How AI search is destroying traditional traffic sources and what tech leaders must do about it.
The internet you built your business on is disappearing. Not slowly. Not gradually. Right now, at a pace that should terrify every tech leader still relying on traditional SEO to drive revenue.
Nearly 90% of businesses are worried about losing organic visibility as AI transforms how people find information, and they should be. The data reveals something far more concerning than a shift in tactics, it represents a fundamental restructuring of how information flows online, and most companies are catastrophically unprepared.
For two decades, the equation was simple:
- Create content
- Optimize for Google
- Share on social platforms
- Watch traffic flow
That promise is dead. Facebook news referrals have dropped by 50% in just one year and 60% over the last five years. But social media’s collapse is just the opening act. The real disruption is happening in search itself.
The zero-click apocalypse: When being found means being invisible
Since the launch of Google AI Overviews in May 2024, zero-click searches grew 13 percentage points, from 56% to 69% in May 2025, just one year later. Think about that statistic for a moment. More than two-thirds of Google searches now end without anyone clicking on a result.
For tech companies that spent years perfecting their SEO strategies, this represents an extinction-level event. In March 2025, 27.2% of U.S. searches ended without a click compared to 24.4% in March 2024, while organic click-through rates dropped to 40.3% from 44.2%.
The mechanism behind this collapse is Google’s AI Overviews feature, which generates comprehensive summaries at the top of search results. These AI-generated summaries take up significant screen space, 1,345 pixels when expanded and 403 pixels when collapsed, pushing the first organic result down to 1,686 pixels, which exceeds standard screen sizes. Users must scroll past Google’s answer before they even see traditional search results.
A Pew Research Center study tracking 68,000 real search queries found users clicked on results 8% of the time when AI summaries appeared, compared to 15% without them – a 46.7% relative reduction.
The revenue implications are devastating. Among 19 major U.S. publishers tracked by the Digital Content Next, the median year-on-year decline in traffic referrals from search was 10%, with non-news publishers experiencing a 14% drop. Some publishers report losing as much as 90% of their traffic.
The social media exodus: A 50% collapse in three years
While Google was quietly restructuring search, social media platforms actively dismantled the open web’s traffic infrastructure.
Between November 2023 and November 2024, Facebook traffic to publishers declined from 6.4% to 4% of overall traffic, while X (formerly Twitter) dropped from 0.6% to 0.4%. For context, Facebook referrals now represent less than a quarter of their 2018 levels.
Similarweb data analyzed by Axios shows Facebook referrals to news websites have declined approximately 80% since September 2020, while X traffic has shrunk by around 60% in the same period.
Even platforms once considered bright spots are failing to deliver. Instagram, despite its massive user base, accounts for just 0.22% of publishers’ overall traffic, while Threads drives an even tinier 0.02% share.
The reason? Every click away from a platform is a lost opportunity for engagement, ad impressions, and data collection. Meta’s 2018 decision to prioritize content from “family and friends” over news in the News Feed proved pivotal, fundamentally reshaping what content gets distribution.
The B2B tech crisis: When your buyers stop clicking
For B2B tech companies, these trends create a particularly acute challenge. Unlike consumer publishers who might pivot to subscriptions, B2B technology companies depend on digital channels to reach decision-makers and generate leads.
The problem compounds with generational shifts in buying behavior. According to Forrester, Millennials and Gen Z made up 71% of B2B Buyers in 2024, up from 64% in 2022. This generational shift has influenced B2B purchasing behaviors, with younger buyers favoring digital self-serve channels.
Meanwhile, Forrester research shows that B2B buyers are upwards of 80% through their buying process before engaging with a sales rep. If those buyers can’t find your company because your content isn’t surfacing in AI Overviews or you’ve lost visibility on social platforms, you’ve lost the opportunity before the conversation even begins.
A survey of 300+ in-house marketers and business owners found that 87.8% of businesses said they’re worried about their online findability in the AI era, with 85.7% already investing or planning to invest in AI/LLM optimization.
