The way people search for information online is undergoing a profound transformation. For decades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) meant tuning your website to rank higher on Google or Bing so that users click through to your site. Today, however, users are increasingly bypassing traditional search engines in favor of AI assistants like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and others that give direct answers (designrush.com, takt.inc). In this report, we explore this shift from SEO to Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) – what’s driving it, how it’s affecting web traffic, and what marketers can do to ensure their content remains visible in the age of AI-driven search.
AI Assistants Are Changing Search Behavior
Consumers worldwide are embracing AI chatbots and assistants as a new way to find information. ChatGPT, for example, reached 100 million users within its first two months and grew to over 200 million active users in 2024 (wisernotify.com). Notably, only about 16% of ChatGPT’s users are in the U.S., indicating a broad global uptake. In the UK, one survey found 33% of internet users (age 16+) have used generative AI tools in the past year (facebook.com). These tools are no longer niche experiments – they’re becoming mainstream across the English-speaking world and beyond.
One major appeal of AI assistants is that they deliver instant, conversational answers. People can ask a question in natural language and get a direct response, rather than sifting through pages of search results. In fact, over 35% of consumers who used AI chatbots in 2023 did so in place of a search engine to get a question answered (explodingtopics.com). Platforms like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard), Anthropic’s Claude, and others don’t just show a list of blue links – they provide the answers users want, right within the chat interface.
This convenience is driving a behavioral shift. A recent Bain & Company survey found that about 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results at least 40% of the time, meaning they get the information they need without clicking through to a website (bain.com). Even among users skeptical of AI, about half say most of their queries are answered on the results page itselfbain.com. In other words, users increasingly expect immediate, direct answers — delivered by the platform they’re using — and are less inclined to navigate to external sites.
Zero-Click Searches and Declining Web Traffic
Figure: Breakdown of user behavior after a Google search in 2024, showing that over half of searches result in no click to an external site (58.5% are “zero-click” searches) (sparktoro.com).
The rise of AI answers and rich search snippets has led to an explosion in “zero-click” searches, where the user doesn’t click any traditional result. As shown in the figure above, nearly 58.5% of Google searches in 2024 ended without the user clicking through to any website. Instead, the query either terminates on the search page (the user found what they needed in a snippet/answer) or is refined without an external click. This zero-click trend has been steadily growing, and generative AI is accelerating it.
For marketers, the implications are stark. When users get answers directly from Google or an AI assistant, organic traffic to websites suffers. Bain & Company estimates that the proliferation of AI summaries on search results pages has already reduced organic web traffic by 15% to 25% as of late 2024. Gartner, a leading research firm, predicts that search engine traffic will drop 25% by 2026 and 50% by 2028 as more queries go to AI chatbots and virtual assistants instead of traditional search (designrush.com). In Gartner’s words, “Generative AI solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines”.
Real-world data is bearing this out. In 2023, Google began rolling out its Search Generative Experience (SGE) — AI-generated answers at the top of search results — and companies felt the impact. HubSpot, a U.S. marketing software company known for its SEO prowess, saw its organic traffic plunge by an estimated 75% from a peak of 24 million monthly visits to around 6–7 million by late 2024 (edifycontent.com). Analysts attributed this drop to changes like Google’s AI overview feature and users turning to ChatGPT for answers. In short, there’s less pie to go around: fewer clicks leaving Google means even top-ranked pages get a smaller share of traffic than before.
For marketers and content creators, this new reality raises an urgent question: How do we remain visible when clicks and site visits are disappearing? The answer lies in rethinking our optimization strategy for the AI era.
From SEO to AIO: Understanding the Difference
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has long been about making your content rank highly on search engine results pages. This involved keyword research, link-building, meta tags, and creating content that aligns with what search algorithms look for. The end goal was to earn that coveted page-one listing and entice the user to click through to your site.
AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization) is emerging as the next frontier – it’s about optimizing your content to be featured in AI-driven answer platforms. Instead of vying for a blue link, you’re now vying to be the answer itself. This is a fundamental shift. As one industry expert put it: “SEO taught us to think in keywords. Artificial Intelligence Optimization demands we think in concepts.” In practice, that means focusing on the intent behind queries and the contextual knowledge around a topic, not just specific search terms.
Why the change? AI systems process information differently than traditional search engines. Google’s algorithm might rank a page based on keywords and backlinks, but an AI like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini is trying to understand natural-language questions and assemble a coherent answer. These AI “answer engines” are trained on vast amounts of text and learned to identify relevant facts, explanations, and even opinions to construct an answer. They don’t just match exact keywords – they interpret meaning.
Crucially, many AI platforms (especially search-integrated ones) aim to present one synthesized answer, often pulling from multiple sources. They might quote a source or two (as Bing Chat and Perplexity do), but the user often sees a single consolidated response. In effect, AI acts as a new gatekeeper of content: it decides which snippets of web information to show or not show to the end-user (totheweb.com). For marketers, this means that having great content is not enough; the AI needs to recognize your content as valuable and authoritative on the question being asked.
It’s important to note that AIO doesn’t replace SEO so much as extend it. Traditional SEO best practices – high-quality content, relevant keywords, fast load times, mobile friendliness – still matter (they help AI find and understand your site in the first place). But AIO adds new layers: thinking about how an AI might use your content, how it might interpret the context, and whether it would consider your page worth including in a synthesized answer. In the AI era, visibility is about being the trusted source that an AI references or paraphrases when answering a user’s question.
AI Platforms Redefining Search Entry Points
Let’s look at the major AI platforms and assistants that are changing how people find information. Each operates a bit differently, but all serve as key entry points where users might find answers without ever visiting your website directly:
ChatGPT (OpenAI) – The breakout AI chatbot that started this trend, ChatGPT provides conversational answers drawn from its training on billions of webpages, books, and articles. It does not browse the live web by default; instead, it generates answers based on learned knowledge (up to its knowledge cutoff). As a result, ChatGPT often responds without citing specific sources. However, with extensions and updated models, it can use plugins or browsing to fetch real-time info. ChatGPT’s ease of use has made it a massive hit globally – by early 2024 it had roughly 180 million monthly users (and growing), with people asking everything from trivia and research questions to advice and content generation. For marketers, ChatGPT is both a threat (it might answer using your content without a click) and an opportunity (it could surface your brand or facts if those were prominent in its training data).
Google Gemini (Bard/SGE) – Google has integrated generative AI into its search products to maintain its dominance. Google’s Bard, now evolving into the more powerful Gemini, is an AI chat assistant that can answer questions and hold conversations. More importantly, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) uses these AI models to produce an overview at the top of search results. For example, a search for a question might show an AI-written summary with key points, with links to the original sources in small boxes. Google’s approach often blends AI answers with traditional search: the AI overview is generated from content in Google’s index, and it typically cites a handful of websites used in the summary. This means that if your content is one of the top authoritative sources on a topic, Google’s AI might feature it (driving some awareness, though fewer clicks), whereas if you’re not among those sources, your visibility drops dramatically. Google is still testing and refining these features, but they are rolling out in the U.S. and other English markets (blog.google). Notably, Gemini/Bard reportedly reached over 140 million users by 2025 (explodingtopics.com) (benefiting from being pre-installed on millions of Android devices and Google accounts). Ensuring your content is favored by Google’s AI involves much of the same signals that traditional SEO does – relevance, authority, and good structure – since Google’s AI is essentially an extension of its search.
