Key takeaways
- Most 2027 plans land at 55-65% SEO, 20-30% GEO, and 5-15% AI ads, but the right split depends heavily on company stage, existing SEO maturity, and how AI-native your audience is.
- Mid-market brands spend roughly $75k-150k per year on GEO; enterprises allocate $250k+. On average, teams allocate about 25% of their search budget to AI search work.
- AI-referred traffic grew 527% year-over-year in early 2025, while Gartner projects a 25% decline in organic search traffic to commercial sites. Both can be true at once, and your budget needs to respect both.
- Start GEO as a reallocation from existing SEO spend (usually from link building and content volume), not as a brand-new line item.
- AI ads (ChatGPT sponsored placements, Perplexity sponsored answers) are still experimental. Cap them at 5-15% of search budget until you have attribution that works.
Why 2027 is the year this decision gets expensive
Every search budget written since 2024 has been a transition document. The 2027 one is the first that needs to fully price in three channels instead of one and a half.
The numbers behind that are blunt. AI-referred traffic grew 527% year-over-year in the first five months of 2025, per 5WPR's research. Gartner projects a 25% decline in organic search traffic to commercial sites. Surveys cited by Stan Ventures show 61.2% of companies plan to increase SEO budgets because of AI, and 55% of marketers already have a dedicated AEO/GEO budget line.
One LinkedIn argument making the rounds is that