How AI is changing the way we search
- Conor Woodhall
- Sep 17
- 3 min read
Overview
We’ve been tracking the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in search, from Google’s January launch of AI Overviews to the growing role of LLM-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Early signs show just how disruptive this shift could be: Google has already reported a 10% increase in Google usage for the types of queries that show AI Overviews, while Gartner predicts traditional search engine volume could drop by 25% by 2026.
With these stats expected to continue increasing over time, marketers need to understand how this will impact brand visibility.
The impact on businesses
In the past, search engines allowed us to choose which websites to visit, giving us at least some freedom over the sources we consumed. Now, AI is consolidating information and delivering direct answers instead.
For businesses, this shift isn’t always positive. Unless you’re among the select few featured in AI Overviews, visibility is starting to decrease. While the full impact of AI-driven overviews and LLMs on website traffic is still unclear, it’s already evident that change is here, and it’s likely going to have a significant impact on brand visibility if you don’t pivot your digital strategy.
Positioning articles for Zero-click Searches
As habits evolve, users are increasingly shifting from traditional to AI-driven search, resulting in fewer direct clicks and changing how people interact with search pages.
For marketers, it’s important that your business is ranking for key terms relevant to your business and your content remains visible and authoritative, even when users don’t click through.
For Proactive PR, we’ve recently been writing content all about the rise of employee advocacy in B2B marketing. Our approach was to ensure our content started ranking in the ‘carousel’ links on Google. As you can see below, before the article was created, we were not ranking for the topic of employee advocacy.
An example of how Generative search works
Before we look at how we can rank our content, we need to understand how Generative search works.
Let’s start with a question like “What is employee advocacy in b2b marketing?”
With Google AI, rather than presenting a selection of relevant pages for you to scan through, AI Overview will now go one step further and do all the heavy lifting with its integrated search results page. This provides a user with this overview at the top of the page, along with links to three relevant pieces of content to expand your summary of a topic. Great for users, but for Proactive PR, we’re not currently ranking for employee advocacy in b2b marketing.
However, there are clear steps we can take to ensure our content ranks.
How to optimise for generative AI
Following our own guidance set out below, we can start to strategically shift our approach to match the goal of ranking our content for this particular search term.
Keyword research – understanding your visibility within LLMs by identifying search patterns, topic trends, and keywords to guide your content strategy.
Content development – delivering easy to understand content which provides information quickly, making it easier for LLMs to surface and reference.
SEO - A key part of any content strategy is creating rich, high-quality, fully SEO-optimised content for your website. To perform well with generative search AI, your writing should use clear, straightforward language and short, easy-to-read sentences rather than long or overly complex ones.
Website optimisation -This includes optimising meta tags, improving page load speed, and enhancing mobile responsiveness to improve search engine visibility. Creating an overall better user experience for your website visitors.
Backlinks to your website - Working to increase the backlinks to your website from trusted sources. Search engine algorithms will further value the quality of content to offset the sheer amount of AI-generated content. This means securing high-quality backlinks is vital to your digital visibility.
Social media output - In some cases, SGE ranks social media content, so it's important to create valuable thought leadership content in-feed to help increase your chances of ranking as a trusted source.
Google AI overviews in practice
ChatGPT
Following our own guidance, we’ve taken a topic that Proactive PR wasn’t originally ranking for and subsequently secured strong rankings under Google overviews and in ChatGPT citations, alongside sources like the Financial Times.
Our support
If you’re not familiar with your brand's performance across AI, speak to our team, and we can uncover how AI platforms describe and position your brand.