Bing AI (Microsoft Bing Chat) – Microsoft’s Bing search engine made a bold move in early 2023 by integrating OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into its search interface. Bing Chat appears alongside search results and can answer queries in a conversational manner, often citing sources with footnotes. Bing’s AI will typically crawl the web in real time for a query, then use GPT-4 to compose an answer that references several websites (with links numbered [1], [2], [3], etc.). It’s like an AI meta-search, and it gives credit to content creators more visibly than some other platforms. Bing Chat can also handle images and other tasks. Microsoft reported that after introducing AI, Bing surpassed 100 million daily active users for the first time (theverge.com, news.yahoo.com), and as of 2025 Bing Chat has around 100 million users in its own right. For marketers, being one of the sources cited by Bing Chat can still drive traffic (since curious users may click the citation), but it requires your content to rank well in Bing and to be structured in a way that the AI picks up.
Perplexity AI – An example of a new AI-native search engine, Perplexity uses large language models to answer user questions with cited sources. When you ask Perplexity something, it will search the web (and its own index of high-quality sources), then generate a concise answer with footnotes linking to the original content. This platform reached about 15 million monthly users by late 2024 (bain.com), indicating a growing appetite for AI-curated answers with transparency. While smaller than ChatGPT or Bing, Perplexity is popular among early adopters who want quick answers and source credibility. The way to optimize for Perplexity is similar to optimizing for search – ensure your content is authoritative on the query topic so that it gets retrieved in the first place. Because it cites sources, there’s a chance for referral traffic if your site is listed, although the answer snippet might satisfy the user’s needs immediately.
Claude (Anthropic) – Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, positioned as an alternative to ChatGPT. It can handle very large inputs (like entire PDFs or books) and deliver detailed answers or summaries. While Claude isn’t a search engine per se (it doesn’t automatically fetch live web results in its basic form), it’s used in various applications (like Slack plugins, AI writing tools, etc.) to assist with Q&A. Some savvy users might input content from multiple sources into Claude to have it analyze or compare information. From an AIO perspective, Claude and similar models matter because they form part of the ecosystem of AI tools drawing on web content. If, for example, your company publishes a well-regarded industry report, a user might prompt Claude to summarize it or compare it with others – meaning your content is being consumed via AI. Anthropic’s Claude had on the order of 20 million users by 2025 (often accessed indirectly through partner apps) (explodingtopics.com). Optimizing for these kinds of assistants is largely about making sure your content is available (not behind paywalls or inaccessible formats) and is written in a clear, structured way so the AI can interpret it accurately.
Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant) – Voice search has been popular for years, and now voice assistants are getting smarter with generative AI. There are hundreds of millions of smart speakers and voice-enabled devices in use globally (statista.com, statista.com). Traditionally, when you asked a voice assistant a factual question, it would either read a snippet from the web (like Siri pulling from Wikipedia or Google Assistant using a featured snippet) or say it couldn’t help. Now, with updates rolling out (e.g., Amazon’s Alexa+ with generative AI), these assistants can have more conversational exchanges and answer more complex queries (aboutamazon.com). The key difference: a voice assistant’s answer is usually singular – it will speak one result. If that result comes from an AI summary or knowledge base, the user might never know the underlying source. For instance, if you ask, “What’s the best time to post on social media for engagement?” the assistant might deliver a synthesized answer drawn from several marketing blogs. As voice assistants incorporate AI (Amazon and Google are actively doing so), ensuring your content is the one referenced becomes similar to optimizing for featured snippets or knowledge graphs – you want to be the answer. Techniques like providing clear Q&A formatted content, using schema markup, and being recognized as an authority increase your chances of being the voice assistant’s chosen source.
How these AI platforms select and synthesize content: Generally, AI systems either rely on a pre-trained knowledge base or real-time retrieval (or a combination). ChatGPT and Claude primarily use their pretrained knowledge (which includes vast swaths of the open web up to a certain date). They generate answers by predicting likely sequences of words based on that training, which means they might combine information from numerous sources without explicitly telling you which. In contrast, Bing Chat and Perplexity perform live web searches for your query, then use AI to summarize the top results – which inherently favors content that ranks well on search engines. Google’s SGE and voice assistants use the search index and knowledge panels to craft answers, often favoring sources deemed highly authoritative (e.g. Wikipedia for factual queries, or well-ranked pages for niche queries). In all cases, content that is clear, factual, and authoritative stands the best chance of being used by these AI as part of their answer. If an AI trusts your content, it may quote it or use it; if it finds conflicting information, it might go with the consensus from multiple sources. This is why consistency and credibility across the web matter – if many sources cite your data or conclusions, an AI is more likely to include that perspective in its synthesized answer.
