Is UX now part of GEO/AEO whether we like it or not?

I been leaning about how much of findability in 2026 is shifting away from traditional search and toward AI gen answers.

A lot of the GEO/AEO discussion seems to come from SEO people, but the more I look at it, the more it feels like a UX problem too.

If ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and other gen AI are increasingly summarizing products, services, and help content instead of sending users through a normal navigation path, then much of what makes a product or site understandable seems directly tied to UX decisions:

• how clearly information is structured
• whether pages answer real user questions directly
• whether flows, labels, and content reflect user intent
• whether the site makes entities, relationships, and context easy to understand
• whether the right answer is obvious without needing a human to click around

It feels like UX used to focus only on "once the user lands here, can they complete the task?" Now I feel like we need to ask: "can an answer engine understand this well enough to represent it correctly before the user ever lands?"

That made me wonder if UX teams should be more involved in GEO/AEO conversations, esp around information architecture, content design, support/help flows, and structured clarity.

I'm not saying UX should suddenly become SEO, what I mean is the boundary feels blurrier now, because answerability and usability seem more connected than they used to be.

I'm wondering how other UX people see this. Do you think GEO/AEO is becoming partially a UX responsibility, or is this still mostly a search/content problem?