With SEO Rizz Fading, Brands Compete For Chatbot Love

As prognostications go, this one was about as grim as the beadle’s rejoinder to a hungry Oliver Twist on the availability of more soup.

“Assume there is no search,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch recalled telling the company’s many publications during a recent episode of the TBPN podcast. In other words, assume publications such as The New Yorker and Wired will, one day soon, no longer derive visitors from Google Search results.

He’s not alone in forecasting a massive change in the flow of internet traffic. It’s what some digital experts are calling the “zero click” or “no click” future, in which internet users primarily access the web via artificial intelligence chatbots, and rarely, if ever, click away from said chatbots.

While Lynch’s prediction may be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s only a bit. Indeed, as remote as a “no click” future might seem, the “low click” age has already arrived (and Lynch quickly caveated that search traffic would drop to “single-digit percentages,” not precisely “zero”).

For publishers like Condé Nast that have long relied on Google Search results sending internet surfers to their websites, and thus their advertisements, it’s just the latest in a long series of apocalyptic nightmares. For small businesses who relied, and thrived, on internet search being a key discoverability tool (after all, how else could poor souls with killer toothaches find the “best dentists nearby” if not Google), the AI-driven age is presenting a whole new set of challenges. And for the massive cottage industry built around Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the shift to AI Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or LLM EO is forcing an identity crisis. Case in point: Nobody can even agree on what to name the new paradigm.

Surf’s No Longer Up, Dude

ChatGPT’s arrival in 2022 was the first sign that viewer habits would change, shifting away from Google’s scrollable pages of links to straightforward generative AI summaries that often feature (and somewhat bury) just a couple of citations to third-party sources. 

Google’s decision to introduce “AI Overviews” at the top of its own search results in May 2024, however, definitively changed the game. Users were suddenly confronted with generative AI responses whether they asked for it or not, and would have to deliberately find an opt-out option to maintain the standard search experience. 

Some 37% of internet users now start their searches via LLM instead of Google Search, according to a January study from Search Engine Land. And those who default to Google still get served AI summaries often. To put it simply, AI has fundamentally changed how users surf the web:

• A Pew Research study tracking internet behavior published last year found that users who encountered an AI summary clicked on an actual link to a third-party site just 8% of the time, roughly half the normal rate of a result that didn’t return an AI summary. 
• Roughly half of all Google search queries returned an AI Overview result as of March, according to marketing firm Digital Applied, up from 35% in December. Searches relating to sectors such as healthcare and education returned AI Overview results at far higher rates.
• Meanwhile, marketing platform Ahrefs found that AI Overview results correlate with a 58% lower click-through rate (CTR) for top-ranked Google pages, while SparkToro found that the overall Google zero-click rate has increased from around 49% in 2019 to 68% this year.

“AI chatbots have indeed had a significant effect on web traffic, costing brands that rely on SEO considerable traffic,” Mike Anderson, founder of organic growth advisory firm Automattik AI, told The Daily Upside.

Google, meanwhile, is weathering the transition from traditional search nicely; total clicks have decreased, but the cost per click for sponsored links at the top of organic search results has increased. The company has also integrated sponsored answers within its AI Overviews. It’s not cannibalizing itself … yet. Its 17% year-over-year revenue growth for Search & Advertising in the three months through June marked the unit’s first deceleration in six quarters.

Marketing Inefficiency

The shift is changing how brands and businesses are discovered, which means that earning the top citation from AI chatbots is a new top priority.

“The whole search world is like the directory at the mall. There’s seven places to get sneakers, and maybe the mall directory lists Foot Locker at the top because they pay, right?” Brian Alvey, chief technology officer of Automattic’s WordPress VIP Platform, told The Daily Upside. “Answer engines are like a genie. If you ask for sneakers, it just gives you the sneakers.”

