By Patrick Coffee

In a matter of months, artificial intelligence has begun to change how people search for things online in ways that have alarmed some marketers.

Consumers who use traditional search engines like Google and Bing are now greeted atop their search results by AI-generated summaries of the topics at hand. A growing number of consumers now also turn directly to large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT to answer everyday questions or guide their purchases.

Both developments have begun to eat away at the clicks and website traffic that marketers have earned over time by spending millions of dollars on search engine optimization, or SEO. They have also created a wave of businesses claiming to specialize in new industry acronyms such as generative engine optimization $(GEO)$, answer engine optimization $(AEO)$ and, of course, artificial intelligence optimization $(AIO)$.

Email software platform Mailchimp has seen a steady drop in web traffic since AI-assisted search started allowing people to gather information about the company and its products without visiting its sites, according to Ellen Mamedov, global director of search engine optimization.

In order to counter the shift, Mailchimp began updating its sites to better serve the so-called crawlers, bots that visit pages across the web to collect the data that informs the answers provided by AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Mamedov said.

Technical search elements, like the speed at which pages load and the snippets of code used to track user activity, are more important for these bots and AI-driven searches than for traditional search engines, according to Mailchimp's research.

The bots are designed to absorb and process information as quickly as possible, which is why they prefer faster-loading sites that have been optimized for machines rather than human readers, according to Mamedov. Websites in general will evolve to serve primarily as data sources for bots that feed LLMs, rather than destinations for consumers, she said.

If Mailchimp doesn't regularly make sure these elements are up-to-date, "we're definitely going to be left behind," said Mamedov.

Chief marketing officers trained on classic SEO have seen similar traffic declines in recent months, and many aren't aware that their companies' sites haven't been tailored to AI platforms or even made accessible to their bots, said Natasha Sommerfeld, partner in consulting firm Bain & Co.'s customer practice.

They're also contending with the rapid rise of so-called zero-click search. Eighty percent of consumers now resolve 40% of their online search queries without clicking any links, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people conducted by Bain in December. Forty-two percent of people who regularly use generative AI said that they use such tools for shopping recommendations, the same survey found.

OpenAI announced last month that ChatGPT will soon roll out a shopping button that redirects users to a merchant's website, where they can buy the product they were researching.

That could begin to address marketers' AI challenge by letting people shop through ChatGPT, said Joy Howard, chief marketing officer at Back Market, a marketplace for refurbished electronics.

LLM searches don't yet drive sales, and they only account for 0.2% of traffic to Back Market's sites. But such traffic is 470 times higher than it was last summer, and it will continue to grow, said Howard.

Back Market is tweaking its SEO practices accordingly. It has focused more intently on updating individual product pages, for example, because some consumers ask LLMs to identify products that suit their needs and tastes before using search engines to locate and potentially buy them, Howard said. Back Market has also begun using a more conversational tone in its product copy, since its search team has found that LLMs like ChatGPT prefer everyday language to the detailed descriptions that often perform best in traditional search engines, she said.

"This is not big for us yet, but it could be," she said of LLM searches.

Very few consumers have entirely replaced Google or Bing with ChatGPT, said Nikhil Lai, principal performance marketing analyst at Forrester. OpenAI says ChatGPT now processes roughly one billion searches a week, but Google handles 5 trillion searches each year, or around 100 times that total, according to its most recent figures.

Trust is a question as well, with only 15% of consumers now willing to share their financial information with generative AI tools, according to Bain.

As AI assumes a larger role in search, however, marketers will increasingly focus on how closely AI-generated summaries and prompt responses match the way they want their brands to be perceived, Lai said.

"SEO teams have been caught flat-footed," he said. "Traffic and ranking and average position and click-through rate...none of those metrics make sense going forward."

Write to Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 08, 2025 06:00 ET (10:00 GMT)

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