We conducted a study to find out how AI search (including Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity) could impact digital marketing and SEO industry traffic and revenue over the coming years.
Based on over 500 high-value digital marketing and SEO-related topics and subtopics, translated into specific search terms and prompts.
What we learned could help the digital marketing industry prepare for an AI-dominant future.
Here are our key findings and what they might mean for you:
5 Key Findings from Our AI Search Study
1. AI Search Visitors to Surpass Traditional Search Visitors in 2028
Digital marketing and SEO-related topics may start driving more visitors from AI search to websites than from traditional search by early 2028, according to our research.
This likely also reflects a broader shift across all industries.
And if the default Google Search experience becomes AI Mode, this transition could happen much sooner.
We expect AI search engagement to increase as the technology becomes more familiar and accessible. Reducing users’ reliance on traditional search results.
For example, ChatGPT weekly active users grew 8x from October 2023 to April 2025 and are now at over 800M.
And Google has started to roll out AI Mode, which provides a ChatGPT-like experience and completely replaces the traditional search results page.
Google also recently expanded its use of AI Overviews (AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional search results).
As user habits change, many clicks will transfer from traditional search to AI search. And some clicks will disappear altogether.
In other words, combined traffic will likely decline at first, then stabilize and slowly grow.
This is because AI search:
- Compresses the marketing funnel: By providing much of the information users need upfront, AI search can eliminate the need for users to visit various websites and pages
- Deprioritizes links: AI search doesn’t always include links to referenced brands or content. Links that do appear tend to be less prominent than those found in traditional search.
What This Means for You
AI search traffic has the potential to overtake traditional organic search traffic within the next two to four years. If you don’t start optimizing for LLMs now, competitors could establish themselves in AI results and capture the majority of available exposure and visits.
While the foundation of LLM optimization overlaps substantially with traditional SEO, they aren’t exactly the same.
The first step is understanding your visibility in LLMs.
A powerful way to track your LLM visibility against competitors is with Semrush Enterprise AIO.
The tool generates brand-specific prompts across different stages of the buyer journey. Then it uses these prompts to evaluate your and your rivals’ visibility and brand mentions across LLMs.
For example, an ecommerce brand selling athletic socks might see prompts like “men’s running sock brands” or “best socks for yoga.”
If an enterprise product isn’t right for you, track your AI visibility with the Semrush AI Toolkit instead.
2. The Average LLM Visitor is Worth 4.4x the Average Traditional Organic Search Visitor
We have seen that the average AI search visitor (tracked to a non-Google search source like ChatGPT) is 4.4 times as valuable as the average visit from traditional organic search, based on conversion rate.
As AI search grows (and traditional search declines) for everyone over time, we project AI channels to drive similar amounts of economic value globally by the end of 2027 and potentially grow far beyond that in later years.
AI search visitors tend to convert better because LLMs can equip users with all the information they need to make a decision.
By the time an AI search user visits your site, they have likely already compared their options and perhaps even learned about your value proposition. Making them much more likely to convert.
Plus, AI responses are presented like personal, word-of-mouth recommendations. So they may have more emotional impact and persuasive power than traditional search results.
What This Means for You
AI search visitors tend to be more highly qualified than traditional organic search visitors. So even the smallest traffic gains from AI search can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
Good news: Currently, traditional SEO factors drive a large portion of brands’ visibility in LLMs. For example, publishing helpful content, ensuring your webpages are crawlable, and securing brand citations (which are basically branded backlinks that don’t actually need to be linked).
But to take it a step further, you can clearly communicate your value proposition to AI systems by:
- Presenting information in an easily quotable or “chunkable” way
- Maintaining consistent brand messaging across marketing channels
- Inserting brand information in locations LLMs learn from
- Publishing machine-readable data to support your claims
- Managing negative sentiment about your brand online
Semrush Enterprise AIO shows how your brand is portrayed across LLMs. The tool also provides direct recommendations to help you build on your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses.
3. ChatGPT Search Primarily Cites Lower-Ranking Search Results
When ChatGPT search cites webpages, the pages it cites rank in traditional organic search positions 21+ for related queries almost 90% of the time, according to our data.
Perplexity and Google’s LLMs also frequently cite pages that rank lower in traditional search results.
However, some LLMs cite pages ranking in traditional organic search positions 1 to 5 more often than they cite pages in positions 6 to 20. In other words, ranking well in traditional search may still help you get cited in LLMs (or the same factors that help you rank traditionally also improve your visibility in LLMs).
