The Future of Search: SEO and AI Impacts Explained
March 21st, 2025 by
Key Insights
- AI is reshaping search behavior: Users increasingly rely on AI-driven platforms for quick answers, changing how content is surfaced in search results.
- SEO remains foundational: Despite AI’s rise, organic search remains the backbone of visibility, particularly for high-intent and local searches.
- Authority and credibility matter more than ever: AI models favor trusted sources, making brand authority, expertise, and transparency essential for being cited in AI-generated responses.
- Optimizing for AI requires a strategic approach: Marketers need to structure content for AI readability, incorporate long-tail keywords, strengthen technical SEO, and prioritize conversational language to improve discoverability.
Generative AI has changed the way people search for information online. According to research by Higher Visibility, 71.5% of people report using AI tools for search, with 14% turning to them daily.
AI search, powered by Google’s AI Overviews and platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini, offers fresh ways to reach users. However, it also introduces new challenges for marketers. AI-powered search results push organic rankings lower, while conversational search engines provide answers to queries without users having to click through to a website.
Search has always evolved, and this shift is no different. To stay competitive and continue reaching your target audience, your SEO strategy must adapt to accommodate AI-driven search — or you risk losing ground to competitors who are.
Maintaining your relevance and traffic requires implementing tactics specifically designed to improve AI search visibility — also known as generative engine optimization — alongside your traditional SEO strategy. Here’s what to know about SEO and AI impacts, plus how to navigate them in the new era of search.
What Is AI Search?
AI search refers to search engines and digital platforms that use artificial intelligence to generate direct, summarized answers to user queries. Rather than simply ranking web pages, these tools analyze vast amounts of data, identify key insights, and deliver structured responses that align with the user’s intent.
AI search is generally divided into two categories: AI Overviews and AI search engines/chatbots.
AI Overviews
Introduced in May 2024, Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) appear at the top of search results in response to queries. These summaries use AI to pull information from multiple sources and generate a concise, structured response. By applying machine learning and natural language processing, they identify relevant details, summarize content, and present it in an easy-to-read format.
AIOs also list citations alongside summaries, giving users the option to explore original sources for more in-depth information.
AI Overviews’ impact on SEO
Declining search visibility
Because AIOs appear at the top of search results, they push traditional organic listings further down the page. As more users rely on AI-generated summaries, ranking in AIOs has become essential for maintaining search visibility and reaching audiences where they are actively looking for information.
The rise of zero-click searches
AIOs contribute to the growth of zero-click searches, where users get answers directly in search results without clicking through to a website. While this reduces organic traffic, being featured in an AIO ensures your content is still seen. It allows you to build brand awareness and authority even when users don’t visit your site.
AIOs and informational search queries
AIOs dominate informational searches, with 99.2% of AIO keywords classified as informational. This means they frequently surface when users look for general knowledge in the awareness stage. Appearing in AIOs puts your brand in front of users earlier in their search journey, increasing the likelihood of engagement before they turn to a competitor.
The role of AIOs in branded searches
AIOs don’t just affect informational searches — they also appear in branded queries, which make up 45-60% of all Google searches (LinkedIn, SparkToro). If an AIO includes information about your business, it can influence how users perceive your brand and shape future interactions.
AIOs and click-through rates (CTRs)
Although zero-click searches are increasing, inclusion in AIOs can still improve click-through rates (CTR). A study by Seer Interactive found that organic CTR increases to 1.08% when a site is included in an AIO, compared to just 0.6% for those that aren’t.
Even when users don’t click through, appearing in AIOs increases brand impressions and helps maintain relevance in search. AIOs are heavily leveraged for voice search, meaning your content has the potential to surface in spoken responses across AI-powered assistants. Ignoring AIOs means missing out on a major shift in search behavior — while your competitors secure the space at the top.
AI Search Engines and Chatbots
AI-powered search engines and chatbots — such as Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Bing Copilot — offer a conversational way to search for and explore information. Unlike traditional search engines, which present ranked lists of web pages, AI-driven platforms generate detailed answers and allow users to refine their queries through follow-up interactions.
While AIOs primarily pull from indexed content and authoritative sites, other AI search tools vary in how they retrieve and present information:
- Bing Copilot offers a mix of live retrieval and indexed content
- Perplexity emphasizes real-time, cited sources for greater transparency
- ChatGPT (with browsing enabled) pulls from both retrieved and summarized conten
Understanding these differences helps you tailor your approach when optimizing for AI-driven search experiences.
AI search engine/chatbot impact on SEO
Growing search traffic through AI-powered platforms
With platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini attracting millions of users, conversational search is becoming a key way people discover information. ChatGPT alone has an estimated 300 million weekly active users worldwide, while Google Gemini averages 275 million monthly visits. As more users turn to these tools instead of traditional search engines, ensuring your content is referenced in AI-generated responses helps increase visibility and establish authority.
