Alex Moreau | AI for Ads & SEO-GEO · Transcript · · Updated
Ads Are Rent, Organic Is Property: SEO vs Paid Ads in 2026 (Real Data) – Transcript
Video by Alex Moreau | AI for Ads & SEO-GEO · Watch the original on YouTube
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- Meta's average price per ad has risen year over year for 11 straight quarters, increasing by 10% in 2024, 9% in 2025, and 12% in each of the first two quarters.
- Google's cost per click rose by 7% in 2024 and by 7% again in 2025.
- Ahrefs found that only 1.7% of new pages which Google stopped ranked within a year, and the average number one page is 5 years old.
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Ads are rent. Organic is property, and the rent keeps going up. Meta's average price per ad has risen year over year for 11 straight quarters, up 10% in 2024, 9% in 2025, and 12% in each of the first two quarters of this year.
Google's cost per click rose 7% in 2024 and 7% again in 2025. To be fair, rent isn't everything. Triple Whale's data on about 35,000 brands shows Meta CPMs up 20% last year, but cost per purchase up only 1% because ads got better. The real problem with rent is simpler. The day you stop paying, you're out. So, what actually happens when the ads stop?
Google ran more than 400 post studies on its own ads. On average, 89% of ad clicks did not come back through organic search. But if you already ranked number one organically, only about half of your ad clicks were new.
eBay tested it for real. When they turned off brand keyword ads, 99.5% of those clicks came straight back through organic search. And in 2020, Airbnb pulled all its marketing. Traffic came back to 95% of 2019 levels without any marketing spend. Today, about 90% of their traffic is direct or unpaid.
That's property. It keeps paying when you stop, but property is slow. Ahrefs found only 1.7% of new pages which Google stopped 10 within a year, and the average number one page is 5 years old. The payoff is that old pages keep working. HubSpot says 76% of its monthly blog views come from posts published before that month. And the long tail is where small stores win. Almost 93% of keywords get fewer than 10 searches a
month. AI changes the shape, not the idea. Pew found people click the result in 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without one. But Seer found brands cited in the AI answer get 120% more organic clicks.
Here's what property looks like on a real site. I asked Rise to compare organic clicks on one of our own sites. It comes back with 1,709 organic clicks in the last 3 months, up 11% and two pages bringing 90% of them, the homepage and a tool page that's been live for months. Nobody paid for a single one of those clicks.
So, here's the split I use. Rent for speed, launches, offers, and testing a new angle in a week. Own for the long run, category pages, comparison pages, and the long tail your buyers type. And don't copy the famous 60/40 rule for this. That's brand versus activation advertising, not SEO versus ads. The honest rule is, if you'd lose most of your traffic when you turn ads off, start building property now. It takes a year, so the best time to start was last
year. Rise runs your ads and writes and publishes your pages, so the rent and the property grow together. Link below. See you in the next one.