Ask ChatGPT whom to hire in Bern to fix a website, and it names three companies. Not thirty. Three. There is no page two of that answer, no scrolling, no "more results". You are in or you are not.
That is exactly why AEO exists as a discipline of its own – and exactly why most of what you have read about it is wrong in an expensive way.
First, the number no AEO salesperson wants to show you
This is the honest state of AI search traffic in mid-2026, and it is not the story being told on LinkedIn.
Cloudflare Radar measured search referrals in May 2026: Google sent 87.6 percent. All AI chatbots combined – ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity – sent 0.29 percent. That is about a fifth of what DuckDuckGo delivers on its own.
So if someone tells you to give up SEO for AEO, they are asking you to trade 87 percent of your referrals for a fraction of a percent. Don't.
Now the other half of the picture – the reason we still build every website for both.
The traffic is small. The change in behaviour is not.
Three things are happening at once, and only one of them shows up as AI traffic.
Zero-click is the real disruption. Google's AI overviews now appear on a large share of searches, and when they appear, the vast majority of those sessions end without a click on any website. That traffic did not move to ChatGPT. It dissolved. Your rankings can stay stable while your clicks fall.
AI visitors convert far better than their volume suggests. People who arrive via an assistant show clearly higher close rates in the available commerce data than visitors from organic search. That makes sense: this person was pre-qualified by a conversation. They aren't browsing. They were told to come.
Measurement undercounts it. When someone copies a link from ChatGPT and pastes it into a new tab, the referrer is lost. That session lands in your analytics as direct traffic. Every business that measures AI visibility through referrer data alone undercounts – and nobody knows by how much.
Put together, the picture is this: AI search is a small, high-quality, poorly measured channel that is growing fast and sits on top of a large channel that is quietly losing clicks. You optimise for both – with largely the same work.
What actually makes you citable
The mechanics are less mysterious than the acronym suggests. An assistant has to be able to take a statement from your page, trust it and attribute it to you. Everything else follows from that.
Answer in the first two sentences. Not after a paragraph of context. If your page about implant prices opens with your practice philosophy, there is nothing to extract. Answer first, then earn the rest.
Be specific enough that it could be checked. "We deliver outstanding results" can't be cited. "Usually live in four to six weeks" can. Models cite statements that sound verifiable, because a verifiable statement is safer to repeat.
Use structured data properly. FAQPage, Service, LocalBusiness, Organization. That is the difference between a machine guessing what your page means and being told.
Publish the boring pages. The long, spoken questions people type into assistants – "what does X cost in Switzerland", "what is the difference between Y and Z" – are barely answered by businesses because they seem too mundane. That is exactly why they can be won.
You will notice: all four points also help in classic search. That is the point. There is no separate AEO budget. There is content machines can process, and content they can't.
The measurement problem, and how to solve it cheaply
You can't steer what you refuse to look at – and ranking tools won't show you this.
The method we use with clients is unspectacular and works: take the fifteen questions a real buyer would ask before hiring, put them once a month to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, and record whether you are named, in which position and next to whom.
That gives you three things no ranking report delivers. You learn whether you are on the shortlist at all. You learn who the assistants think your competitors are – often not the ones you have in mind. And you have a baseline, so in six months you can say whether any of it worked.
It costs about twenty minutes a month. Most businesses have never done it.
What we would do first
If you are a Swiss service business wondering where to start – in this order:
Ask the fifteen questions today and write down what you find. It costs nothing and will probably annoy you.
Get the technical foundation in order – speed, heading structure, schema – because no content work compounds on a website machines struggle to read.
Rewrite your three most important sales pages so the answer comes first.
And then publish against the questions nobody in your market has answered yet – and don't stop.
Expect movement from month three and countable traffic from month six. Mentions in assistants can come faster, sometimes within weeks, precisely because so few businesses are competing for them so far. That window won't stay open.
Does AEO replace classic SEO?
No, and treating it that way would cost you most of your traffic. Google still sends around 87 percent of search referrals, all AI chatbots combined under one percent. AEO is a second layer on the same technical and content foundation, not a replacement for the first.
How do I find out whether AI assistants name my business?
Regularly put your buyers' real questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity and record whether you are named. There is no reliable automatic tracking for this yet, and referrer data undercounts because links copied out of a chat lose their referrer and show up as direct traffic.
How long does AEO take to work?
Mentions in assistants can appear within weeks because competition is still thin. Visibility in classic search takes three to six months. The underlying work is the same, so you don't pay twice for the two timelines.
Does my industry matter?
Less than your buyers' habits. If people research you before getting in touch and a client is worth four figures or more, being absent from the answer is expensive – whatever the industry.
