No. The field is young and hype-heavy, but the shift underneath it is real: people are using AI to get answers, and AI builds those answers from sources it trusts. Helping credible sources describe your brand accurately is durable work. The tactics will keep changing, but the goal, being the trusted answer, is here to stay.
Why it can feel like hype
AEO arrived fast, with a flood of new terms, tools, and bold claims. Any field that grows that quickly attracts overpromising, and some of the loudest claims do deserve skepticism. That is fair.
But a noisy market does not mean the underlying need is fake. The buzzwords are new. The behavior driving them is not.
The shift underneath is real
The durable part is how people now find answers. More of them ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI instead of scrolling through links, and those tools answer from a small set of trusted sources. If you are not one of those sources, you are invisible for that question.
That is not a trend that reverses. Semrush, which studied the impact of AI search on traffic, projects that AI search visits could pass traditional search for digital-marketing topics by early 2028 (Semrush, AI search traffic study). That is a forecast, not a promise, but the direction is consistent across the industry. As AI answers become a normal way to research and buy, being cited by them becomes a normal thing brands work on, the way SEO became normal a generation ago.
The tactics will keep changing
What does change is the how. Platforms re-weight their sources often, sometimes sharply. A Semrush study of more than 100 million citations caught ChatGPT's use of Reddit falling from roughly 60% of responses to around 10% within weeks in late 2025 (Semrush, most-cited domains study).
That volatility means AEO is ongoing work, not a one-time setup. But it also shows the opposite of a fad: the platforms are actively maturing how they cite, not abandoning the idea. The work adapts; the goal holds.
Where to go next
For the evidence behind it, read does AEO actually work. For the fundamentals, see what is AEO, GEO and AI search.
