Semrush’s research shows that 50% of all links included in ChatGPT are for business or service websites. Since June 2023, Reddit’s organic traffic has increased from 175.9 million to 1.45 billion. All of these sites are high authority domains with strong SEO profiles and organic search rankings. Even though (in this case), the traffic is not coming directly from LLM search, this is the perfect example of why LLM search visitors are higher value. vegas casino app They’re more informed and ready to buy compared to someone typing “what’s the best dog food” into Google.
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While Project Mariner is still in the early stages of development, it represents an important step towards Google’s goal of making AI a core part of everyday web interactions. In the near future, it’s expected to enable users to engage with information across various platforms without needing to manually search each site individually. Launched in late 2023, Gemini is Google’s direct answer to competitive AI models like ChatGPT and Claude.
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- Perhaps they’re highly engaged in the topic and want to go deeper.
- “It’s not just so-called web results, but there are images and videos, and special things for news.
- Even if the growth rate slows to a more conservative 5-6% per month, ChatGPT would already have reached at least 770 million WAU as I write this.
- We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something.
- For example, Google Lens, which lets people take a picture or upload an image to find out more about something, uses AI-generated answers to tell you what you may be looking at.
And if history has taught us anything, it’s that whoever controls the flow of information controls everything. Start planning strategies around intent-driven, decision-supporting content now, while the landscape is still evolving. Instead of traditional articles targeting specific keywords, build decision frameworks that include goals, options, criteria, trade-offs, and guardrails. Each of these components can provide useful material for AI to cite in responses, whichever AI system that might be. If 1-2% of traffic currently comes from AI sources at 10% market adoption, what happens when we reach 20% or 30% adoption? AI-mediated traffic – with its higher conversion rate – could easily grow to 5-10% of total website visits within two years.
- OpenAI won’t reveal how many people are using its web search, but it says some 250 million people use ChatGPT weekly, all of whom are potentially exposed to it.
- To boost its growth, Google is experimenting with embedding ads directly in AI-generated search summaries.
- These overviews take information from around the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph and use the company’s Gemini language model to create answers to search queries.
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Whilst traditional SEO will evolve, its role may shift toward helping AI tools understand and accurately represent content. Visibility will increasingly depend on creating AI-friendly content alongside building direct audience relationships. PerplexityPerplexity is a conversational search engine that uses third-party largelanguage models from OpenAI and Anthropic to answer queries.
Google’s recent launch of a new payment protocol suggests it is already hedging against the risk of falling ad revenue from traditional search. For SEO professionals, this signals a fundamental shift. The focus will no longer be solely on keyword rankings or backlinks. Instead, SEO strategies will need to be redefined to account for how AI systems like Gemini interpret and present content.
Google’s transition from the traditional search box to AI-driven, multimodal interfaces will reshape how we access and interact with information on the web. For SEO professionals, this means adapting to new AI technologies and creating content that is accessible, relevant, and tailored to AI systems. For digital marketers and publishers, this means that optimizing content for cross-platform functionality will become increasingly important. Mariner is an example of how AI will be embedded into the web, making the search experience more interconnected and user-centric. These LLMs can deliver conversational, synthesized answers to user prompts. In the early days of search engines, at least we had guidelines on indexing and ranking.
For businesses, this means that optimizing for voice search, video content, and structured data will be just as important as optimizing for traditional text-based queries. The future of SEO lies in ensuring that your content can be effectively understood and utilized by AI-driven tools like Project Astra. When AI tools provide users with instant, summarised answers, fewer people may click through to original sources. For instance, a query like “How do I bake a loaf of ciabatta?
In October 2022 (before ChatGPT was released), Semrush found that 57% of mobile users and 53% of desktop users perform a search and don’t click on any results (both organic and paid). This LLM visibility tool allows you to create prompts relevant to your business across different stages of the buyer journey. It uses those prompts to see how you and your competitors rank across the most popular LLMs and whether your current strategy is working. Additionally, Google recently released AI Mode, which is essentially a ChatGPT alternative available right in your Google search window. Instead of blue links and a traditional Google SERP layout, you can work within this LLM to ask questions, find information, conduct research, etc.
