How to Drive Website Traffic from ChatGPT and AI Search Engines

With the rise of AI-driven search engines like ChatGPT and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), businesses and content creators face new challenges in driving website traffic. Unlike traditional SEO, where appearing on a search engine results page (SERP) can directly lead to clicks, AI-generated responses often summarize content without linking to the source. However, that doesn’t mean leveraging these AI tools to drive traffic is impossible. By adapting your content and strategies, you can still capture attention and increase website traffic even in the era of AI-driven search.

1. Building Authoritative Content
AI tools like ChatGPT rely heavily on high-quality, well-researched, and authoritative content to respond accurately to users’ queries. Creating high-quality content should be your priority if you want your website to be a top source for AI-generated information.

Focus on producing in-depth articles, research papers, guides, and long-form content that covers topics comprehensively. This type of content provides value to users and increases the likelihood that it will be referenced by AI models when answering questions. Additionally, keeping your content relevant with regular updates and refreshes ensures it remains an authoritative resource.

Tips for Building Authoritative Content:

Conduct thorough research and cite reputable sources.
Include expert opinions, case studies, and data-backed insights.
Use clear, engaging language that resonates with human readers and AI algorithms.
Structure content to answer frequently asked questions in a concise, accessible manner.
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2. Optimizing for AI Summaries
AI-driven tools like ChatGPT often pull content from websites to generate summaries. Optimizing your content specifically for AI tools is essential to increasing the chances of your website’s content being referenced in these summaries.

Here are some strategies to help ensure your content is AI-friendly:

Use clear headings and subheadings: These help AI tools easily identify your content’s structure and key points. Headings also make it easier for AI to extract and summarize the most relevant information.
Write concisely and straightforwardly. AI models appreciate simplicity. Try to write explicit, easy-to-understand content that gets to the point quickly.
Use bullet points and numbered lists: These are easy for AI models to digest and summarize accurately.
By ensuring your content is easily extractable and digestible, you increase the chances of using it in AI-generated summaries, which can still bring valuable exposure to your brand.

3. Establishing Brand Presence Across the Web
One key factor in appearing in AI-driven search results is strengthening your website’s domain authority. AI-driven tools like ChatGPT pull from various sources, and content from reputable, authoritative sites is more likely to be included in their responses. Therefore, building a strong brand presence across the web is essential.

Guest Blogging and Partnerships: Contributing high-quality guest posts to popular blogs and websites within your industry can increase brand visibility and domain authority. In your guest posts, include relevant links back to your website.
Press Mentions: Getting mentioned by well-established publications or other authoritative platforms boosts your online presence and helps improve domain authority.
Social Media Presence: Keep a consistent presence on social media platforms. Engaging with followers, sharing valuable content, and participating in discussions can help your brand gain recognition and improve your online authority.
When search engines and AI tools assess which sources to pull from, having a reputable presence online can significantly increase your chances of being included in AI-generated responses.

4. Encouraging AI to Reference Your Site
To ensure that AI tools like ChatGPT reference your website in their summaries, making your content easy for AI to pull from is essential. Structured data, FAQs, and concise formatting can all help achieve this goal.

Implement Structured Data: Structured data, such as Schema Markup, helps search engines and AI tools understand the context of your content. This can increase the likelihood that your content is cited when generating summaries or answers to queries.
Add an FAQ Section: AI tools frequently pull information from FAQ sections to answer questions. By providing direct, clear answers to common queries in your industry, you increase the chances of being included in AI-generated responses.
Concise and Scannable Formatting: AI tools prefer well-structured and easy-to-read content. Short paragraphs, bullet points, and lists help make your content more digestible and accessible for AI models.
These techniques make it easier for AI systems to use your content as a reliable source when generating responses.

5. Leveraging AI-Powered Platforms
AI-driven search engines are not limited to traditional search engines like Google. Platforms like ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly popular ways for users to find information.

To increase your visibility on AI-driven platforms:

Develop AI-optimized Content: Create content that directly answers questions and provides information in a concise and easy-to-digest format. This content is more likely to be referenced by AI tools when responding to user queries.
Use AI-Powered Tools for Content Creation: Platforms like GPT-3 and GPT-4 can be used to create or refine your content. Additionally, some content management tools integrate AI features to help streamline AI’s content creation and optimization process.
Integrate with AI-driven apps: Explore ways to feature your content on AI-powered apps, such as integrating your website’s content with chatbots or digital assistants.
By finding ways to appear in AI-driven platforms, you can maintain website visibility to users who rely on these tools to gather information.