Strategies to Optimize Content for AI (AIO Tactics)
Marketers need to adapt their content strategies to this new landscape. Below are practical, step-by-step strategies to make your content more discoverable and favorable to AI assistants. These steps will help ensure that when an AI is answering questions in your domain, it chooses your content (or insights from it) to share with the user:
Audit the AI Search Landscape: Start by seeing what answers are already out there. Take key questions related to your business (e.g., “How do I fix X problem?” or “Best tools for Y”) and pose them to AI platforms like Google (with SGE enabled), ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Perplexity. Note what sources are being referenced or what answers are given. This audit will reveal whose content is currently “winning” the answer box. Are competitors showing up in the AI summaries? Is the AI giving outdated or inaccurate info? This research informs where you have opportunities. For example, if the AI answers seem generic or lack a crucial insight that your team has, that’s a gap you can fill with content. Monitoring AI outputs should be an ongoing practice, as these answers can change with new data and algorithms.
Ensure AI Crawlability and Access: Just as traditional SEO starts with making sure search engines can crawl your site, AIO begins with ensuring AI systems can access your content. Check your robots.txt and site settings to make sure you’re not inadvertently blocking known AI user agents (for instance, OpenAI’s GPTBot). Some organizations are introducing protocols like “llms.txt” to explicitly permit or guide AI crawlers (linkedin.com). While standards are still evolving, the key is you want your content in the mix for AI training and retrieval, unless there’s a specific reason to opt out. If your content is behind a login or paywall, consider offering a portion freely accessible or providing AI-readable abstracts. The easier it is for an AI to read your content, the more likely it will include knowledge from it when formulating answers. (Tip: Make use of feeds or APIs if available – e.g., if you have a dataset or frequently updated info, publishing an open API can sometimes get your data directly integrated into answer engines.)
Optimize Technical SEO for AI: Many AIO best practices echo technical SEO fundamentals. Clean, well-structured HTML and fast-loading pages are crucial. AI bots (like search engine bots) prefer content that is easy to parse. Use proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to delineate sections and topics on your page – this helps AI models identify the structure and main points of your content. Minimize heavy scripts or interstitials that could prevent content from loading. Also, ensure your site is mobile-friendly and performs well, as mobile content may be what voice assistants and others access. Another tip is to use descriptive, relevant metadata (titles, meta descriptions). While an AI might not show your meta description anywhere, those elements can influence how your page is understood contextually. A clear title tag, for instance, gives a strong hint of what your page is about.
Use Structured Data and Schema Markup: Implementing schema.org structured data on your pages can make your content more digestible to AI algorithms. For example, marking up an FAQ page with FAQ schema can signal to Google (and its generative AI) that your page contains Q&A pairs, which are perfect for answering queries directly. How-to schema, product schema (for e-commerce), organization and person schema (for authority) – all these add explicit context that machine learning systems can utilize. Structured data is like feeding the AI the answers in a format it understands. Google’s own documentation suggests that schema might be used in generating rich answers and knowledge panels. While Bing and others haven’t detailed how they use schema for AI, it certainly doesn’t hurt to supply as much machine-readable context as possible. In summary, structured data = machine-readable clarity about your content.
Provide Direct Answers (in Human-Readable Form): A classic SEO tactic for featured snippets – providing a concise answer to a question in your content – is even more important for AIO. Identify the common questions in your niche and make sure your content explicitly answers them. For instance, if you have a blog post, include a section that directly poses and answers relevant questions (“What are the benefits of X?”, “How much does Y cost?”, etc.). Use clear, declarative sentences that an AI could easily quote or summarize. Example: begin a paragraph with “The best time to post on social media for engagement is between 9am and 12pm on weekdays, according to our analysis.” This way, whether a user asks an AI “When is the best time to post on social media?” or Google’s SGE tries to summarize answers, your content has a ready-made statement that could be picked up. Think of it as creating snippet-ready content. However, be sure to also provide depth and context around that answer (so your content remains valuable if a user does click through). The goal is to satisfy both the AI’s need for a quick answer and the user’s need for comprehensive info if they delve deeper.
