Research from Search Engine Journal suggests that major LLMs are heavily influenced by organic search engine rankings - showing that you cannot neglect SEO in the pursuit of AI visibility.
The emergence of AI overviews, coupled with the increase in people using LLMs for search has led much of the digital marketing industry to hurriedly focus on optimisation for AI search.
This is often referred to as AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation).
But there’s very little understanding of how LLMs actually select their citations. This leaves a knowledge gap for digital marketers who are looking to ensure their clients get good visibility in AI search.
But the latest research from Search Engine Journal indicates that the link between GEO and traditional SEO may be a lot closer than initially thought, with changes in SEO performance reflected in LLM visibility.
SEJ Research: AI Search Citations Reflect Organically Visibility
After an unconfirmed Google algorithm update in January 2026, SEJ identified 11 major websites that saw a significant loss of traffic to their new, blog or article-based folders.
Breaking the data down by source, they saw that traffic from the majority of LLMs correlated very closely with the drop in organic search traffic.
For AI Mode and Gemini - Google’s own products - this is not a huge surprise, but does indicate that their AI search products are still relying on their organic rankings and results.
More surprisingly, ChatGPT also showed an even closer correlation, which reinforces the theory (though still not proven) that ChatGPT scrapes Google’s search results for live searches. Although the indication that it is more dependent on organic results than Google’s own products is certainly interesting.
Perplexity however, was the outlier, with a much smaller drop. As Perplexity is believed to use its own crawler and the Brave Search API, which is independent from Google.
What does this mean for GEO/SEO?
With much of the industry moving towards LLM-focused marketing strategies, these results confirm that organic search is still a huge part of any successful campaign.
This is great news for brands who have spent time, effort and money building a solid organic presence and strategy, as it confirms that it still holds huge value - not just for the majority of users who still rely on it - but even for those using LLMs.
As the SEJ conclude in their article:
Not only is a strong SEO foundation critical for AI search visibility, but tactics that hurt your organic rankings can have a cascading negative impact on your AI search citations as well. In other words, the fastest way to lose visibility in AI search might be to lose it in Google first.
So don't neglect SEO in the hunt for better visibility in LLMs - it’s still going to be the foundation for a solid digital marketing strategy.
