asks their LLM a relevant question, and how much solving that problem is worth.