Demonstrate E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness): Generative AI doesn’t consciously know your brand’s reputation, but it is trained on signals of authority – such as mentions of your brand on reputable sites, the caliber of content you produce, etc. Moreover, search engines like Google explicitly reward content that demonstrates expertise and first-hand experience, which in turn likely influences what the AI overview pulls in. To optimize for AI, produce content that stands out as authoritative and original. This could mean conducting your own research or surveys (unique data that others might cite), or sharing expert insights/opinions that aren’t found elsewhere. If an AI finds a unique point in your content, it might include it especially if it sees that information repeated or supported elsewhere. On the flip side, content that just rehashes generic info may get ignored in favor of the more original source. Also, make sure to establish author credibility on important content (have author bios, credentials, or links to LinkedIn profiles) – these can be indirect signals that your content is trustworthy. In the AI age, one marketing expert advises creating “content that can’t be easily answered with a simple search query – content that needs a person behind it, based on personal experience and expertise” (designrush.com). That human touch and depth make your content harder for AI to replace or overlook.
Leverage Multimodal Content (Text, Images, Video): AI models are getting better at handling images and even video in their answers (for example, Bing can generate charts or fetch images, and future models like Gemini are multimodal). To stay ahead, consider providing infographics or descriptive images with alt text, and even transcripts of video content on your site. An AI might not “see” your infographic image, but if you provide the data and explanation in text alongside it, that info becomes usable in an AI answer. Likewise, a video on “How to do X” should have an accompanying text summary or transcript on the page – not only for accessibility and SEO, but so an AI could glean the key steps. By offering content in multiple formats, you increase the chances that some part of it can be consumed and reproduced by an AI. (Also, if Google or Bing show an AI answer with an image, it might pull from an image on one of the cited pages, which could be yours.)
Monitor AI Traffic and Mentions: Traditional analytics won’t always show how AI is affecting you (since if no click occurs, it doesn’t register on your site). However, you can watch for indirect signs. For instance, check if Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console have new metrics (Google has started reporting SGE impressions to some publishers). Look at your referral traffic – Bing’s AI clicks might show up as coming from bing.com with a specific referral path, and similarly for Google’s AI. Also monitor social media or forums for mentions of your brand in context of AI (“ChatGPT said X about [YourCompany]”). Some businesses set up Google Alerts or other monitors for their brand or key content titles + “ChatGPT” to see if people are discussing what the AI is saying about them. The more you know about how (and if) your content is surfacing via AI, the better you can refine it. If you find, for example, that AI is giving outdated info from your site, you might need to update that content or publish something more recent to replace it in the AI’s knowledge. If AI isn’t mentioning you at all on core topics, that might push you to create more definitive guides or content on those topics.
Adapt Your KPIs and Expectations: Finally, accept that the definition of “organic success” is evolving. Instead of solely tracking clicks, start thinking in terms of brand visibility and influence within AI answers. This might involve more qualitative goals: e.g., “Ensure our product is mentioned by AI assistants when users ask about top solutions in our category,” or “Aim for our statistic to be the one cited in AI summaries of topic X.” To that end, building your brand authority off-site can help. If AI frequently quotes Wikipedia or high-authority sites for your topics, consider contributing there (if appropriate) or publishing thought leadership on sites that are likely to get scraped and cited. The bottom line is to broaden your optimization focus – success might not always be a click, sometimes it’s simply being part of the answer. As search guru Rand Fishkin urges, marketers must learn to derive “value from searches that don’t result in a click” (sparktoro.com) (for instance, by strengthening brand recognition or capturing leads through other channels when your content is seen).
