Search used to be so simple. Users typed a query into Google (occasionally Bing), scanned a list of websites ranked based on which one matched the enquiry the most, and clicked on it to get the information they needed. Whether those were the good old days or not, I’m not sure, but they’re over now.
Search used to be so simple.
Users typed a query into Google (occasionally Bing), scanned a list of websites ranked based on which one matched the enquiry the most, and clicked on it to get the information they needed.
Whether those were the good old days or not, I’m not sure, but they’re over now.
Because a few years ago, a little thing called ChatGPT came along. What looked like a quirky little chatbot that you could “talk to” became the first in a line of LLMs that have started to change how customers look for answers.
Since 2022, we’ve had Claude, Gemini, Co-Pilot, Perplexity and a range of other LLMs to contend with. And that’s not even getting into the emergence of AI-Overviews.
All these tools have changed the way search works. We’ve gone from browsing and clicking links, to treating search more as a question and answer experience without ever needing to click a link.
Which, for the old poor marketers trying to get their company in front of people, begs the question, how do you stay visible (and relevant) when users are looking for direct answers, not websites?
Has the death of ‘traditional’ search been announced prematurely?
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it’s worth noting that Google is still by far the dominant giant when it comes to search, taking a whopping 90% of all search enquiries.
For all the hype around LLMs, ChatGPT and the rest are still way behind, even Bing (which never got a lot of attention, but gets even less now) still accounts for more online enquiries than ChatGPT and the like.
To give you an idea of how far ahead Google still is, if the search giant is Jupiter in the solar system, ChatGPT is Pluto, or a “random asteroid with a podcast” as ChatGPT described itself when I asked it to compare itself to Google.
But AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot are increasingly being used as “search engines” in their own right.
And OpenAI’s move to advertise ChatGPT on TV shows the ambition for these tools to become part of mainstream search.
Google is now also moving away from its role as purely a curator of links, with more searches (around 50%) resulting in AI Overviews (copy scraped answers that pull copy from other websites and present them as full answers, without the user needing to click through to the original source).
Whether you think it’s ethical for tech giants to essentially steal content and present it to users without attribution or compensation to the original author/ owner is one thing, and the EU Commission’s investigation into potential anticompetitive conduct by Google around how it uses online content for AI purposes could signal a change in how these tools work.
But for now, it’s creating a new side of SEO that marketers and business owners are contending with: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
The biggest consequence of “answer-led” search has been the erosion of website clicks.
This is essentially an attack on the foundation of SEO. For decades, the premise behind search optimisation has been that if you rank highly enough, you’ll get a relatively predictable share of user clicks.
Today, close to 60% of Google searches end with no click.
That’s not to say that rankings don’t matter. Customers are still more likely to click through to a website when it comes to the final purchase decision.
But the incremental benefits of moving from position five to three, or to position one, for informational keywords are noticeably smaller than they were.
Some of this depends on your industry. Not surprisingly, the biggest victims of zero-click searches have been news websites. But every industry has seen some drop off in clicks for more enquiries since AI Overviews became more of a thing.
Even with all these changes, traditional SEO still makes a difference.
Whether it’s Google or AI tools, websites are still crawled, interpreted and indexed.
Content still has to be matched to search intent.
Technical website performance, relevance signals and authority signs like links are still a huge part of visibility, whether it’s on search engines or in AI answers.
What’s changed is the assumed predictability that being more visible results in more website visits.
GEO is a form of AI information retrieval. When a user makes a query, GenAI tools scan content online, match it to the context of the query, and present an answer.
Where SEO is about ranking pages in SERPs, GEO is about getting cited in answers.
But, while a lot is made about the difference between SEO and GEO, much of it follows the same principles.
Much of the appeal around generative search comes from the perceived lack of friction in getting the information you want.
Unlike traditional search, which gives you a list of sources that you have to click and review manually, AI tools create the answer for you and give the answer directly in the chat.
About three-quarters of ChatGPT users are using it to find information, according to OpenAI.
This has become even more appealing lately as Google shoehorns more and more paid ads into the organic positions.
The challenge to marketers is that instead of being presented as one of many options, AI tools are automatically filtering sources down to a smaller list.
Despite what you might read on LinkedIn, SEO and traditional search aren’t dead or disappearing.
Sure, it’s changing, slowly, but the fundamentals of SEO are also, for the most part, the things likely to get you cited by genAI.
What is changing is that ranking higher for some searches (mostly informational) might not produce the same level of traffic it once did, even if it increases your visibility.
If you need help adapting your search strategy to the needs of SEO and GEO, get in touch with our SEO agency for help.
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