“We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where we’ve been in the past decade,” says Pichai. But Google has long been moving vegas casino app away from simply serving up a series of blue links, notes Pandu Nayak, Google’s chief scientist for search. Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge. Learn to rank in ChatGPT search with tactics that drive brand mentions and & citations. Zero-click search is a serious challenge facing SEO professionals.
When I asked him about it, he couldn’t really explain why the model chose the sources that it did, because the model itself makes that evaluation. The company helps steer it by identifying—sometimes with the help of users—what it considers better answers, but the model actually selects them. OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, Varun Shetty, told MIT Technology Review that it won’t give preferential treatment to its publishing partners. Weil also argues that ChatGPT has more freedom to innovate and go its own way than competitors like Google—even more than its partner Microsoft does with Bing.
Then, the early adopters come along (13.5%), to be followed by the early majority (34%). At this point, ~50% of the potential market has adopted the technology. Anyone jumping on board after this point can safely be described as either the late majority (34%), or laggards (16%). For a SaaS client, we rewrote existing content in a more conversational, question-led style. When optimized well, these pages reduce support volume and increase conversion readiness. We’ve seen clients boost conversions by more than 50% simply by aligning content and layout to searcher expectations.
While that’s safe for some, it’s dangerous for others. Astra can, for example, look at a crude drawing of a Formula One race car and not only identify it, but also explain its various parts and their uses. This is the kind of future Pichai says he is excited to bring online. Google has already showed off a bit of what that might look like with NotebookLM, a tool that lets you upload large amounts of text and have it converted into a chatty podcast. He imagines this type of functionality—the ability to take one type of input and convert it into a variety of outputs—transforming the way we interact with information.
The shift has heightened fears of a “zero-click” future, where search referral traffic—a mainstay of the web since before Google existed—vanishes from the scene. Search firm Exa wants to use the tech behind large language models to tame the wildness of the web. There’s a reason why your search engine traffic is down, but impressions are up—this guide explains what you need to do next. Use real-time topic data to create content that resonates and brings results.
Google’s transition from the traditional search box to AI-driven, multimodal interfaces will reshape how we access and interact with information on the web. For SEO professionals, this means adapting to new AI technologies and creating content that is accessible, relevant, and tailored to AI systems. For digital marketers and publishers, this means that optimizing content for cross-platform functionality will become increasingly important. Mariner is an example of how AI will be embedded into the web, making the search experience more interconnected and user-centric. These LLMs can deliver conversational, synthesized answers to user prompts. In the early days of search engines, at least we had guidelines on indexing and ranking.
As of March 2025, 13.14% of all queries generated an AI Overview. Of all the queries that do trigger an AI Overview, 88.1% are informational. AI chatbots consolidate everything into a single response. We have no idea where that information comes from, how it’s prioritized or who’s making those decisions. The web didn’t collapse overnight—it was a slow, painful unraveling.
You don’t have to be able to articulate what, precisely, you are looking for. It’s amazing, and once you start searching that way, it’s addictive. LLMs rely on patterns within massive datasets to deliver answers. By optimizing your content and digital presence now, you can feel confident that your brand will be referenced more often (and more accurately) in search results in the future.
In comparison, LLM search platforms provide synthesized, conversational answers that prioritize impressions, brand citations, and direct responses (often without a click). It’s becoming harder to track LLM search because it’s common to receive answers with unlinked brand mentions and citations. ChatGPT has an advantage in having largely established the conversational search behaviors we’re now seeing. Instead of piecing together information by clicking back and forth on links in the SERPs, ChatGPT provides users with complete answers in a fraction of the time. Additionally, LLM features enhance visual search tools like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens. These improvements increase the accuracy of image-based queries and enable users to quickly identify products, objects, and other visual content.
According to New Street Research, AI Overviews advertising is poised to account for a growing share of Google’s search advertising revenues, generating 1% in 2025, 3% in 2026, and 6-7% in 2027. In a landscape dominated by conversational search, the most effective strategy for businesses and creators is to reduce dependence on search engines by building their own audiences. Owning direct relationships provides stability and ensures content reaches those who value it most.
The new report reveals that, in the five-month period from February to July 2025, ChatGPT grew from 400 million to 700 million weekly active users (WAU), sending 18 billion messages per week. That represents an average compound growth of roughly 11-12% month-over-month. Developed by sociologist Everett Rogers, the diffusion of innovation theory provides us with a useful framework to explain how new technologies spread through society in predictable stages. First, there are the innovators, accounting for 2.5% of the market.
But it has gotten a bad rep with publishers, who say it plays fast and loose with their content. Google’s AI Overviews are great at giving an easily digestible summary in response to even the most complex queries, with sourcing boxes adjacent to the answers. Among the major options, its deep web index feels the most “internety.” But web publishers fear its summaries will give people little reason to click through to the source material. OpenAI’s ChatGPT now has access to the web, making it far better at finding up-to-date answers to your queries.
The way AI can put together a well-reasoned answer to just about any kind of question, drawing on real-time data from across the web, just offers a better experience. That is especially true compared with what web search has become in recent years. If it’s not exactly broken (data shows more people are searching with Google more often than ever before), it’s at the very least increasingly cluttered and daunting to navigate. Traditional SEO tactics like keyword optimization, backlinks, and site speed are evolving to focus on optimizing content for LLMs and multimodal search. This shift emphasizes the importance of natural language processing and contextual relevance, making conversational tones and long-tail keywords critical for inclusion in AI-generated summaries.
According to the latest data, Google reports that 1.5 billion users now regularly use AI Overviews. Since the launch of ChatGPT, the growth of generative AI and AI search has been rapid. For many brands, this will mean moving away from individually optimized pages to entire content ecosystems. For many businesses, that’s enough to warrant strategic attention now.
I came across several examples like this, both in Google and in OpenAI’s ChatGPT search. Stuff that’s just far enough off the mark not to be immediately seen as wrong. Google is banking that it can continue to improve these results over time by relying on what it knows about quality sources.
Microsoft released generative search results for Bing in September. The startup Perplexity was doing the same, but with a “move fast, break things” ethos. Literal trillions of dollars are at stake in the outcome as these players jockey to become the next go-to source for information retrieval—the next Google. LLMs rely on a brand’s online presence to assess the authority and relevance of their content.
Perhaps they’re highly engaged in the topic and want to go deeper. Or perhaps the AI responses have answered their product queries, and they’re now ready to buy. As the volume of AI-powered search queries increases and user adoption grows, search behaviors will change. In response, advertisers will cautiously and gradually experiment with AI ad formats, testing and refining their strategies as the landscape continues to evolve.
I’ll be staying in Tokyo but would like to take some day trips. ” And you’ll get an answer—not just a link to Reddit, but a built-out answer with current results. AI content without human involvement presents a huge risk for content and SEO teams.
Optimization will need to focus on contextual relevance, multimodal accessibility, and AI interpretation rather than just simple keyword matching. With all the noise around AI and the evolution of search, it’s easy to get swept up in misconceptions. Here are some common myths we encounter, and the real story behind them.