How AI Search is Reshaping SEO Marketing Strategy in 2025 and Beyond

You search for your core products or services on Google. The AI summary at the top mentions three companies in your space. Your competitors are there. You are not.

Does this have to do with the declining organic traffic you’ve been seeing? How did these competitors get featured by Google’s AI? And wait, do people even search on Google anymore, or are they using ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, and the like instead? Are all your SEO investments becoming worthless?

If these questions sound familiar, you’re not alone. All our SEO marketing clients have asked us the same questions. In this article, we’ll share the answers with you, explaining how AI search is changing user behavior, what this means for your business, and how you can prepare for what’s coming.

Is AI Search Taking Over Google Search?

The short answer: Not soon. But the game is changing fast.

Despite the buzz about ChatGPT “killing” Google, search volume on Google is actually growing 20.64% year-over-year from 2023 to 2024, and search share by all dominant LLM chatbot tools remains less than 2% of the total search pie, according to research by SparkToro.

AI Search vs Google Search: Numbers that Matter

• Google handles 14 billion searches daily, according to Google’s official release of 5 trillion searches annually.
• ChatGPT logs 1 billion messages per day, according to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in Dec 2024. But here’s the important distinction: messages aren’t the same as prompts, and prompts aren’t the same as search queries.

On average, each prompt involves 8 messages, and 70% of those prompts are for non-search-like functions: creating images, summarizing text, writing code, and doing math homework. Only 30% of ChatGPT queries represent traditional search intent.

When we compare apples-to-apples, ChatGPT processes 37.5 million search-like queries daily while Google processes 14 billion – a 373x difference. Even when we include searches on other dominant generative AI tools – Google’s own Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthopic’s Claude, and Perplexity – the split between traditional Google search vs AI tools is approximately 98:2. So no, AI tools aren’t taking over Google anytime soon.

Why does It Feel Like AI Search Is Everywhere?

Because of a confluence of events. The ChatGPT phenomenon that unleashed an era of AI tools and sparked a tech revolution globally, the media hype that followed, the “future is here” narrative, and the genuine “wow” experience that millions had when first chatting with generative AI – all of these played a part in creating the perception that AI search was taking over.

On Google itself, the search experience has gone AI. In May 2025, Google officially announced that “generative AI now does the search for you.” Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) at the top of search results, which was part of Googles’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) evolution, have now been rolled out to over 200 countries in more than 40 languages. That’s why it feels like AI search is everywhere. Because now AI powers search experiences in every platform, regardless whether you’re using a generative AI search tool or a traditional search engine.

AI Search’s Impact on Your Business

In search engine optimization (SEO), zero-click searches refer to searches where users don’t click on any results after the search page loads, often because they get the information they need immediately. Before AI Overviews, this happened when featured snippets, instant answers, knowledge panels, or map listings were present. Now with AI Overviews, zero-click behavior has spiked, affecting your click-through rate (CTR) and overall traffic from SEO.

Here’s the extent of the impact:

• CTR for top ranking positions on organic search result dropped 34.5% when an AI Overview is present, according to an Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords.
• Businesses that depend on SEO traffic in all industries suffer, with reported traffic decrease ranging from 20-40%.
• Top 5 industries with AI Overviews growing the most are science, health, people & society, government & law, and travel, as analyzed by Semrush.

Your instinct is right! AI search is causing the decline in your organic traffic from Google. It’s not because people stopped searching – Google’s search volume is actually growing. But they’re clicking less because they get answers without needing to visit your website. In the age of generative search experience, your website can be in “no man’s land” even when it’s ranked on the first page on Google.

This raises the questions: if Google’s AI Overviews are “stealing” your organic traffic, can being cited there get it back? Do those competitors who get in AI Overviews know something that you don’t?

What Is GEO, And What It Isn’t

GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization, is a set of strategies and execution techniques aimed at making your content more visible and quotable in AI-powered search or chat tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, and Perplexity.

It’s sometimes called Generative SEO, which is partly true because GEO borrows from SEO’s playbook. But GEO also plays in a different field.

GEO isn’t a Replacement for SEO, It’s an Evolution

Like SEO, GEO still values:

• Structured content
• Clear headings and intent mapping
• Authoritative voices
• Schema and metadata

If you’ve done good SEO in the past, your site is often discoverable by generative AIs, though specific techniques can further improve it. But the way generative tools retrieve and present information is fundamentally different from SEO.

GEO Plays by Different Rules

Traditional SEO focused on ranking pages based on keywords and backlinks. GEO focuses on getting cited in AI responses, where the engines look for:

• Direct answers that address user intent and context, not just keyword matches
• Clear structure that AI tools can parse
• Topic expertise, not just high domain and page authority
• Entities and sources that provide context around a query

For example, in Google’s AI Overviews, it’s not uncommon to see a site with lower domain and page authority getting quoted, because it’s the one that best addresses the searcher’s intent contextually in a scannable format.

