Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make

Traditional search—and Google, in particular—is under serious threat of being dislodged as the starting point for many buyers’ journeys. In January, ChatGPT and other alternatives drove Google’s search engine market share below 90% for the first time since 2015, according to Statcounter. And the sharks are circling more aggressively now, with both OpenAI and Perplexity set to release browsers to compete with Google’s market-leading Chrome, and with at least a dozen AI startups also vying to gobble up some of Google’s market share.

To be fair, the biggest loser here isn’t Google, which has introduced its own generative AI search results in the form of AI Overviews. The biggest losers are website operators, who are having their content regurgitated by generative AI engines in exchange for a source link (sometimes) and are seeing their web visitor traffic plunge.

For instance, research shows that website traffic from Google has declined between 30% and 70% depending on the search terms used because of AI Overviews, according to AI magazine. That’s in line with Ahrefs research showing that an AI Overview in a search results correlates with a 34.5% lower clickthrough rate on average for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview.

And the worst is yet to come. “Your website doesn’t need to go away,” says Chris Andrew, CEO & Co-founder of Scrunch, “but 90% of its human traffic will.”

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