Enter Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Traditional SEO focused on ranking websites for specific keywords. The new paradigm – Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), focuses on something fundamentally different: Ensuring your content becomes the answer that AI systems provide to users.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of adapting digital content and online presence management to improve visibility in results produced by generative artificial intelligence. The term was first introduced in November 2023 by six researchers in an academic paper that demonstrated GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.
Following publication of the paper, the term GEO gained traction among digital marketing firms, SEO consultancies, and technology companies. By early 2024, marketing outlets such as Search Engine Land began covering the concept, identifying GEO as a strategic necessity for visibility in AI-generated content.
The distinction between traditional SEO and these new approaches is critical.
Traditional SEO aims for page rankings and clicks through keyword targeting, backlinks, and domain authority. The assumption is that users will click through to your site.
AEO/GEO shifts focus toward content clarity, authority, and structured knowledge that AI models can confidently use in their answers. AEO assumes many users will not click through, so visibility must come directly within the AI’s provided answer.
Traditional measures such as click-through rate (CTR) and first-page ranking are being replaced by new indicators, including: Generative appearance score (the frequency and prominence of a source within AI-generated responses), Share of AI voice (the proportion of AI answers in which a brand is mentioned), and AI citation tracking (monitoring mentions and references within AI-generated text).
The academic foundation: What research tells us
The shift to GEO isn’t speculation, it’s backed by rigorous academic research. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new paradigm of search engines that use generative models to gather and summarize information to answer user queries.
While this shift significantly improves user utility and generative search engine traffic, it poses a huge challenge for the third stakeholder, website and content creators. Given the black-box and fast-moving nature of generative engines, content creators have little to no control over when and how their content is displayed.
The research introduced a flexible black-box optimization framework for optimizing and defining visibility metrics. Through systematic evaluation using GEO-bench, a large-scale benchmark of diverse user queries across multiple domains, researchers demonstrated that the efficacy of these strategies varies across domains, underscoring the need for domain-specific optimization methods.
The market reality: AI search adoption is accelerating
The adoption of AI search has reached a tipping point. In 2024, ChatGPT alone surpassed Bing in visitor volume, receiving more than 10 million queries per day. And ChatGPT is just one of several platforms – Perplexity, Gemini, and CoPilot are also evolving, driving changes in the behavior of B2B buyers.
58% of users have already replaced traditional search engines with AI-driven tools for product and service discovery. 63% of websites report traffic coming from AI search. Most importantly, 64% of customers express readiness to purchase products suggested by AI.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, up to 25% of searches will move to generative engines. ChatGPT has already surpassed 400 million active weekly users and more than 5.2 billion monthly visits. Perplexity AI is rapidly growing, with over 50 million monthly visits and over 500 million queries per year.
For B2B specifically, the numbers are even more striking. Forrester reports that 89% of B2B buyers have adopted generative AI as a key source of self-guided information throughout their purchasing journey. Adobe found that 87% of people are more likely to use AI for larger or more complex purchases.
Simply put: If your brand isn’t appearing in AI answers, for many users, it doesn’t exist.
What’s changing: The shift from links to citations
Two main categories of AI-powered platforms are identified:
Traditional search engines with generative components – Google Search and Bing integrate AI-generated overviews (e.g., Google’s AI Overview) alongside conventional search results, continuing to display SERPs while adding summaries at the top.
Dedicated generative engines – Platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity operate as answer engines, returning a single synthesized response generated by large language models (LLMs) instead of a list of links.
Three in four businesses (75.5%) said their top priority is brand visibility in AI-generated answers, even when there’s no link back to their site. Just 14.3% prioritize being cited as a source (which could drive traffic).
This represents a profound shift in thinking. For years, marketers optimized for clicks. Now, they must optimize for mentions, being included in the answer itself, whether or not it drives traffic.
Studies in 2025 show organic clicks dropping between 18% – 64% when AI overviews appear. An Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords found that when an AI Overview is shown, the click-through rate (CTR) for the top organic result drops by 34.5%.
The business impact: Revenue without clicks
The traffic declines aren’t just vanity metrics. They represent a fundamental threat to business models.
According to survey respondents, the primary ways referral traffic decline impacts revenue are decreased advertising ROI (63%) and changes in collaborations with brands, influencers, or other publications (54%).
