What’s Really Changing with AI Search

Your GEO Questions (with Answers)

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Zero-click search.

Everyone’s asking, “How do I get my organic traffic back?”

My answer: You don’t want your traffic back.

The organic traffic you lost to AI Overviews was mostly people who were never going to convert anyway.

Our internal study of healthcare brands proves this point: the brands we studied experienced an average 40% YoY traffic decline, but their conversion rates increased by an average of 60%.

“Traffic down, revenue up” is not a problem to solve. It’s an opportunity to embrace.

The fundamental reframe is this: AI search platforms aren’t stealing your traffic. AI search platforms are qualifying customers for you.

If you’re feeling uncertain about this shift, you’re not alone.

To embrace this opportunity, however, marketers must first take an honest look at the risks and broken SEO tactics still in use.

In this article, I answer the questions I hear most from marketers on topics like organic traffic loss, the end of attribution and the value of traditional SEO.

How is AI search changing digital marketing funnels?

When someone asks ChatGPT about project management software, it doesn’t just list options, it asks follow-up questions, understands their specific needs, explains different approaches, and helps them narrow down what they’re actually looking for.

By the time they click through to your website, they’ve already been through a sophisticated discovery process. LLMs are training buyers to ask smarter questions, so prospects come to you better informed. They’re not only well-qualified, they also tell you upfront about their needs.

This reframe completely changes your organic strategy.

Instead of trying to capture organic traffic at scale, you focus on educating AI platforms about your brand so they send you their best prospects. Brands that carve out a clear niche will stand out to AI as the most relevant choice. If you try to be everything to everyone, AI won’t recognize you as the obvious choice for anyone.

When your brand owns a narrow space, AI is far more likely to recognize you as the obvious fit. Generalists get overlooked and specialists get mentioned.

Ask yourself: Are we the authority in this category or would AI pass us over for a competitor?

Bottom funnel content–like competitor comparisons, detailed use cases, product details, and pricing guides–is more important than ever.

AI depends on this bottom-funnel content to decide whether to recommend you.

This isn’t just a tactical shift. It’s the continuation of a long-term trend in digital marketing: From traffic quantity to traffic quality.

It’s about earning more qualified visitors from AI by helping AI search engines qualify visitors for you.

Is my lost organic traffic ever coming back?

Traffic that’s been lost to AI overviews, ChatGPT, and Google’s AI mode is not coming back. This is the new reality we’re facing, and we need to accept that the old model of driving high volumes of organic traffic is fundamentally changing. We’re seeing this across the board. Our study of healthcare brands showed an average 40% traffic decline over the past year.

However, this isn’t necessarily bad news for your business. The same internal study revealed that while traffic dropped 40%, conversion rates increased by an average of 60%. This means the traffic you’re getting now is significantly more qualified. Instead of focusing on getting your traffic numbers back up, you should reframe this as AI platforms qualifying your customers for you before they reach your site.

Invest in strategies to influence how AI qualifies your customers before sending them to your site. You’ll get less organic traffic, but it will be higher quality.

What’s the difference between SEO and GEO?

SEO and GEO are two different tools for two different purposes, though they have significant overlap. Think of SEO as keyword targeting that’s good for direct response marketing. SEO demonstrates clear value when measurable clicks lead to clear conversions. Let’s be clear: SEO is still valuable, but it will deliver less traffic going forward, even though that traffic will be better quality.

GEO involves building content on specific micro-topics that also covers related topics comprehensively, so AI platforms view it as authoritative. GEO, as a tool, is best suited for brand visibility and reputation management, with some direct conversion potential. You’ll need both SEO and GEO strategies going forward because traditional search engines will always be around, but AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI mode will become increasingly important.

When will AI Mode become the default search experience?

AI Mode will be the default in the next 6-12 months. This isn’t a distant future scenario. It’s in motion now. The shift feels disorienting for consumers because the journey looks completely different when AI is steering the conversation instead of serving a list of pages.

Marketers need to start treating AI optimization as part of their marketing mix today, not as an experiment on the side. AI search technology is fundamentally different from traditional search, and that impacts your strategy. You can’t afford to wait and see how this plays out.

Why does my brand sometimes appear in AI results and sometimes not?

Visibility in AI search is probabilistic. You won’t always appear for the same prompt. But creating more passages and assets across multiple platforms increases your odds. Think of it as building brand equity through consistent presence rather than guaranteed placement.

