2025 is moving rapidly changing how people are searching for you.
ChatGPT, Grok and Google Gemini, they’re chaining things fast.
If you’re focusing on metrics such as website traffic, clicks to your website and using those as priorities, ranking above your competitors in searching, you’re already behind in your thinking as to how to keep new business coming in form search marketing.
Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s) – the pages you’ve seen for 25 years, especially the ones looking for local services life doctors, chiropractors, senior living facilities, etc. are not even really used anymore. Ask around, you’ll see it’s maybe 1 out of 10 times. These people are going into directly AI searches or Google local otherwise known as Google maps.
Currently, you can see that there is an AI mode at the top of Google now. It’s not the default search just yet, but how long until it is? And when that happens, you’ll likely see the old search results, what you’re used to seeing, become history.
Google has been testing different pages for their AI mode, daily. When this mode becomes the default we’re not sure, but we’d guess within the next 12 months or so. . ChatGPT and Grok have taken quite a bit away from Google search but Google still is the 500 pound gorilla in the search space.
Remember, AI is not thinking for you in search. AI is just an agent interposed between you and the Internet. You use it to search the internet. The Internet is kind of 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.
ChatGPT and Grok are simply doing those searches for you. It is dramatically changing how those searches are occurring, though. Instead of people putting in “keywords” like you’ve been used to, 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 calling a “zero click” atmosphere. This means that people aren’t going to be going to your websites. It’s exaggerated, for sure, but as an example: Informationally based websites 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,
Dan York
Stellar-eMarketing, Inc.