AI search engines/chatbots and brand recognition
Some AI platforms, like Perplexity, consistently provide citations in their responses, while others, such as ChatGPT, vary in how they attribute sources. Free-tier models may offer only basic references, while premium versions provide more detailed citations, pulling from multiple sources and adding contextual annotations.
When these platforms do cite sources, being included is a valuable opportunity to increase your credibility. Even if users don’t click through to your site, being cited in responses helps you gain your audience’s trust as a trusted source of information.
The connection between traditional SEO and AI visibility
Ranking well in organic search directly impacts the likelihood of being referenced in AI-generated responses. AI search engines prioritize authoritative, high-ranking sources when generating answers, making a strong SEO strategy essential for increasing visibility within these platforms.
Many core SEO principles still apply to AI search strategies, including understanding user intent, structuring content around entities, and maintaining high-quality information. However, AI-driven search shifts the focus from backlinks and keyword targeting to citations and specificity. The more detailed and entity-rich your content, the better AI models can reference it.
While SEO helps content rank, ensuring it is clear, credible, and easily retrievable increases its chances of appearing in AI-generated results.
What Is Generative Engine Optimization?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing content for AI-generated responses, increasing visibility in Google’s AIOs and AI-powered chatbots or search engines. While traditional SEO focuses on ranking web pages, GEO tailors content for AI models that extract and present direct answers.
By aligning content with how AI processes and prioritizes information, GEO helps marketers maintain authority, improve engagement, and capture opportunities across evolving search platforms.
How to Get Featured as an AI Source
A successful GEO strategy means getting included as an AI source, whether that’s in an AIO or a Perplexity response. Use these tactics to strengthen your AI visibility:
Improve your E-E-A-T
Google is more heavily emphasizing brand authority when ranking content and generating AIOs. Instead of solely optimizing for rankings, brands need to focus on strengthening Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) to improve visibility.
AI models prefer sources that demonstrate credibility, which means establishing strong brand authority is essential. To improve E-E-A-T:
- Demonstrate expertise and experience: Highlight author credentials, industry insights, and first-hand knowledge.
- Maintain accurate business and directory listings: Ensure consistency across platforms like Google Business Profile and industry directories.
- Ensure content transparency: Properly cite sources and reference factual, verifiable data.
Focus on relevant, high-quality content
AI favors concise and informative content, meaning readability and structure are just as important as accuracy. Google’s passage ranking feature allows AI models to pull specific sections of your content to answer queries directly, so structuring information in a clear, digestible way improves its chances of being referenced.
To make your content more AI-friendly:
- Anticipate user intent and provide concise and informative responses that align with what users are searching for. AI-driven search prioritizes content that directly answers queries with detailed, structured, and context-rich information.
- Write in conversational language, using a natural, direct writing style and concise phrasing. AI models rely on natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and generate human-like text, making them more effective at understanding content that mirrors everyday speech. Overly complex or formal wording can create friction in processing, while clear, natural phrasing ensures better readability.
- Break down complex information into digestible, skimmable formats, such as bullet points or numbered lists, with clear subheadings.
- Include FAQ sections, as a structured Q&A format can help AI identify relevant insights quickly.
- Leverage multimedia content with schema markup, since AI increasingly references videos and images in responses.
Leverage long-tail keywords
AI-generated search results are more likely to pull from content that matches specific, detailed queries. Long-tail keywords — phrases that are longer and more precise than broad search terms — help target the kinds of questions AI models reference in responses.
Search intent plays a crucial role when optimizing for long-tail keywords. While informational-intent keywords trigger AIOs 99.2% of the time, commercial and transactional queries only generate AIOs 10% of the time.
To best capitalize on long-tail keyword opportunities:
- Review “People Also Ask” (PAA) questions to identify commonly searched queries that AI models may prioritize.
- Analyze AI search engines like Perplexity to see what types of queries generate responses.
- Optimize for natural, conversational queries that reflect how users phrase searches in AI chatbots and voice search.
Optimize content for entities
AI models process content using entities — specific people, places, organizations, and concepts — rather than just keywords. While keywords are the words or phrases users type into search engines, entities act as nodes in a knowledge graph, helping AI understand relationships between concepts and generate more relevant responses.
To improve AI-driven visibility, structure your content to clearly define and connect entities:
- Use Schema.org structured data: Define entities such as businesses, products, authors, and services to help AI recognize key concepts.
- Link to authoritative sources: Reference Wikipedia, industry databases, and government sites to align with established entities AI understands.