But no one is yet entirely sure how to become the genie’s favored answer, and the genie seems to change its mind frequently. Experts told The Daily Upside that, so far, chatbot responses are far more variable than typical search results. A traditional Google search for “best pizza in the East Village” will probably surface the same top results today, tomorrow and next week. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is more likely to give one recommendation at 11:30 a.m., and a completely different suggestion by 1 p.m. Claude is liable to give altogether different answers than ChatGPT. While Google in May said that its guidelines for GEO are more or less the same as its guidelines for SEO, the market has suddenly fragmented beyond Google.

“Take a brand we track across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, and list every site those three cite while answering the questions that matter in its category. About one domain in 20 is cited by all three. Four in five are cited by one engine and never picked up by the others,” JP Garbaccio, head of AEO and SEO at AEO firm Searchable, told The Daily Upside.

One Ahrefs analysis, meanwhile, found that just 28% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. 

In other words, chatbots have finally cracked Google’s internet gatekeeping monopoly. And now every gate has its own password, which may or may not change at any given moment.

Not All Press is Good Press

Best practices are becoming clearer and clearer. In the past, brands could predictably generate solid Google rankings through specialized content and technical optimizations to their websites; that’s what SEO is. GEO is a little more complicated.

“Today, when a searcher asks an LLM a question about a brand, the chatbot essentially retrieves everything the internet is saying about you. That includes your website, G2 and Trustpilot page, Reddit, press coverage, YouTube and more,” Anderson said. “They ingest the information and generate a subjective response based on that information.”

That means the online visibility of brands and businesses is now much more at the mercy of consumer reviews and third-party press coverage. In fact, Garbaccio says that Searchable has found a brand’s website “accounts for under 4% of everything ChatGPT cites when it answers the questions that matter in that brand’s category.” The rest comes from third-party sources of information, such as Reddit posts or Yelp reviews. In an unsurprising development, some brands have been found to be spamming such online forums with positive comments in an attempt to manipulate GEO results. 

Still, some marketers and PR experts told The Daily Upside that the upside of GEO could be that it makes brand visibility less about SEO-style gamification and more about good old-fashioned reputation management and strong PR.

That does beg one dire question: Will there be any press left to have good relations with?

AI Killed the Digital Media Star

According to Semrush data, CNN’s website has seen a 31% decline in US Google search traffic in the 12 months through June. Ditto Politico. USA Today has suffered a 20% decline. Think of any major publisher, and more likely than not, its decline is in the double digits. 

AI referrals are not close to making up the gap. Traffic from AI chatbot referrals accounts for just 1% of total web traffic, according to a July AEO/GEO Benchmark report from AI search platform Conductor. “It will never rival traditional organic search traffic,” the group wrote in the report.

The digital publishing industry’s ad revenue has shrunk by billions of dollars as search traffic dwindles, according to estimates. In turn, outlets are leveraging other strategies to survive. News Corp. in 2024 struck a deal reportedly worth as much as $250 million over five years to license its content to OpenAI, and struck a similar deal with Meta in March. The Financial Times, Vox Media and Axios all have deals with OpenAI, while the Associated Press has a deal with Google, and The New York Times has a deal with Amazon. 

Add all the deals together, and the total still doesn’t make up for lost revenue. That has some publications rethinking their agreements already, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, USA Today, Reuters, The Economist and others are considering whether to ban Google from crawling their site for its Overview summaries, the WSJ reported. For some, that could mean stepping outside the Google Search ecosystem altogether.

“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” USA Today CEO Mike Reed told the WSJ.

The situation amounts to a game of whack-a-mole, says Alvey, who helps run WordPress’s platform for major publishers such as CBS, NBCUniversal and others.

“We find we have this interesting need for our platform to be able to give clients granular controls,” Alvey said. “So like one company over here is, like, ‘Block Perplexity. We hate them, but let these other ones in.’ And another one’s like, ‘We love Perplexity. We have a deal with them, but block OpenAI.’”

It all leaves the media world in a fraught, but all too familiar, spot.

“Oh, the publishing industry is in a decline? Yeah, it’s been in decline for like 500 years,” Alvey said.