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6. Driving Engagement Beyond AI
While AI-driven search tools can bring attention to your content, it’s up to you to convert that attention into actual website traffic. Engaging users beyond AI-generated responses is crucial to building lasting relationships with potential customers.

Here are a few strategies to drive user engagement:

Include Clear Calls to Action: Once users read an AI-generated summary and are interested in learning more, direct them to your website with clear and compelling calls to action. These can add valuable content, product pages, or sign-up forms.
Email Marketing: Encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list by offering incentives like exclusive content or free resources. Once they’ve signed up, nurture those leads with personalized email campaigns that drive traffic to your website.
Social Media: Share AI-generated content summaries or responses on social media platforms. Engage with users by asking questions, encouraging comments, and sharing relevant content that leads users back to your website.
By driving engagement through multiple channels, you ensure that users who discover your content through AI-driven search are more likely to visit your website and interact with your brand.

AI-driven search engines present new challenges for businesses seeking to drive website traffic. However, you can still generate valuable website traffic. The key is to adapt your strategies to meet the needs of AI tools while maintaining strong, human-centric engagement practices that convert AI-discovered users into loyal visitors.

How to Get Traffic from AI: Complete 8-Step Guide
Understanding the AI traffic landscape
The way people find information or answers to their questions has changed significantly since the advent of AI-powered tools.

Instead of just typing keywords into Google, users now prefer to engage their favorite AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, to ask full questions and receive detailed, direct answers.

These tools typically fall into two categories: 1) AI chatbots and 2) AI search engines.

AI chatbots like Chat GPT, Claude, and Gemini generate conversational answers to users’ questions (or prompts) based on large language models (LLMs).
AI search engines like Perplexity, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), and Bing combine AI-generated responses with web results, sources, and/or citations.
So, while their formats are different, they both essentially function as ‘answer engines’ that try to satisfy user queries without users having to dig through multiple pages or links.

Many chatbots can now also act like search engines if you turn on the ‘search’ functionality when asking questions.

What does this mean for businesses and their overall digital marketing strategy? For starters, it presents a new opportunity to drive traffic and even enhance their credibility if they are mentioned in these AI responses.

Therefore, visibility and relevance are crucial for driving traffic from AI. It also means that the rules of games have changed a little as AI-powered platforms prioritize quick, clear, and accurate answers.

This new area of optimization is being dubbed ‘answer engine optimization, aka AEO but that’s not to say it works without the time-tested, beloved SEO. Let’s dive deeper into it!

Step 0: Track traffic from AI search
Before diving into optimization strategies, you need to establish a baseline for measuring success. How much AI traffic are you currently receiving? Which AI tools are already sending visitors to your site? Without this data, you’ll have no way to measure whether your Answer Engine Optimization efforts are working.

While most AI tools don’t provide referrer tags or custom UTM parameters, there’s still a way to track and analyze this traffic reliably with the help of Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

GA4 serves as your primary data source, capturing sessions, sources, and user behavior across your site. However, identifying AI traffic in that data isn’t always straightforward – that’s where a dedicated dashboard comes in.

Inspired by methods like those we blogged about in How to Track and Analyze Website Traffic from AI Sources, our AI traffic performance dashboard helps surface and segment AI-driven visits using GA4 data.

ai traffic performance dashboard coupler
AI traffic analytics dashboard

Preview dashboard
The dashboard tracks 11 essential metrics from Google Analytics, including total users, new users, sessions, key events aka conversion events, and purchase revenue.

The cool thing is that you can use different dimensions to measure your site’s AI performance against these metrics. For example, the tab below enables you to see performance by AI source, aka referral, and AI traffic by the landing page.

ai traffic by landing pages
The dashboard also includes a list of AI sources and a helpful ‘Readme’ tab to help you get started and make the most of it. Just to clarify, the dashboard is simply a tool to analyze your AI traffic in one place. It is available in Coupler.io and as a template for Google Sheets and Looker Studio. Each option gets its data automatically from GA4 using the Coupler.io connector. Choose the version you like the most and try it right away for free.

ai traffic performance dashboard coupler
AI traffic analytics dashboard

Analyze visitor behavior and performance from AI referral sources like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Track user engagement, session quality, conversion metrics, and landing page effectiveness to understand how AI-driven traffic impacts your business goals and optimize content for emerging AI channels.