In 2023, 13 million U.S. adults already used generative AI as their primary search tool. By 2027, that number is projected to skyrocket to over 90 million. And it’s not just niche users—68% of adults now turn to AI for answering questions.
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The AI understands context and responds conversationally, eliminating the need for keyword trial and error. As these systems mature, the user experience will increasingly prioritise convenience and efficiency, delivering comprehensive information in a single interaction. As AI becomes more sophisticated at providing instant responses, it raises important questions about the future of search engine optimisation (SEO) and online content visibility. For businesses and creators, success may lie in embracing this shift whilst focusing on building loyal, independent audiences. Sure, we will always want to use search engines to navigate the web and to discover new and interesting sources of information.
According to the latest data, Google reports that 1.5 billion users now regularly use AI Overviews. Since the launch of ChatGPT, the growth of generative AI and AI search has been rapid. For many brands, this will mean moving away from individually optimized pages to entire content ecosystems. For many businesses, that’s enough to warrant strategic attention now.
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As of March 2025, 13.14% of all queries generated an AI Overview. Of all the queries that do trigger an AI Overview, 88.1% are informational. AI chatbots consolidate everything into a single response. We have no idea where that information comes from, how it’s prioritized or who’s making those decisions. The web didn’t collapse overnight—it was a slow, painful unraveling.
The future of search: how conversational AI and audience-building will redefine information retrieval in 2025
When I asked him about it, he couldn’t really explain why the model chose the sources that it did, because the model itself makes that evaluation. The company helps steer it by identifying—sometimes with the help of users—what it considers better answers, but the model actually selects them. OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, Varun Shetty, told MIT Technology Review that it won’t give preferential treatment to its publishing partners. Weil also argues that ChatGPT has more freedom to innovate and go its own way than competitors like Google—even more than its partner Microsoft does with Bing.
Business and Service Sites Perform Well
When this happens, a user is more likely to get a recommendation from ChatGPT and then type in the brand’s name to Google or go directly to their website. As of now, there’s no way to track this because it appears as either organic search traffic or direct traffic. Performance still matters, whether for human visitors or AI crawlers. If AI bots are scanning your site for content, a slow or bloated user experience won’t just hurt human visitors—it could impact whether AI even considers your content relevant. AI isn’t just a better search tool—it’s completely rewriting how information flows.
Perhaps they’re highly engaged in the topic and want to go deeper. Or perhaps the AI responses have answered their product queries, and they’re now ready to buy. As the volume of AI-powered search queries increases and user adoption grows, search behaviors will change. In response, advertisers will cautiously and gradually experiment with AI ad formats, testing and refining their strategies as the landscape continues to evolve.
According to New Street Research, AI Overviews advertising is poised to account for a growing share of Google’s search advertising revenues, generating 1% in 2025, 3% in 2026, and 6-7% in 2027. In a landscape dominated by conversational search, the most effective strategy for businesses and creators is to reduce dependence on search engines by building their own audiences. Owning direct relationships provides stability and ensures content reaches those who value it most.
Traditional SEO remains foundational, but the definition of search visibility has expanded. A model that maybe can’t understand, precisely, but has the ability to put that information together, rearrange it, and spit it back in a variety of different hopefully helpful ways. A few weeks after our call, OpenAI incorporated search into ChatGPT, supplementing answers from its language model with information from across the web. You can also opt to manually force it to search the web if it does not do so on its own. OpenAI won’t reveal how many people are using its web search, but it says some 250 million people use ChatGPT weekly, all of whom are potentially exposed to it. But alongside the rise of search engines came the first attempts to exploit their ability to deliver traffic.
“We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where we’ve been in the past decade,” says Pichai. But Google has long been moving away from simply serving up a series of blue links, notes Pandu Nayak, Google’s chief scientist for search. Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge. Learn to rank in ChatGPT search with tactics that drive brand mentions and & citations. Zero-click search is a serious challenge facing SEO professionals.
With the projections that LLM search value will overtake traditional organic search by 2028, it’s better to act now than get caught behind. Tools like Semrush Enterprise AIO and the Semrush AI SEO Toolkit will help you get started today. Optimizing for LLM search is more than just a quick tactic for search traffic today.