Can GEO Bring Back Your Lost Organic Traffic?

Short answer: No, not in the way you might hope. Here’s why.

• SEO traffic is dropping across the board because AI overviews and AI answers reduce the need to click. GEO won’t reverse that trend.
• GEO doesn’t guarantee traffic. You might get quoted or referenced without a link.
• GEO doesn’t level the playing field, at least not yet. Although our own experience with GEO and research from other sources show that pages and sites with lower authority can get featured, it isn’t a consistent trend. In many cases, generative tools still favor well-known entities and high-authority sources over more relevant content, by human’s assessment.
• GEO is not a recovery tool. It won’t fix content that wasn’t helpful by SEO standards before.

What GEO Can Do for You Instead?

Think of GEO as a visibility tool and a hedge for the AI search future. When used strategically, it can:

• Make your brand discoverable and quotable by AI as it evolves beyond the current behavior of favoring well-known, high-authority sources
• Boost your brand’s visibility even without direct traffic (featured by AI)
• Ensure your content structure is AI-ready as the technology continues to develop

So instead of “How to get back the lost SEO traffic?”, here’s the money question business leaders need to ask their SEO marketing agency or team: “How can GEO help improve my brand’s discoverability in a world where product and brand searches are being redefined by AI?”

GEO Techniques: Two Paths to Success

In our work with clients, we’ve identified two distinct paths to GEO success, depending on where you’re starting from. The techniques are similar, but the approach and prioritization are different.

Path 1: For Businesses with Strong SEO Foundations

If you’ve invested heavily in SEO over the years and built certain level of authority, GEO work mainly involves adapting to how AI works.

Technical Foundation Optimization:

• Enhanced schema markup that AI tools can easily parse
• Website structure improvements for better content accessibility
• Fast, crawlable pages that AI models can efficiently process

Strategic Content Mapping:

• Topic mapping with a focus on customer’s intent during search
• Competitive analysis to identify additional contextual elements that can enhance chances of reference by AI tools
• Data analytics to identify search trends unique to your business

The advantage here is that your domain authority and existing content structure give you a head start. You’re optimizing, not rebuilding.

Path 2: For Businesses Starting Fresh

If you’ve done minimal SEO, or starting a new business, this is actually your opportunity to leapfrog competitors by addressing both SEO and GEO simultaneously.

Foundation-First Approach:

• Build content structure that serves both traditional search and AI tools
• Implement AI-friendly formatting from day one
• Create topic clusters that establish expertise across your domain, focus on depth not breath

Integrated Strategy:

• Content that targets both keyword rankings and AI citation opportunities
• Technical setup that satisfies both Google’s crawlers and AI parsing requirements
• Brand positioning that works for human searchers and AI recommendation engines

Universal GEO Techniques (Both Paths)

Regardless of your starting point, successful GEO implementation includes:

Content Structure:

• Clear, scannable formatting with descriptive headings
• Direct answers to common questions in your industry
• Comprehensive coverage of topics within your expertise area

AI-Friendly Set-up:

• Structured data markup that clearly defines entities and relationships
• Authoritative sourcing and proper attribution
• Content that addresses user intent and provides contextual depth

Authority Building – More important than ever:

• Consistent expertise demonstration across related topics
• Strong internal linking that shows topical relationships
• External validation through strategic presence, content distribution, and quality backlinks and mentions

Measurement and Adaptation – Track what actually matters for optimization:

• Are you being found for the right topics?
• Do visitors understand what you offer?
• Are you building recognition in your field?

The key difference isn’t in the techniques themselves. We know everyone can get a comprehensive list of GEO techniques perfectly summarized by their favourite AI tool or Google’s AI Overview. It’s about knowing which techniques to prioritize based on your current position and how to execute them effectively for your specific industry and audience, which we believe will remain a uniquely human role, whether powered by AI or not.

Future-Proofing Your Business with SEO, GEO and Beyond

AI search is here. It isn’t going to make or break your business overnight, but it can create dramatic shifts over a few months. And that’s not the only big change happening in the market. We’re also navigating other major waves – third-party cookie deprecation, evolving consumer behavior patterns, and corporate sustainability requirements.

In times like this, it’s essential to think holistically of your marketing strategy and take control of what you can be certain of. The ultimate objective remains the same: make your brand and products found, trusted, and bought by the right target audience, but the tactics need major upgrades.

As a growth-focused digital marketing agency, we understand the importance of these big changes and have invested in hedging our own future as well. Whether you’re building a sustainable B2C brand or expanding your B2B business, we’re here to partner with you throughout these defining changes.