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8 ai traffic performance dashboard template ga4 data google sheets
AI traffic performance dashboard in Google Sheets

Analyze the performance of website traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT, Meta.ai, Gemini, and others in this comprehensive dashboard.

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AI traffic performance dashboard
AI traffic performance dashboard in Looker Studio

Visualize and analyze visitor behavior from AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini with actionable insights on engagement, conversions, and content performance. This dashboard helps you understand the emerging AI referral channel and its impact on your business goals.

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Step 1. Master Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Simply put, AEO is the practice of optimizing your content creation so that AI tools can find it, understand it, and use it to answer questions users ask them.

So, it’s not just about SEO anymore; it’s also about maintaining a presence in the answers provided by these AI tools in your content strategy.

All the strategies we will discuss in this post will eventually lead to a better AEO. So, if you want your website’s content to be referenced when someone asks “What’s the best pet insurance for senior pets?” or types a how-to do something, your content needs to be structured to answer it clearly.

A good AEO strategy requires you to:

Anticipate specific questions: Research what your target audience would ask, whether these are FAQs or something more niche. In fact, the more niche the answers, the greater the chance your content will appear in AI results.
Be concise yet comprehensive: Keep it short and sweet, i.e., answer it in a few lines, then if the users want to read more about the topic, they can click through. This pattern matches how AI tools typically present information.
Use a structured format: Organize content with clear headings, lists, bullet points, and FAQs that are easy for AI crawlers to interpret.
Provide evidence and citations: Back your answers with any real examples, case studies, statistics, and reputable sources to establish credibility.
Ensure technical accessibility: Make sure your content is crawlable and fast-loading.
Optimizing AI-powered tools’ ability to understand and use your content as an authoritative response will help you tap into high-intent traffic that wants clarity and real value – not fluff.

Now that we understand what AEO is all about, let’s look into some strategies that can help you leverage AI tools to get the most out of them.

Step 2. Earn mentions on high authority websites
AIs use mentions on other websites as one of the factors to include your content in their answers. This might remind you of SEO, as will most of the strategies. This makes backlinks and mentions on reputable websites crucial for inclusion in AI answers.

Getting mentioned on reputable websites that are relevant to your business and target audience puts you in front of them as someone who can offer value to users.

The goal is to secure positive mentions that appear natural and organic for the most part, thanks to your content optimization efforts, and if you get backlinks from authority websites, it will also help your SEO efforts.

Best practices to implement this approach
Identify authority sites in your niche: Use tools like Ahrefs to find sites with high domain authority that rank for your target keywords. For instance, if you sell automation SaaS, then you might want to do keyword research to target relevant keywords, see what ranks, and then reach out to those sites.
Create linkable assets: Develop comprehensive guides, original research, or exclusive data that other sites will want to reference. Interact with posts or blogs on those topics, where possible, get featured in ‘Top 10 roundups, How-to guides’ type posts, and even sponsored ones.
Collaborative content and guest posting with expertise: Contribute high-quality guest posts to relevant publications, showcasing your expertise and linking back to your detailed resources. Connect with well-known experts to collaborate on high-quality guest posts, and organize or attend webinars and podcasts.
Digital PR techniques: Create newsworthy content or studies that journalists and bloggers will want to cover and reference. Look into promoting with other relevant industries or businesses, e.g., legal case management software or e-commerce businesses wanting to automate their processes.
Step 3. Make it easy for AI crawlers to find your content
It’s difficult for AI-driven tools to use your content in their responses if it’s harder for them to find or understand it.

Just like the crawlers in good ol’ SEO, AI-driven crawlers also rely on crawling the web and going through a ton of content.

