There is no doubt about it that the way people are searching online is changing. If we are honest about it, search has been gently shifting for years. Yet, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude, ChatGPT and NotebookLLM, plus AI Overview, has seen an acceleration of that change.
We’re already aware that younger generations have been shifting from using Google to Instagram and TikTok for their search. Responding to this can mean moving away from a single digital channel approach, but how do we know we’re getting the response right?
Behavioural change is slow
The first thing to remember is that we don’t like change as humans. Change means an increased level of threat to our subconscious and, therefore, increases the level of fear. Even Google’s dominance of search took years to develop.
The first search engine was launched in 1990, called Archie, and while it’s not something that the likes of you and me will have used, it’s a reminder that, in terms of human behaviour, online search is still relatively young.
You will probably remember Yahoo! search, one of the first on the wider market, and Ask Jeeves. For someone of a particular age, Ask Jeeves was one of the initial forays into the internet in 1996, along with that lovely dial-up tone and your parents and siblings shouting at you to stop blocking the phone line.
Google launched two years later, in 1998. This is important because Google wasn’t the first, and if you remember when it first came out, you’ll also know it seemed like the underdog in the search options.
One of the many reasons why Google became so dominant is that the search results on there were simply a whole lot faster and better than what you’d get with Ask. It responded to what people wanted and gave them that.
I wish we could say the same about today but alas, this is where we are. The shifts might seem to be coming thick and fast to those of us in marketing because everyone wants to be an early adopter, but the reality is that these changes have been taking place, slowly, over the years. The difference now is that some of these technology add-ons, like AI Overviews, are happening whether we want to use the tool or not. There is no turning it off.
Zero Click Search
The result is that we’re starting to experience zero-click search, which is only going to increase over the next couple of years. If you’re unsure, zero-click search is when someone gets the answer to their question directly on Google.
So, let’s say you’re looking to compare two services. You put it into Google, hoping to get some ideas. At the very top of the page is the AI overview, which rounds up content from across the web. You don’t need to click into the websites, unless you want more info. Everything you want is on Google, right in front of you. You are now experiencing zero-click search. It’s estimated that AI Overviews appear on around 18% of searches, although this is 2025 data, and the reality is likely much higher.
There is a new development that when you do click on to read more, it will start automatically taking you into AI mode, rather than to websites, but it’s not rolled out just yet.
Does zero-click search mean the end of SEO and websites?
No. Quite the opposite. All of the AI options rely on the same principles as good SEO, but with some extra add-ons like schema markup and a slightly different approach to style and structure. You can embed these into your SEO content as you go.
AI search will be looking for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT). In other words, the signposts that search engines use for their results, with a few caveats. AI is still scraping the search results and looking for these signals, in the same way that search engines do. Although for those of you with smaller businesses and less traffic, there is currently good news that citations on AI are seemingly more of a level playing field. If you put the work in.
There is nothing to say it will stay that way, and experience tells us that it won’t. But a little effort now could give you a new channel for people to find out.
If people aren’t clicking on websites, what’s the point?
Don’t be disheartened by zero-click search. I actually think it’s a good thing. At the moment, you’re getting a whole load of traffic to your website, and you don’t really know if the people on there are totally new to your business, or if they’ve seen your talk, followed you on LinkedIn, or come into contact with your brand at several other places.
While organic traffic might drop, you may see a percentage increase in direct traffic. Zero-click search should mean that the people who are hitting your website are more likely to buy. They already know you and are now checking out if it’s right for them. It’s thought that the conversion rate for AI traffic sits at around 14%, compared to 2% for traditional search.
That means the content on your site needs to focus more on this bottom end of the funnel, rather than a lot of how-to content that sits at the top of the funnel. I’ll come to how social media fits into this in a later blog. Sign up for my newsletter to make sure you get it.
When you have content that addresses some of those objections or builds trust, then you are better leveraging what you know to be happening. Plus, that bottom of funnel content is far more specific and will be answering specific SEO queries, which can still bring in organic search traffic.
There is a lot more to getting this right, but it is not as complex as you might think.
Adapt to the change – even if we think it’s stoopid
To give you a bit of hope, my career started in the music industry right before the first iPod launched. That shift of behaviour to digital music decimated a lot of the industry. Those changes are still being felt today. But, for good or bad, a lot of it survived.
I remember asking what would happen if HMV went under? What was the plan to adapt before that time? Clearly, HMV did not go under, but it is barely recognisable as the shop it once was. It adapted, changed and survived.
What is more hopeful is that what was once true then about marketing music through digital change is true now: people just want things put in front of them. They don’t want to search through, they want it easy.
Even when you’re crate digging, looking for that little piece of vinyl gold, you hope to happen across it, but you don’t want it to take hours.
How can we best put what people want right in front of them?
Look at what teenagers are doing and how fast they are adapting to these changes. They search on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat (although I’m told Instagram is now for the old people and no one touches Facebook unless they are being ironic).
Teenage brains are still developing. They have less sense of danger and are more willing to take risks. It’s why they do absolutely bonkers things that make no sense. As a result of this, they pick up new technology at speed, adapt to change better and are helping this shift. Under 25s are the biggest group using AI platforms right now. When we look at what teens are doing, we get a little vision into what shifts may be taking place in two or three years’ time for the rest of us.
The old ways are still working
No matter what folks online might be saying, AI search still only accounts for a small amount of the search traffic. And while it might be tempting to ignore this until it takes up a larger percentage, it would be foolish to do so. As more people get used to AI platforms, they will start using them. Do I think ChatGPT will overtake Google? Unlikely. It’s too much of a behemoth right now.
However, when someone using AI hits your website, it’s because a level of trust has been developed. The trust is only developed if we follow the basic, foundational marketing principles. AI is another channel or tool that marketers can use to support their campaigns.
In the same way as when social media platforms came out, it didn’t create any new ways of marketing. The same market research was needed, the same understanding and the same approaches. The tools that delivered the strategy were simply different. Respond to the behavioural change, but use the foundations that have always worked. Why? Because the tools change rapidly, humans do not.
Go back to what it is that you’re selling, who you are selling it to, and really dig deep into those human motivations.
Be the early adopter
There are huge benefits to shifting and being an early adopter. You get the traction before it gets difficult. But let’s be clear, you and every other marketer or business owner out there want to be the early adopter. Not everyone is acting on it yet.
Some of the simple actions you can take are getting your website updated and structuring your blogs. You can imagine how delighted I was to discover that the template on which this website is built doesn’t currently meet the structured needs for AI search. Yet, putting in the arduous changes now will pay off in the future.
Think of it as when you’re decorating your home. You can chuck a can of paint on the walls, and it will look beautiful. But if you don’t sort out the structural issues, that paint job will only last for a while before it needs doing again. Get the unseen work done, and the beautiful work you do at the end will be there for you to enjoy for much longer.
Change. Or Don’t.
It’s up to you if you want to adapt what you’re doing for AI. At the moment, not doing so won’t hurt that much, but if you’re still expecting the tactics of 2015 to work this year, then it’s not going to happen. The foundations of marketing remain no matter what. The strategy and the approach you take are the core building blocks. AI search is simply another channel, another tactic that you can use. The good news is that this is one which is based on really good content.
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