- Leverage co-occurrence: When two or more words, phrases, or entities frequently appear together in content, AI models — especially LLMs like ChatGPT without search — become more likely to generate them. Strategic co-occurrence helps reinforce associations between key concepts.
- Utilize co-citation: When two entities (brands, websites, or sources) are cited or linked from the same source, it strengthens their perceived relationship in AI models, even if they aren’t directly connected.
- Structure content with semantic triples: AI processes information in subject-predicate-object statements (e.g., “Apple manufactures the MacBook Pro”), so clearly defining these relationships enhances AI comprehension.
- Enhance entity salience: Ensure that the most important concepts stand out within your content. Salience determines how relevant an entity appears in AI-driven searches and conversations. Think of it as a more structured way to signal significance without relying on keyword stuffing.
Prioritize your technical SEO
Strong technical SEO helps AI models better interpret, index, and surface your content. Without a solid technical foundation, even well-written and authoritative content may struggle to appear in AIOs or AI-driven search results.
To improve your technical SEO:
- Use schema markup to structure data: Properly coded structured data helps AI search engines understand key business details, such as operating hours, services, and locations, increasing the chances of being included in AIOs.
- Optimize title tags and meta descriptions: Clear, well-crafted metadata improves indexing and can enhance how AI models retrieve your content.
- Improve site navigation and internal linking: AI favors well-structured sites where information is easily accessible and logically organized.
- Ensure fast page speed and mobile usability: A slow, poorly optimized website signals low trustworthiness to search engines, reducing the chances of being referenced.
Monitor your standing in AI search
As AI-powered search evolves, tracking your visibility in AI-generated results is just as important as traditional SEO monitoring. New and existing tools now offer AI search tracking features, helping you understand how your content appears in AIOs and other AI-driven search responses.
To stay ahead, leverage these AI search tools to track your rankings, analyze competitor performance, and identify opportunities for optimization:
- Recent AI search entrants: Semrush AI Toolkit, Otterly, Rankscale, Profound, xfunnel, Peec.ai
- Existing tools adding AI metrics: Semrush, Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs
Does Bing Matter in AI SEO?
While Google dominates search, Bing still holds a significant share of queries, particularly in the U.S. Bing powers 28.3% of online searches when factoring in Yahoo and Microsoft voice searches, making it an important platform to consider.
Here’s how to pay attention to Bing in your AI SEO efforts:
- Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) to ensure proper indexing and visibility.
- Monitor Bing rankings: While brands ranking on page 1 of Google strongly correlate (~0.65) with AI mentions, Bing rankings also play a role (~0.5–0.6).
- Stay updated on Bing’s algorithm changes: SEO best practices currently align with Google, but keeping an eye on potential Bing-specific shifts ensures continued optimization.
SEO and AI Impacts: Is SEO Still Important?
Short answer: yes. While AIOs and AI-driven search platforms are changing how users find information, traditional SEO remains the foundation of search visibility.
Research shows that 52-73% of AIO sources come from pages already ranking in the top 10 organic search results. This means that if your site isn’t ranking well in traditional searches, it’s unlikely to be referenced in AI-generated responses.
At the same time, only 10% of middle to low-funnel keywords trigger an AIO, meaning AI-generated results are not replacing the most valuable searches — those tied to users actively looking for a business, product, or service.
SEO is even more critical for local businesses. Searches for local goods, services, and businesses rarely populate an AIO, making local SEO tactics essential for maintaining visibility.
What’s more, the highest-volume AIO keywords average just 150 searches per month, while non-AIO keywords drive an average of 29,000 searches. This means that despite AI-driven changes, organic search remains the dominant traffic driver. Businesses that prioritize SEO are still best positioned to reach high-intent users, capture search demand, and drive meaningful engagement.
Stay Ahead in the Age of AI With Search Influence
AI search is evolving every day, reshaping how users find and engage with content. To stay visible, you need a nimble, data-driven approach that keeps up with both traditional SEO and AI-powered search trends.
That’s where partnering with an experienced agency can make all the difference.
At Search Influence, we continuously track organic traffic, click-through rates, and AI-related search shifts to help our clients adjust their strategies and maximize their visibility in an AI-driven world.
SEO Roadmap for Higher Ed
For higher education marketers, our SEO Roadmap is designed to ensure your program pages remain competitive — even as AI-driven search changes the way students explore their options.
This customized, three-month strategy provides clear, actionable recommendations you can implement right away. It helps you improve rankings, strengthen visibility, and optimize for AIOs and AI-powered platforms. We factor in AI’s impact from the start, ensuring your content is structured for both organic search and AI-driven discovery.
Whether you’re refining an existing SEO strategy or building one from the ground up, Search Influence helps you stay ahead of AI search shifts so your brand remains visible where it matters most.
Let’s build a strategy that works for the future of search.