This means your content has to be easily discoverable and accessible for these tools. Here are a few ways you can include this into your existing SEO strategy:

Keep pages public and crawlable – Don’t block important web pages with content in your robots.txt file. Also, avoid placing valuable content behind logins or creating a bad user experience. Use clean HTML instead of putting content behind JavaScript.
Consider implementing an llms.txt file – while not an officially announced standard yet, many marketing teams are currently testing this approach to provide specific guidance to AI crawlers.
Use structured data – Aka Schema for blogs, FAQs, or reviews to make it easier for crawlers to understand your content.
Provide concise answers – AI tools like concise, to-the-point answers. Having content with clear headings, summaries, bullet points, and/or key takeaways helps AIs extract or make sense of the content more easily.
Link internally with context – You can provide more context vs using a generic ‘click here’ anchor text, as it can help AI crawlers (even your visitors) understand what they are going to discover.
Don’t forget meta tags – Certain AI-driven platforms extract summaries of your content from meta tags, so having clear and relevant meta descriptions and titles can help. In fact, alt text for images can give LLMs info about visual content.
Common issues you may encounter
Issue	Impact on AI Crawlers	Solution
JavaScript-rendered content	May be missed by some crawlers	Implement server-side rendering or dynamic rendering
Excessive redirects	Slows crawling and indexing	Minimize redirect chains to one hop
Duplicate content	Confuses crawlers about the authoritative source	Use canonical tags to indicate primary content
Slow page speed	Reduces crawl efficiency	Optimize images, use CDNs, and implement caching
But as you might have experienced yourself, many people also use artificial intelligence for conversational search. Let’s explore this next.

Step 4. Focus on long-tail conversational search terms
A 2020 study found that around 92% of searches include long-tail keywords. If this was the case five years ago, there’s a good chance the number has only increased – especially in the past couple of years.

So, instead of just typing in “automation tool,” which would be helpful for your keyword research, they might ask:

How can I automate emails?
How can I automate customer service?
What tool is best for automating invoice management?
Another SEO technique that will be useful for AEO now is directly asking AI to provide your conversational topics or queries that users can ask about your content, and target those.

Now, for these types of questions, it’s a good idea to provide content that aligns with how AI algorithms would typically respond.

Another good place to look for these conversational topics is by scrolling down a little on Google search results and looking under the ‘People also ask’ section.

people also ask automation tools
People also ask for examples in SERPs. It’s even cooler when you click on one of these questions; more will show up, giving you many more ideas for your content marketing strategy.

Best practices to implement this approach
Identify conversational queries: Use tools like:
AnswerThePublic
Google’s “People Also Ask” sections
AI tools themselves (ask ChatGPT for likely questions in your niche)
Your customer service team’s frequently answered questions
Create content that mirrors AI response patterns:
Start with a direct, concise answer
Follow with supporting details and evidence
Include comparative information where relevant
End with actionable takeaways
Optimize for query variations:
Include both question forms (“How do I…?”) and implied questions (“Best ways to…”)
Address different knowledge levels (beginner, intermediate, expert)
Consider regional variations in terminology
Step 5. Leverage Google’s E-E-A-T framework
The E-E-A-T framework, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, is primarily used in SEO to get you featured on the first page of search results.

While the E-E-A-T framework was originally designed for Google’s search results, its principles are increasingly valuable for AI optimization as well.

Though there isn’t always a direct correlation between Google rankings and appearances in AI responses.

At the same time, if you create content with strong Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness signals, the chances of establishing your content as a reliable source for both traditional search and AI tools are pretty solid.

E-E-A-T best practices
Experience: Demonstrate first-hand experience with your subject matter:
Include personal observations and insights
Document processes you’ve personally completed
Share before/after scenarios with measurable results
Use first-person language where appropriate (“We tested 15 models before reaching this conclusion”)
Expertise: Establish clear subject matter expertise:
Feature content from qualified authors with relevant credentials
Create detailed author profiles highlighting qualifications
Include professional certifications and education
Reference your experience in the industry (years, roles, achievements)
Authoritativeness: Build site and brand authority:
Get mentioned or cited by recognized authorities in your field
Secure guest posting opportunities on authoritative sites
Participate in industry events and webinars
Contribute to research or studies in your field
Create comprehensive resource hubs on specific topics
Trustworthiness: Build trust signals throughout your content:
Include clear datelines and update timestamps
Provide transparent methodology sections in research content
Disclose affiliate relationships or sponsorships
Implement secure browsing (HTTPS)
Display trust badges and certifications
Include easily accessible privacy policies and terms
Take, for example, an automation tool; let’s say you do a piece on ‘Top 10 Automation Tools’. Now, instead of talking about each tool briefly, some pros and cons, and the price, you could go deeper and add the following things:

Experience elements:
Screenshots of your dashboard using the tool
Time-lapse demonstration of the implementation process
Before/after metrics from your usage
Talk about what some best use-cases are and in what cases it might not be necessary to use the specific tool or the automation
Expertise elements:
Author bio highlighting automation certifications
Industry context showing knowledge of the automation landscape
Use any stats with their sources, making your content data-driven
Authority elements:
Quotes from tool developers or industry experts
Comparisons with industry benchmark data
Show positive and negative reviews or what the industry experts say
References to your previous work in automation
Trust elements:
Disclosure of testing parameters and limitations
Balanced coverage of pros and cons
Clear explanation of rating criteria
Transparent update policy
Cite any case studies
This makes your content very high quality, and you add trustworthiness and authoritativeness by backing up your claims with stats, sources, and industry experts.

Step 6. Tailor content strategy to each AI platform
While most AI tools aim to answer users’ questions, their response styles vary, and this can help give direction to your content marketing strategy.

For instance, each one of them has a different format to their responses for the same query e.g. “automation for testing.”

ChatGPT
Response pattern: Provides comprehensive, structured answers with clear sections. Here is what ChatGPT’s response style looks like:

chatgpt
Perplexity
Response pattern: Emphasizes cited sources and offers related queries. Perplexity also suggests search terms or queries as you type.

perplexity
It also includes a ‘Related’ section with similar queries to give you an idea.

perplexity
Google’s Gemini/SGE
Response pattern: Combines AI summaries with traditional search results.
gemini
Grok
Lastly, let’s look at Grok’s response to the same query.

Response pattern: More conversational, sometimes includes opinions and references
grok
So, what can you do? You might want to see what types of queries trigger which style of response, how your content can cover all those angles, and what types of content you can use in your content marketing.

Step 7. Don’t forget AI overviews
Using AI to learn from AI overviews shows you how important it is to have structured content.

For instance, if we look at the AI overview for ‘how to automate testing,’ we get a very clear, structured overview of the steps we can take.

ai overview
Although AI-generated content in overviews seems a little counterintuitive if you want to increase click-through rates to your content, they can still help you to get traffic if you’re cited as one of the sources.

Now, let’s say you’ve finally started to receive AI traffic. The next step would be to find out where you’re getting website traffic from.

Bonus step 8: Compare AI performance against organic search
Now that you’ve implemented these optimization strategies and have been using the AI traffic performance dashboard from Step 0, it’s time for the crucial question: How does your AI traffic actually perform compared to traditional organic search?

This isn’t just about volume – it’s about understanding whether your Answer Engine Optimization efforts are driving traffic that’s as valuable as your SEO results. Are AI-referred visitors converting at similar rates? Do they engage with your content differently? Which source provides better ROI for your marketing efforts?

Our AI traffic vs Organic traffic dashboard provides the comparative analysis you need to make informed decisions about where to focus your optimization efforts.

AI traffic vs organic traffic dashboard
AI traffic vs Organic traffic dashboard

Preview dashboard
What insights you can get

Traffic volume trends: Track monthly growth patterns comparing AI tool referrals (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) against traditional search engine traffic to identify which is growing faster
Conversion rate analysis: Compare key event performance and purchase revenue between AI and organic visitors to determine which source drives more valuable business outcomes
Source composition breakdown: Understand which specific AI platforms drive the most traffic and how the referral mix is evolving over time, compared to search engines
Quality assessment metrics: Analyze engagement patterns like session duration and bounce rates to determine if AI traffic matches the quality of organic search visitors
Long-term trend identification: Spot seasonal patterns and growth trends in AI tool adoption versus traditional search behavior to inform your content strategy
The dashboard is available as a Looker Studio template, automatically pulling comparative data from GA4 using the Coupler.io connector. Check the ‘Readme’ tab for setup instructions and filtering options to focus on specific AI sources or time periods.

