There is a certain panic among digital marketeers as AI is claimed to change the game of search engine marketing respectively SEO. There are saying that search engine use is declining in the favour of conversational based generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. All this can be a serious threat for the one company that dominates this space since the late 90s and that there is the first time the chance that this company will get into serious troubles: namely Google.
Google’s revenue is mostly coming from its cash cow, the search engine and selling paid ads on keyword base on it to be used by marketeers. It is a big portion of their revenue but also not their only source of revenue:
So the business model might be under pressure if web traffic on the Google search declines in favour for new AI based tools, but for now this is definitely not the case and also the outlook + the answers from Google itself that we could hear at Google I/O are clearly speaking for a powerful position of Google in the AI race.
That web of as today
Looking at the numbers we can see that search and social media are still dominating the web as we know it – but ChatGPT is on the rise:
| Website | Domain name | Ranking | Type | Company / Nonprofit organization | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Similarweb (April 2025) | Semrush (April 2025) | |||||
| Google Search | google.com | 1 ( ) | 1 () | Search Engine |  United States | |
| YouTube | youtube.com | 2 () | 2 () | Video-sharing platform | United States | |
| facebook.com | 3 () | 3 () | Social Media Networks | Meta | United States | |
| instagram.com | 4 () | 4 () | Social Media Networks | Meta | United States | |
| ChatGPT | chatgpt.com | 5 ( )1 | 6 ()2 | Programming and Developer Software | OpenAI | United States |
I hear a lot that Google will loose its market position in search cause of AI. What they announced at I/O and what is already working for them in this field, makes me positive that they will retain their market position. Contenders like perplexity or also the web search feature in chatgpt must get beyond the established usage pattern of “to Google” something…and this is only happening at scale if they offer significant better product experience and results + get the broad awareness (according to similarweb data ~30% of the web traffic applies to Google and only 2,3% to chatgpt which in his category of GenAI is taking 80% of the traffic). perplexity is going to be an a top tier acquisition candidate in the next months and I bet that either Microsoft, amazon or Apple are taking their chance. Only if Apple is backing really up from their search deal with Google, this could lead to massive tectonic shifts – but to do this they need a working alternative at their hands (maybe this is Perplexity).
Is SEO dead now?
Google is globally rolling out AI Overview and announced AI Mode at their Google I/O conference two weeks ago. So this can be seen as an answer to rising usage pattern in ChatGPT and the AI first search Perplexity but is also a logic step forward for the #1 information broker on the web right now. Here is an example of an AI overview:
As you can see we got an AI generated short summary on the topic but we also still got links, that are used as references and sources. So the claim that Google will not send clicks at all is definitely wrong. Will it send less? – probably as we can see that the top result links are being used here. Which brings us to the conclusion that is even more important to rank on top positions that it was before. Or as important? Nobody could really tell at this moment, but the Google search was always a long tail game where only the top players win and get the traffic for the keywords they have done the SEO homework for. So in general the fundamental mechanism behind the AI powered search is not so different, as still the search is relying on input information/sources for their output.
Don’t fall for this pitch….
Numerous agencies are advertising AI-SEO to be present as brand in ChatGPT and other GenAI platforms. They market it as “Answer Engine Optimization,” GEO, and other terms. However, here’s the reality: The AI utilizes the same data sources as traditional search engines, including the engines themselves. First, succeed in the information layer, as this is the foundation for excelling in the search and consolidated answer layers that follow. Your reputation is the true driving force behind this – despite the claims of AI gurus that they can perform magic trick prompts to solve it.
Google itself gives useful tips (and this is not so different of what we were doing before for SEO):
While specific optimization isn’t required for AI Overviews and AI Mode, all existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile, for example:
- Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date
- Ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure
- Making your content easily findable through internal links on your website
- Providing a great page experience for users
- Making sure that important content is available in textual form
- Supporting your textual content with high-quality images and videos, when applicable
- Making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page
So in summary this are things that you should already been doing now to get ahead in Google search results. We are in a fast moving field and things change also quickly but our tip is don’t fall for easy and fast promises from service providers in this field to make you AI top ranked, as there is no way that those folks actually can control the technical behaviours they are selling.
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