This inconsistency is why traditional keyword tracking becomes less reliable. Instead of expecting to rank #1 for specific terms, focus on maximizing your chances of inclusion across various AI responses relevant to your brand.

How should I measure SEO success if traditional metrics don’t work anymore?

Stop obsessing over traffic numbers and rankings. The era of useful attribution is over, and you need to focus on business outcomes that actually matter: conversions, revenue, customer acquisition, and conversion rates. You won’t be able to draw straight lines from specific organic search optimization activities. But you can measure business growth.

Think like a growth marketer, not a vanity marketer. The marketers who earn the respect of their leadership teams are focused on customer acquisition and business growth, not technical metrics. Executives never understood how canonical tags helped the business generate new customers anyway. Your job is to educate your leadership that you’re optimizing for revenue and customer acquisition, not traffic volume.

Why do I need to talk to my customers when I have analytics data?

Analytics data is less valuable for organic search optimization than it used to be, and you need to weigh it equally with qualitative research. The detailed analytics and keyword reports we used we realized on for SEO aren’t very useful for SEO.

Analytics must be combined with qualitative data, like direct conversations with your customers. When you get a new customer on the phone, go deeper than the standard “How did you hear about us?”

Ask a series of specific questions to understand their actual journey: “How did you search for our product? What search engines did you use? Did you search in any online communities or forums like Reddit? Did you see anything helpful on social media?” The qualitative data you gather from these conversations is just as, if not more, valuable than the quantitative data you see in your analytics dashboard.

Weight this qualitative conversation data with your analytics data. If you’re getting hundreds of customer conversions monthly, this becomes incredibly valuable intelligence about your true customer journey. Many successful businesses are adding these questions to their call center scripts or customer intake processes.

How do I optimize content for AI platforms?

Create content that comprehensively covers topics rather than targeting specific keywords. If you’re writing about air filters, also cover related topics like asthma, HEPA filters, and air quality so AI platforms view your content as thorough and authoritative. AI search platforms look for comprehensive topic coverage, not just keyword placement.

Instead of thinking about these platforms as stealing your traffic, reframe it as these platforms qualifying your customers for you. Your job is to educate the AI platforms about your brand, your competitors, the comparisons you want them to make, and the information you want them to have. The traffic you do get will be much higher quality and more likely to convert.

How should I communicate these changes to my leadership?

Educate your leadership that digital marketing won’t work the same way it did before. Explain that you’re a growth marketer focused on revenue and customer acquisition, not a vanity marketer chasing traffic numbers. The direct attribution they’re used to seeing was actually a temporary phenomenon that’s now ending.

Prepare them to expect less traffic but better quality visitors, and focus discussions on overall business growth metrics. If your leadership can’t adapt to this reality, you may need to consider whether you’re in the right organization. The story you need to tell is “traffic down, revenue up” — emphasizing quality over quantity.

Measure and communicate this story to your leadership. The visitors arriving from AI-influenced searches are often more qualified and informed, leading to better business outcomes even with lower traffic volume. Focus on metrics that matter to the business: customer acquisition, lead quality, conversions, and revenue rather than vanity metrics like traffic volume.

What content strategy works best in the current environment?

Focus on bottom-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel content first. Target visitors in your ICP with content that addresses the questions they ask when making a purchase decision. This is your bullseye content that directly drives conversions. The informational, top-of-funnel content that used to work well is less effective now because AI platforms are handling those queries directly.

When you do create informational content, design it specifically to educate AI platforms about your brand. Write comparison articles that directly compare your services to competitors, create comprehensive topic coverage, and include the data points, case studies, and examples you want AI platforms to reference when discussing your industry.

Additionally, your content strategy can’t just focus on your website anymore. AI pulls from Reddit, LinkedIn, reviews, media mentions, and other platforms. You need a comprehensive content footprint across multiple surfaces, not just your owned media.

Think beyond your blog and product pages. Create valuable content wherever your audience engages—industry forums, social platforms, review sites. AI search engines aggregate information from all these sources when making recommendations.

How much content should I be publishing?

Monitor your crawl rate to determine if you’re publishing too much. Google will tell you if you’re over-publishing by reducing crawl frequency across different sections of your website or stopping crawling altogether. Look at both overall crawl rate for your entire website and specific crawl frequency for individual sections and pages.

The key is balancing quantity with quality and ensuring Google can effectively crawl and index your content. You can increase your crawl budget by improving content quality or domain authority. If you have an established domain with decent authority, you can typically handle more content than sites starting from scratch.

