Should CMOs Cut SEO Budget or Just Add AEO/GEO?

In this episode of ThriveCast, we speak with Hank Azarian, founder of Hank Azarian Consulting and an enterprise SEO & AI consultant working with publishers and PE-backed brands. Hank explains how AI-first discovery is scrambling attribution, walking through how a website's job has shifted from "brochure" to source of canonical truth, why traffic and rankings are becoming vanity metrics as click-through rates collapse, and why the real budget question isn't SEO-versus-AEO but which channels are actually closest to revenue. This conversation is essential for CMOs, Growth Leaders, and SEO practitioners rethinking how marketing dollars get allocated in an AI-first discovery landscape.

Key Insights

* AI is capturing a growing share of discovery. Recent Similarweb data found that among users who use both AI and search, 35% preferred AI as their discovery mode versus only 13% who preferred search — roughly a two-to-one shift.

* Discovery and attribution have decoupled. A buyer’s first touch may happen on AI, but the resulting relationship often gets credited to whichever channel they eventually click through — social, organic, or paid — even though AI influenced it further upstream.

* The website’s job has changed. It’s no longer the “brochure” that drives discovery; it’s now a source of canonical truth that validates the claims other AI surfaces are already making about you.

* Rankings can hold while revenue quietly collapses. A keyword that once delivered a 10–12% click-through rate at a top-three ranking can now deliver roughly 1%, even though the ranking itself hasn’t moved.

* “Key person SEO” beats keyword SEO. A specific returning-user segment came back four times more often, consumed five to six pages per visit instead of one to two, and showed a 17x increase in lifetime value once they signed up for email.

* Traffic loss isn’t evenly distributed. In Hank’s experience, the roughly 20% of visitors who are genuinely engaged can represent 80–95% of a business’s actual revenue from that traffic — so recovering that slice matters more than the headline traffic number.

* Start with the ICP, not the channel. Before assigning budget, define who your business serves best, then build revenue-driven objectives around that customer — not around a channel line item.

* The budget conversation should start at the marketing level, not the SEO level. AI is disrupting SEO, paid, and social simultaneously, so treating AI as strictly an “SEO problem” misframes it — it’s a marketing problem.

* Comparative “best-of” content can backfire. If you’re not the clear category leader, publishing roundups that rank your competitors alongside you effectively validates their claims and can lower your own perceived standing.

* Consensus content adds nothing. If your content just repeats what ChatGPT and competitors already say, AI systems have no reason to cite you — differentiation requires your own IP, data, or point of view.