Yet some companies are finding ways to thrive. NerdWallet reported a 35% growth in revenue despite a 20% decrease in site traffic, by ensuring their content and brand expertise still reached consumers through snippets and other channels.
While AI search is booming, multiple studies suggest that ChatGPT and LLM referrals convert worse than Google Search. The key is understanding that conversion paths have changed. Users may discover your brand through an AI answer, then later search directly for your company or convert through other channels.
Implementing AEO/GEO: What tech leaders must do now
The shift to AI-powered search requires immediate action. Here’s what tech leaders need to implement:
- Use clear, question-based headings
- Implement comprehensive schema markup (FAQ, How-To, Article)
- Create content with concise answers (≤40 words) followed by deeper explanation
- Use tables, lists, and bullet points for easy extraction
- Ensure your content directly answers specific questions
- Direct answer to the question (40 words or less)
- Expanded explanation with context
- Supporting data and examples
- Clear attribution and sourcing
- Generative appearance score: Frequency of your brand appearing in AI responses
- Share of AI voice: Percentage of AI answers mentioning your brand
- AI citation tracking: Monitoring mentions and references
- Brand visibility as cited source: Referrals or mentions from AI platforms
- Assisted conversions: Revenue impact from users who encountered your brand via AI
Number of sessions from AI search tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity), CTR from AI answers (server logs or ChatGPT-user bots), Impact on revenue/conversions (GA4 + Looker Studio), and Brand visibility as a cited source (referrals or mentions) should all be tracked.
The investment reality: Most companies are already moving
61.2% of businesses plan to increase their SEO budgets due to AI. 86% of enterprise SEO teams have integrated some AI and 82% plan more investment.
Most prefer to keep the “SEO” label – with “SEO for AI” (49%) and “GEO” (41%) emerging as leading terms for this new discipline.
The companies moving fastest are seeing results. AEO optimization typically shows results faster than traditional SEO, often within 2-4 weeks of focused effort. Most brands see measurable improvements within 6-8 weeks of consistent optimization.
The cost of delay: Why waiting is fatal
Companies that delay AEO implementation can face increasingly expensive catch-up requirements. Competitors are establishing authoritative positions in AI training data and real-time search results, making it harder and more costly for late adopters to gain meaningful visibility.
The window to establish authoritative positions is narrowing. AI systems are training on current data, and the brands being cited now are establishing patterns that will be difficult to disrupt later.
More than 71% of Americans already use AI search to research purchases or evaluate brands. Waiting to adapt means falling behind your competitors.
The strategic framework: Combining SEO with AEO/GEO
In 2025, both are needed. But GEO will decide who is visible in the future.
The most effective strategy combines traditional SEO with AEO/GEO:
- Create content that ranks high on Google
- Write it in a way that AI can easily understand, cite, and process
- Structure it for both human readers and AI extraction
- Build authority through traditional and AI-specific channels
- Measure success across both traditional and AI-driven metrics
The best strategies post-2025 combine SEO with GEO. Create content that ranks high on Google. Write it in a way that AI can easily understand, cite, and process.
Conclusion: The new reality of digital visibility
The internet is reorganizing itself around a fundamentally different architecture. The era of the open, interconnected web, where links flowed freely between sites, is giving way to a new structure dominated by large platforms and AI intermediaries.
For B2B tech leaders, the implications are clear:
- Traditional SEO isn’t dead, but it’s insufficient on its own
- Zero-click search and AI-powered answers are the new reality
- Brand visibility in AI responses matters more than ever
- The companies that adapt quickly will gain significant advantages
- The cost of delay increases exponentially
The internet isn’t dying. But it’s becoming something different. A landscape where visibility and authority matter more than traffic volume, where owned channels trump rented ones, and where the ability to reach people directly determines success.
The question isn’t whether to invest in AEO/GEO. The question is whether you’ll move fast enough to capture position while it still matters.
The great traffic collapse isn’t the end of digital marketing. It’s the beginning of something new. The tech leaders who recognize this shift and act decisively will own the next decade of digital visibility. Those who wait will find themselves invisible in the very channels their customers now use to make buying decisions.
The choice is binary: adapt now or become irrelevant. There is no middle ground.