This comparative analysis helps you answer critical strategic questions: Should you allocate more resources to traditional SEO or double down on Answer Engine Optimization? Are your AEO efforts complementing or cannibalizing your organic search performance?

Use these insights to keep track of your performance and optimize website traffic for the tools that are bringing in the most traffic and/or conversions. These would be the easiest ones to optimize for, and then you can work your way through other AI tools that are generating website traffic.

Check out also other ready-to-use reporting solutions by Coupler.io including a SEO dashboard.



Increase visibility via AI-generated traffic
As AI tools continue to evolve and shape how users discover and consume information, it’s becoming increasingly clear how important using AI is for businesses if they want to grow.

But AI-generated answers, regardless of the tool, aren’t just about gaining more visibility; they also demonstrate that your business can be trusted in that space as it uses your content, and that’s a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

The strategies we covered all work together to improve your chances of appearing in AI responses. So, a balanced approach where every strategy is given some consideration will be the most effective for content optimization.

And this isn’t just some theoretical content, as using the AI performance dashboard, you can measure if these strategies are working or not in generating traffic or conversions.

In the end, AI isn’t going to replace your traditional SEO strategy, but it is definitely going to extend it and use it to show your content.

So, this is the time to position your content for an AI-first web, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for when artificial intelligence takes over the world, even if it costs the AI companies today!

Artificial intelligence (AI) has completely shifted organic search from a "blue link" click model to a machine-summarized answer model. Generative AI searches use built-in models to instantly synthesize answers directly on the search results page, frequently leading to fewer clicks but higher-quality traffic overall.How AI is Reshaping Organic SearchThe "Zero-Click" Reality: AI Overviews (AIO) summarize information at the top of the page, meaning users often get their answers without ever visiting a website.Conversational Intent: Users are typing longer, more specific queries into AI engines like Google's Search and independent platforms like Felo.Better Conversion Rates: While overall traffic volume may drop, users who actually click through from an AI citation typically have higher purchase intent and convert at much better rates.How to Adapt Your SEO StrategyTo maintain visibility and organic traffic, your optimization strategy needs to evolve beyond traditional keywords.Optimize for Citations: AI engines pull from established entity authorities. Format your content with clear answers, bullet points, and direct summaries so AI algorithms can easily extract and cite them.Build Entity Authority: Focus on building a strong digital footprint. Google's AI relies on brand mentions, reviews, and mentions across trusted third-party sites to verify factual accuracy.Target "Long-Tail" Keywords: AI is great at answering simple questions, but users rely on organic links for deep, nuanced content. Focus on detailed guides, expert opinions, and original research.Track New KPIs: Move away from relying solely on click-through rates. Monitor your AIO visibility (how often your brand is cited in AI summaries) and analyze assisted conversions using analytics platforms like Google Analytics.

AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks
We continue to send billions of clicks to the web every day and are committed to prioritizing the web in our AI experiences in Search.

AI is driving the most significant upgrade of the Google Search experience ever. With AI Overviews and more recently AI Mode, people are able to ask questions they could never ask before. And the response has been tremendous: Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do now.

At the same time, we’ve recently heard some questions about what this means for traffic to websites from Google. So we wanted to share some insights on the data we’re seeing, as well as more about our approach with AI in Search.

Traffic trends from Google Search
Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year. Additionally, average click quality has increased and we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago (by quality clicks, we mean those where users don’t quickly click back — typically a signal that a user is interested in the website). This data is in contrast to third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search.

So what’s going on? With AI Overviews, people are searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more complex. In addition, with AI Overviews people are seeing more links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked. For some questions where people are looking for a quick answer, like “when is the next full moon,” people may be satisfied with the initial response and not click further. This has also been true for other answer features we’ve added, like the Knowledge Graph or sports scores. But for many other types of questions, people continue to click through, as they want to dig deeper into a topic, explore further or make a purchase. This is why we see click quality increasing — an AI response might provide the lay of the land, but people click to dive deeper and learn more, and when they do, these clicks are more valuable.