Still, our data shows that you can get cited in LLMs while ranking relatively poorly in traditional search. We have three main theories why:
First, AI systems simply have a larger pool of content to choose from in positions 21+.
Second, AI search experiences are primarily designed to surface information. While traditional search experiences are primarily designed to surface entire webpages.
This means AI systems can focus more on the relevance and quality of discrete “chunks” of content. And less on overall page experience (e.g., load speeds and content depth).
Third, AI systems can develop a more sophisticated understanding of user intent than traditional search engines. Because they can:
- Process natural language more effectively
- Gain context through conversation
- Build an understanding of each user over time (beyond simple demographics)
This means LLMs can focus on delivering the best response for the specific user. Rather than the best result for the average user.
What This Means for You
Ranking in standard search results could help you earn citations in ChatGPT and other AI systems. So, traditional SEO could remain just as important even as traditional organic traffic declines. However, ranking organically in the top three positions for a given keyword may not be as crucial for AI search.
Our research suggests that AI systems may be more likely to cite content tailored to highly specific use cases and audiences. This type of content should therefore play a key role in your future marketing strategy.
For example, you could create product guides tailored to specific verticals. Or create blog posts to answer the most niche questions your support team receives.
4. Quora Is the Most-Cited Website in Google AI Overviews
Quora is the most commonly cited website in Google AI Overviews, according to our AI search study.
Reddit comes in second place.
Quora and Reddit users often ask and answer niche questions that aren’t addressed elsewhere. Making them rich information sources for highly specific AI prompts.
Reddit may also perform well because Google has a partnership with Reddit and uses Reddit data to train its systems.
The graph below shows the top 20 most commonly cited domains in AI Overviews:
These are high-authority domains that also perform well in traditional organic search.
For example, check out the Domain Overview reports for Travel + Leisure, Good Housekeeping, and NerdWallet.
What This Means for You
Quora and Reddit marketing could play an important role in your AI optimization strategy because Google commonly cites these websites.
Getting featured on other relevant, high-authority websites (using digital PR and link building techniques to get brand citations) could also boost your AI search visibility.
You can discover the most impactful places to get mentioned with Semrush Enterprise AIO.
The tool identifies the most commonly cited webpages for your analyzed prompts. And flags whether your brand is not mentioned, mentioned favorably, or mentioned unfavorably.
5. Half of ChatGPT Links Point to Business/Service Sites
Our research shows that 50% of links included in ChatGPT 4o responses point to business/service websites (even though sites like Quora and Reddit perform best on an individual domain basis).
We believe this distribution is similar across other models.
This indicates that LLMs will often rely heavily on your website when generating responses about your business. And often consider business websites to be good sources of topical information.
What This Means for You
Your website has strong potential to get cited in AI responses—but you need to create the right kinds of content and make it LLM-friendly.
Here are our quick tips for success:
- Focus on quality. Just like search engines, LLMs value unique, useful, and authoritative content that aligns with a specific audience and intent.
- Create multimodal content. Multimodal content combines multiple formats like text, image, audio, and video. This gives AI systems more ways to interpret and display your content.
- Write for NLP. Natural language processing (NLP) is a method AI systems use to understand written content, so you should optimize content for NLP. For example, mention relevant entities, use clear language and grammar, and structure your content with descriptive headings.
- Publish comparison guides. Help LLMs (and users) understand the key differences between your offerings and competitors’ by creating useful comparison guides.
- Ensure crawlability. Make sure your website pages are crawlable and not rendered in JavaScript. Many AI crawlers will not execute JavaScript files.
And, watch for our in-depth guide to LLM optimization which we’ll be publishing next week.
Notes
Traffic and value projections are extrapolations of historical data and user adoption rates.
As part of our AI traffic projections, we modeled the probable impact of users who:
- Click an AI link without referrer data (in which case, the traffic is shown as direct or unknown)
- Manually navigate to the website after viewing an AI response (in which case, the traffic would be seen as direct)
- Are primed to buy after viewing an AI mention, but only after later visiting the website via other channels (such as branded search)
Start Preparing for an AI Future
AI search optimization isn’t just about gaining visibility now—it’s an investment in the future.
LLMs learn by finding patterns in vast amounts of online content. By working to shape these patterns today, your brand could be presented more frequently, accurately, and favorably for years to come.
Our research shows that AI search could be a major revenue and traffic driver by 2027, if not much sooner.
So, it’s time to take action.
Start tracking your AI visibility and building a stronger business strategy with Semrush Enterprise AIO (for enterprise businesses) or the Semrush AI Toolkit (for everyone else).