By implementing these strategies, you transition from a pure SEO mindset to an AIO mindset, where you’re considering not just how to rank on a page, but how to inform and populate the answer boxes and voice responses of the future.
AIO Readiness Checklist
To help ensure your organization’s content is ready for the era of AI-driven search, use the following checklist of best practices:
✅ Content is accessible to AI crawlers: No unwarranted blocks on important pages (check robots.txt for AI user-agents like GPTBot). If content is gated, provide some accessible summary or data feed.
✅ Pages are structurally clean and fast: Uses proper HTML semantics (headings, lists, etc.), minimal clutter, and loads quickly on all devices. A fast, clean page is easier for AI to parse and quote.
✅ Important questions are answered directly: Key FAQs and common user queries have concise answers in the text (preferably near the top or clearly marked), along with detailed explanation. This caters to both snippet-style extraction and deeper reading.
✅ Using schema markup for key content: Relevant pages have schema (FAQ, HowTo, Article, etc.) to explicitly highlight question-answer pairs, steps, product info, reviews, and other data. This helps search engines and AI understand the purpose of the content.
✅ Content demonstrates expertise and originality: Pages include author bylines, credentials, or personal experience where appropriate (supporting E-E-A-T principles). The content contributes unique insights or data not found on every other generic page.
✅ Up-to-date and consistent information: Statistics, product details, and references are kept current so that AI isn’t pulling stale info. If an AI is known to have cited an older figure from your site, update it (and indicate the date) to increase the chance that newer models or search AI pick up the correction.
✅ Incorporation of multi-format content: Important informational pages include text alternatives for images or videos (captions, transcripts). This ensures AI can extract knowledge from all elements of the page, not just plain text.
✅ Monitoring is in place: Team members periodically check AI assistants for your company name, products, and primary topics. Any incorrect or missing info discovered in AI outputs is noted and can be addressed with content adjustments or outreach. You can’t directly control an AI’s output, but you can influence it by what exists on the web.
✅ Diversified traffic strategy: Acknowledge that not all discovery will come via clicks. Build alternative ways to capture value: e.g., if your advice is featured in a zero-click answer, ensure the branding around that content is strong so users remember you. Grow channels like email subscriptions, social media, webinars, etc., to engage your audience beyond just search. This way, even as organic clicks fluctuate, your overall reach remains strong.
By running through this checklist, you can identify areas where your content strategy might need tweaking for AIO. The core idea is to make your content as AI-friendly as possible – easy for AI to find, understand, and trust – while still delivering real value to the human reader.
Conclusion
The transition from SEO to AIO represents a fundamental change in digital marketing. Users are no longer simply choosing which link to click; increasingly, the AI is choosing which content to share with the user. This “answer-first” paradigm means that marketers must optimize not just for visibility in search rankings, but for visibility in the answers themselves. It’s a challenging shift – one that requires new techniques and a keen eye on emerging trends – but it’s also an opportunity. Brands that adapt early and shape their content for AI-driven platforms can become the authoritative voices that these systems rely on.
In practical terms, staying ahead in this AI-driven search era comes down to a blend of technical excellence, authoritative content, and strategic foresight. We must continue to produce high-quality, user-focused content (that will never change), but also package and present that content in ways that AI agents can easily digest. We must track how our audience’s behavior is changing – for example, if they prefer asking voice assistants or chatbots – and meet them there with answers. And we should remember that while the mediums of discovery might evolve, the end goal remains the same: connecting people with the information, products, and services they need.
Marketers who embrace AIO and weave it into their SEO efforts will be well-positioned to maintain and grow their reach in a world of chat-driven search. The tools and tactics may be new, but the guiding principle isn’t: know your audience, understand how they seek information, and make sure you’re right there with the answer when they ask. By doing so, you ensure that your brand’s voice is heard — whether it’s coming from a search result or an AI assistant speaking directly to your customer.