2025 is moving very quickly with regard to how people are searching.
AI search, whether it’s coming from ChatGPT, Grok or Google Gemini, is moving in very quickly.
If your company that you’re working with is still reporting metrics such as website traffic and clicks to your website and using those as priorities, they are very likely behind the ball on this one, already.
Regular search engine result pages (SERP’s), which are the pages that you’ve seen for call it 25 years, in particular people looking for local services, such as mold removal service, water damage restoration, board up services, etc., are primarily not even used. These people are going into directly AI searches or Google local (AKA Google maps).
Currently, you can see that there is an AI mode at the top of Google. Now that is not the default search just yet, but how long do you think it will be before that is the default search? And when that happens, we will very likely see the old search results, the organic results that were used to seeing forever, become practically useless.
Google has been testing different pages for their AI mode and it changes daily. When this mode becomes the default, we’re not sure, but we would guess that it’s probably somewhere in the next 12 months. ChatGPT and Grok have taken quite a bit away from Google search although they still remain to be the 500 pound gorilla in the search space.
Now, one of the things that people think AI is doing, is thinking for them. But you realize that AI is just an agent that has now been interposed in between you and searching the Internet. The Internet you could kind of conceive as a giant card catalog just like in an old library. But instead of cards arranged by the Dewey decimal system, you have webpages sitting on servers, millions and millions and millions of them.
So what ChatGPT and Rock are doing is doing those searches for you. It is dramatically changing how those searches are occurring. Instead of people putting in “keywords” like you’ve been used to for a quarter of a century, people are “prompting.” A prompt can be a paragraph long and has all sorts of specific instructions for the AI search agent to follow.
This is leading to what they are now calling a “zero click “atmosphere. This means that people aren’t going to be going to your websites. Informationally based websites, depending on what they are, have been losing 30 to 70% of all of their Internet traffic just in the last eight months due to this zero click atmosphere created by AI searching. This does not mean that leads are going to stop coming in. It’s just how those leads come in is changing. This technology is very quickly being adapted and is being adapted. Much faster than companies are keeping up with it.
Sincerely.
The Stellar-eMarketing, Inc. Team