AI Search Opens New Opportunities

The past few weeks has seen a flurry – more of a blizzard, really – of announcements from Search Engine Optimization companies that have added tools for AI search ranking. This is a natural outcome of the meteoric growth in AI search: referrals from ChatGPT grew 20% from June to July this year while ChatGPT agent visits doubled in the same period. 

Before you get too excited, bear in mind that LLM vendors’ share of global search is still a minuscule: 0.13% so far in 2025 (for ChatGPT and Perplexity combined). Given that Google still has nearly 90% of all search traffic, it’s much more important that more than half of Google searches now return an AI overview.

Probably the most important statistic is that organic click-through rates drop by 20% to 40% when AI Overviews are displayed.  One important caveat is that AI overviews show up primarily on “informational” queries, as opposed to commercial, transactional, or navigational queries. The caveat to the caveat is that informational queries are by far the most common: 88.1 % of the total, compared with 8.7% commercial, 1.4% transactional and 1.8% navigational. So, if your web strategy has been based on providing information to attract visitors, you have some adjusting to do.

Or do you? Most AI optimization tools replicate SEO by focusing on how often a brand appears in AI search results. This Evertune press release provides a detailed explanation of how their product works, which is probably typical: the system runs a set of common prompts on a topic and tracks how often the target brand is mentioned. That’s very similar to traditional SEO, which reports how the target brand ranks in search results. In both cases, the goal is to be seen more often.

It's true that tactics to reach those goals will differ. Traditional SEO is based on links and keywords, while AI search engines care more about detailed information and reviews. More broadly, content that attracts humans will often be insightful or entertaining, while bots respond best to clearly presented data. So some changes are needed if you want to switch your goal from SEO to AI search ranking.

The deeper question is whether appearing in AI search results is the right goal. If you’re a brand whose aim is building awareness and credibility, the answer is probably yes – so long as the AI results present you in a positive light. It will be even more important as search bots morph into shopper bots, which recommend (and will eventually execute) purchases on behalf of human buyers. Shopper bots will no doubt engage with brand-owned seller bots, a category (or e-commerce system feature) that I can't recall seeing but is surely gestating as you read this.

The answer is different if you’re a publisher. There’s little value in having your materials cited in an AI response that doesn’t generate a click-through to your site. In fact, showing your materials gives users less reason to visit. Adding injury to insult, responding to the AI search engine’s crawler actually adds to your website operation costs. Put simply, publishers need traffic.  Visitors provide inventory for ad impressions and names to capture for future promotions. The drop in organic traffic forces publishers to seek other traffic sources, including both paid search and social forums such as reddit, Instagram, and YouTube.

• Paid search itself will evolve along with AI search. Ads already appear alongside Google and Microsoft AI search results. Looking ahead, Google Research recently published a paper describing how advertisers could bid on the text of the responses themselves. There are also other ways to reward AI search engines for driving traffic to advertisers, such as affiliate relationships. Consumers won’t be pleased when paid and unpaid recommendations mingle indistinguishably in search results, but it’s not clear they’ll have much choice in the matter. The problem facing publishers is that many won’t be able to afford the cost of paid advertising or will need to reengineer their business to generate revenues to cover the expense.  

• Social traffic is a more appealing option for publishers since it’s “free” to the degree they can generate it. That should be possible: after all, publishers' core competency is to create appealing content. One implication is a growing overlap between traditional publishers and influencers, a distinction that has already become quite blurry. It’s worth noting that we’ve recently seen substantial growth in software and services to support influencer marketing, including tools to find influencers, build audiences, and streamline content creation, as well as ad networks and media buying tools to simplify ad placement on influencer sites. Most have been aimed at individual influencers, but enterprise-grade products will probably appear with publishers as the target clients. Social marketing will increasingly look like SEO, except aimed at optimizing content for social algorithms rather than search algorithms. Since SEO companies and social media management vendors both have a legitimate claim to this turf, it will be interesting to see who ends up owning it.

In short, we’re just beginning to see the changes resulting from AI search. It has already disrupted the business model of many web publishers, who no longer receive the organic search traffic that powered their audience creation. Traditional SEO will be supplemented by AI SEO, especially for brands who can benefit from appearing in AI search results. But while traditional search generated large volumes of free traffic, AI search results will likely be dominated by paid placements. Publishers, who gain less than brands from AI search ranking, will need to find alternative sources of traffic and will increasingly resemble influencer business models. Above all, we’ll see continued development of supporting technologies (“infrastructure” in terms of the STIB model) as entrepreneurs identify new opportunities to help companies operate in the new environment. Ultimately, again according to STIB, we’ll start to see new business models emerge that are best suited to the dynamics of an AI search-based economy.