Should I cut my SEO budget since traffic is declining?

Consider reducing traditional SEO investment to reflect the diminished value of the traditional SEO. This doesn’t mean eliminating SEO entirely, it’s still valuable, just not as much as before. The remaining budget should focus on high-quality, strategic SEO efforts that drive conversions rather than just traffic.

Reallocate the rest of your budget toward GEO efforts or other channels where your customers are actually going: niche communities, Reddit, social media, influencer marketing or AI platform optimization. But first, discover through customer conversations where your specific customers are actually searching and spending time online.

What’s the future of Google after the antitrust ruling?

The recent antitrust remedies won’t significantly affect Google’s search distribution. They’ll continue handling the same volume of searches, except for users who switch to ChatGPT or other AI platforms. The ruling doesn’t prevent Google from switching their default experience to AI mode, which we expect to happen within the next year.

This means we’ll see even more traffic decline when Google fully transitions to an AI-first search experience that looks more like ChatGPT. However, this also means the traffic that does come through will be even more qualified and valuable for businesses that optimize correctly for this new landscape.

Are backlinks still worth investing in?

Backlinks are still valuable, but less so than before because SEO overall is less valuable than it used to be. Fortunately, GEO strategies will make up the difference. Keep in mind that SEO campaigns rely on digital PR for backlinks and GEO campaigns rely on digital PR for brand mentions.

Regarding backlinks, the same link quality rules apply: only pursue links from websites that real people actually visit, bookmark, and find valuable. Don’t rely on domain authority alone when searching for links. If a site looks spammy to you as a human, it’s likely worthless because Google is even more discerning than you are.

Don’t focus on domain authority scores or technical metrics. Focus on whether real people regularly use these websites as legitimate resources. Ask yourself if this website was created as a publisher for real people or if it’s just another SEO-created site selling backlinks. If it looks spammy to you, Google will consider it worthless.

Regarding brand mentions, pursue mentions on pages that are cited by ChatGPT in Google’s AI mode. Prompt AI search platforms as your customer would. Then, consider reaching out to the pages that appear as citations in responses. Separate the pages by difficulty. For example, government websites are less likely to mention your brand than publisher sites.

How should small teams get started with GEO?

For teams with limited resources, prioritize GEO for your highest-value content themes while maintaining SEO for your top-converting pages.

Small teams should focus on improving existing content comprehensiveness before creating new GEO-specific content, transforming them from keyword-targeted pieces into comprehensive resources that AI can easily parse and cite. This means taking your best-performing content and expanding it to cover related subtopics in a single piece, adding structured comparison tables, clear headers and subheaders, and specific data points that AI platforms frequently reference.

The goal is to educate AI platforms about your brand and expertise so they send you qualified prospects, which requires less content volume but more content depth. This approach allows small teams to compete effectively by becoming the obvious choice in a narrow niche rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

Large teams can run parallel SEO and GEO campaigns but need separate success metrics and reporting structures.

Is LLMs.txt worth implementing for GEO?

Creating an LLMs.txt file for AI crawlers might benefit your GEO efforts, but there’s no strong evidence it’s worth prioritizing. Many people recommend it because it’s something tangible they can do and feels like an easy fix, but it won’t significantly move the needle for most businesses. If you have extra time and resources, it won’t hurt, but focus on higher-impact activities first.

What alternative channels should I explore beyond Google to capture organic demand?

This depends entirely on your specific customers and industry. Through customer conversations, you’ll discover where your audience actually goes for information. This might include niche communities, Reddit, social media platforms, industry forums, or other specialized platforms relevant to your business.

For example, we’ve seen success with parenting forums for family-focused businesses, autism support communities for pediatric therapy services, and health tech communities for B2B healthcare companies. The key is identifying these channels through direct customer research rather than making assumptions about where you think they should be.

What should I tell my team about future expectations?

Set realistic expectations that organic search will continue to shrink over time, and established paid platforms will become more expensive, no matter how smart your strategies are. This is a fundamental shift in the digital marketing landscape, not a temporary downturn. Teams should prepare for less traffic but focus on higher quality interactions and better conversion rates.

Encourage your team to develop skills in customer research, qualitative analysis, GEO and multi-channel marketing rather than focusing exclusively on traditional SEO tactics. Marketers must adapt to measuring success differently and optimizing for business outcomes rather than search engine metrics.