While overall traffic to sites is relatively stable, the web is vast, and user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others. People are increasingly seeking out and clicking on sites with forums, videos, podcasts, and posts where they can hear authentic voices and first-hand perspectives. People are also more likely to click into web content that helps them learn more — such as an in-depth review, an original post, a unique perspective or a thoughtful first-person analysis. Sites that meet these evolving user needs are benefiting from this shift and are generally seeing an increase in traffic.

Building AI in Search to highlight the web
As a search company, we care passionately — perhaps more than any other company — about the health of the web ecosystem. We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day and believe that Search’s value exchange with the web remains strong.

We take a distinct approach in how we build our AI experiences: they’re built to highlight the web. In other words, it’s not the web or AI — it’s both. We’ve trained our models to deeply understand the web and when and how to link to the most relevant sites. And our AI responses feature prominent links, visible citation of sources, and in-line attribution. This isn’t just helpful for websites; it also helps users learn where information is coming from and how they can explore further. And websites always have control over how content is highlighted or included in Search with open web protocols, which we respect and follow. We’re committed to highlighting high-quality content on the web and we will continue to refine how we do it.

The web has existed for over three decades, and we believe we’re entering its most exciting era yet. Technology shifts bring change, but they also bring extraordinary opportunity. We believe that AI will be one of the most expansionary moments for the web, empowering us all to ask vastly more questions and creators to reach more deeply engaged audiences. We’ll continue to help businesses, creators and websites seize these opportunities as we build this future together.

User Behavior & Preference

exl 83% of users prefer AI search over traditional search.

exl 44% of AI users prefer it for purchase decisions.

AI Content & Optimization

exl 74% new content includes AI-generated material.

exl 65% of businesses report better SEO results with AI.

Rapid Market Adoption

exl Business AI adoption doubled in 2024, reaching 65%.

exl Early AI adopters are seeing an average return of 3:1.

AI Overviews Explained: What They Mean for Organic Search Visibility
As the digital landscape shifts into 2026, the traditional “blue link” search result is no longer the only game in town. Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) have fundamentally rewritten the rules of organic traffic, creating a “zero-click” reality that many businesses weren’t prepared for.



If you’ve noticed a dip in your Google Search Console data recently, you’re not alone. Here is the reality of how AI is changing SEO and what it means for your brand’s digital strategy.
The Death of the “Easy Click”
For over two decades, SEO was simple: rank in the top three, and you’d earn the lion’s share of traffic. Today, Google often provides the answer directly at the top of the page.



Recent industry data from late 2025 and early 2026 shows a startling trend:



CTR Collapse: For informational queries where an AI Overview is present, organic Click-Through Rates (CTR) have plummeted by as much as 58% to 65%.


The Zero-Click Surge: Nearly 60% of searches now end without a single click to a website because the user found their answer in the AI-generated summary.


Informational vs. Transactional: While SEO services still drive high-intent leads, top of funnel “how-to” and “what is” traffic is being swallowed by Google’s own interface.




Why Your Traffic is Decreasing?
The decline isn’t necessarily a reflection of your content quality; it’s a change in user behavior. Users now prioritise speed. If an AI can summarize the “best time to plant roses” or “how to calculate GST” in two sentences, the user has no reason to click through to your blog post.



However, this doesn’t mean SEO is dead. It means it has evolved into Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). To survive, you must move beyond just “ranking” and focus on being cited within the AI Overview itself. Brands cited in these summaries actually see a 35% higher organic CTR than those left in the traditional links below.





Navigating the New Organic Channel
To compete in this new era, your content strategy must be more technical and authoritative than ever. Success in 2026 requires:



Semantic Density: Covering sub-topics so comprehensively that AI models view your site as the definitive source.



Schema Excellence: Using structured data so Google’s Gemini model can easily “digest” and attribute your data.



High-Intent Targeting: Shifting focus toward Google Ads and bottom-of-funnel organic keywords that AI can’t easily replicate, such as localized “near me” services or complex consulting queries.







Adapt Your Strategy with Creed Digital
The “set and forget” SEO tactics of 2023 won’t work in a world dominated by AI Overviews. If you’ve seen your traffic stagnate or drop, it’s time to pivot.



At Creed Digital, we specialize in helping Australian businesses navigate these shifts. From technical Web Design that improves crawlability to advanced SEO strategies designed for AI visibility, we ensure your brand remains the answer Google gives.