AI is Disrupting the Search Landscape: What Marketers Need to Know Now
People prefer the simpler route. When they’re looking for information, that now means they’re turning to generative AI tools, like Gemini and ChatGPT, or even AI Overview in Google Search.
These LLMs provide carefully presented answers. They don’t require information seekers to scroll through a page of results, click on a promising link, look through the site’s content to find the answer, and click the back arrow if they don’t find what they need. need.
This is why marketers need to adjust their search strategies to continue to attract online audiences to their brand and its content. To optimize your content for the search revolution, read on to discover recent research and advice from some of CMI’s leading experts in search, analytics and AI.
AI is not an alternative to Google; this will be the new Google
Even the search giant itself – Google – is immersed in the world of AI responses in a way that creates a “serious SEO situation”. writes Roger Montti, author of Search Engine Journal.
“In 2025, AI is not only AI Insights. AI is Gemini, its new functionalities arriving on Gemini and possibly the release of functionalities developed from Project Astra, a multimodal universal agent… All this deviates from the traditional research field as a point of contact between users , Google and websites,” explains Roger.
Will people really move from the familiar search field to Gemini? Google’s recent statements and products indicate that the company is betting on this.
Co-founder of Google’s AI lab says company will “turbo charge” the Gemini application in the next two years. Google’s universal assistant — Astra Project – will converse with users audibly and visually through their phones and prototype glasses and give answers, recommendations and more information based on these discussions.
And that’s exactly what’s happening at Google.
Microsoft has integrated its Bing search engine into its AI tool, CoPilot. ChatGPT, which is already a slang term for generative AI, released SearchGPTwhich is inspired by Bing.
And given the growing number of players in the diverse game of generative AI, continued disruption in this revolution is to be expected.
Don’t panic; learn the game board
Revolutions are not unique. If you’re a seasoned professional, you know that before Google was THE search engine, there was Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, MSN Search, Yahoo!, and many more. Each had its own nuances, from the algorithm’s preferences to how it produced results.
Response-driven AI could be at a similar stage. So it’s time to understand what each tool matters most when generating responses and decide where your SEO team should invest the most time.
Will Seer and Jason Stinnett at Seer Interactive recently broke down the three types of AI research:
Training-driven systems such as Claude And Lama “generate responses based solely on their training data – snapshots frozen in time until the next model update.”
Research-driven systems such as Google AI Insights And Perplexity “relying heavily on real-time indexing of web pages… It’s like SEO on steroids, with a twist of content curation.”
Hybrid systems such as Gemini And ChatGPT “blur the lines by deciding, often in real time, whether to respond based on their training data or retrieve updated information from the web. »
Discover your audience’s preferences
Now that you know the potential systems, how do you know what your audience prefers? You should do what every good marketer does: review your web analytics.
To do a quick check, use a simple GA4 filter as explained by Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media:
Go to the Engagement > Page Path & Query String report. Set a long date range. Click the “Add Filter +” button at the top of the report. In the filter settings on the right, select “Page Referrer” as the dimension. Select “matches exactly” as the match type. Enter “https://chatgpt.com” as the value. Click “Apply”.
Then you can see the traffic coming from ChatGPT. Follow the same process but change the “Page Referrer” values to other domains, such as https://gemini.google.com and https://perplexity.ai.
Given the novelty of AI as an alternative search method, don’t expect a lot of traffic to come from any of the sites, says Andy. As this changes, you’ll already be monitoring the impact to better understand which response AI tools your audience prefers.
For example, Orbit Media’s site saw AI referrers account for 0.2% of its total traffic over the previous 30 days, but that’s twice as much as the month before, Andy explain.
By checking the numbers regularly, you can also see how (if) your traditional search traffic is decreasing month over month.
Want to spend more time setting up this monitoring permanently or creating a custom channel group? Orbit Media has step-by-step instructions on how to do both.
Improve your AI SEO engines
Of course, just like you don’t sit around hoping for search engine traffic, you shouldn’t wait for AI sites to generate traffic. Study emerging trends and know how your brand appears (or doesn’t appear) in today’s systems.
Chris Long of Go Fish Digital did the latter. The agency conducted a ChatGPT search test to see how it performs for “digital PR agency” a query that works well for Go Fish Digital on Google Search.
It was discovered that ChatGPT Search listed Go Fish Digital, but did not include the agency’s notable clients as had been the case for some other companies mentioned in the results.
To remedy this, the Go Fish team revisited the most frequently cited source page for its ChatGPT Search mentions. He added a “Notable Clients” section to the content in a bulleted list, a format the LLM search engine would be more likely to appreciate.
A week later, ChatGPT Search added Go Fish’s notable clients to its results.
Recognize the Big Picture for Brand Mentions
Seer Interactive has taken a broader view with its proprietary tool to study factors affecting brand mentions in AI-generated responses.
It took 300,000 keywords related to the finance and SaaS industries and obtained their traditional search engine rankings along with other related data, such as backlinks, format, etc. It also selected 10,000 questions that would mostly trigger responses mentioning a brand from People Also Ask. results. He answered these questions via OpenAI’s GPT4o API and counted brand mentions in the answers.
The results led to these conclusions:
The ranking of brands on the first page of Google is highly correlated with their mentions in the AI responses. Bing rankings mattered but a little less. The quantity of backlinks had a weak or even neutral impact. The variety of content formats (videos, images, etc.) did not have much impact.
In another test, Seer Interactive looked at the importance of keyword variations to generative AI tools – something that traditional research rewards.
Seer has asked 1,000 versions of this question: “What are the best composite decking brands?” »
The 1,000 responses mentioned a total of 74 unique brands, with an average of six brands included in each response.
Seer Interactive’s Christina Blake says the results indicate that AI tools prioritize semantic intent over specific words. So, marketers should focus on themes and concepts behind the questions, no minor variations in wording as they might with traditional research.
Do the hard work for an easy search route
In the coming year, more and more people in your target audience will change their search behavior and opt for the easier route.
To ensure your content and brand appear in these beautifully packaged packages, update your marketing playbook. Don’t abandon traditional search rankings, given their potential role in AI-generated responses. But spend less time perfecting keywords and other details that don’t really matter to your audience or generative AI tools.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by a contributor to the article. If you want to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
