AI Search: Changing the SEO Performance Rules

One of the best things about SEO has always been its crystal-clear connection to traffic, goals, and revenue. Conversion straight from the SERPs. For years, we’ve discussed how search engines increasingly prefer to keep users on their platforms rather than send them to external sites. Now, after all the debate around "zero-click search," it’s finally here—and this time, the metrics back it up.

The AI immersed searcher experience has never been richer

Pi's AI search intelligence reveals the relationship between brand sentiment and site presence and applies zero-click brand sentiment thinking not just for LLMs but also for zero click Google SERP.

Chat GPT and Google - search insights - News and Economy

AI search intelligence creates new views

AI content in the search results creates new insights - Pi's Brand Health uses demand data and sentiment data to create a unique view of a market. The searcher experience is a cross platform experience.

Pi Datametrics Brand Health - Dashboard

LLMs and Search: The Real Challenges

Let’s talk about content referencing. Whether we’re looking at Google, ChatGPT, or the next-gen AI Overviews (AIOs), referenced content remains a huge signal in the search story. As brands, we all want to be the source these systems pull from. And sure, we’re seeing an increase in the number of URLs cited in AI results—but zoom in, and the same handful of authoritative sources keep popping up

And let’s not kid ourselves about traffic attribution from search

There’s a lot of hype around LLM-driven search traffic, but in most cases, these systems aren’t referring much traffic yet.

It’s tempting to say the new wave of AI businesses are trying to absorb everything online. And maybe they are. But let’s not forget—no matter how smart AI gets, the internet (or whatever we’re calling it now) still needs businesses to create content, to sell products, to tell stories. Whether the middleman is a search engine, an LLM, or some future thing we haven’t met yet, the job remains: connect the searcher to the content.

I'm wondering what happens when all the content referenced by LLMs was created by LLMs? Right now, ChatGPT is being adopted most heavily in marketing departments. So we’re heading toward a world where AI learns about the world through its own words. Bonkers. If we ever reach general intelligence, surely it would realise that cutting off the flow of original, human-created content would starve its own development. You’d hope AI would be smart enough to leave room for human creativity to keep feeding the machine.

If that’s true, we’re not doomed. In fact, we may be on the edge of a new kind of search journey—one that moves fluidly between platforms like Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others. That journey still ends in a click, a referral, a transaction. So maybe zero-click isn't the death of SEO. Maybe it just means we need to understand the full arc of the searcher’s curiosity—from the spark, through the exploration, to the decision.

More returning URLs in AIOs but the same URLs dominate all SERPs

Booking.com is an exceptional search leader - in this example we can see how for the same search term over the same time period (30 days in May 2025) the results in AIO were significantly more diverse. However if you look closer you'll see that the its the same URLs in both that are the most visible over time. With AIO the user is given greater choice of reference.  Data source: Pi Datametrics

We’ve seen commentary from Gartner about the decline of traditional search. But let’s be honest—traditional search has already fallen off a cliff. In the last two years, we’ve seen a near-total collapse of what we used to call the "classic" search experience. And yet... search itself? Still growing. Demand in Google? Still growing. There's just nothing traditional about the experience anymore.

As per Momentic's post with supporting Similar Web data Maybe proportionally they’re sending more referrals per search than Google "Google's audience is almost 7X the size of ChatGPT. BUT ChatGPT is over 2X more likely to send traffic to external websites than Google." but the scale isn’t even close. For now, we can't treat this as a reliable ROI channel.

That said, cracking visibility in LLMs is no easier than ranking in Google. It’s just a different kind of puzzle. Google rewarded consistency in topic and authority. Do LLMs? TBD. But if they do, brands who commit early might enjoy the same kind of compounding return.

The supporting data in this article (other than statements explicitly referenced) is created by Pi Datametrics