AI platforms are not going to "recoup" your lost Google search traffic
Traffic erosion is happening everywhere. And it's not coming back. If your organic traffic is flat, that's actually positive. So here's why you should double down on BOFU SEO and cut your losses.
Everyone’s pissed about organic traffic erosion. I’ve made the case for cutting your losses because it’s largely a decline of upper funnel traffic.
And most websites never deserved those clicks in the first place, as they were either topically irrelevant or played a questionable role in influencing conversions.
This is a tough pill to swallow for many. But it’s the reason why traffic is down and revenue is up.
AI referral traffic represents less than 5% of the traffic pie for most B2B SaaS websites
Organic Search (Google & Bing) continue to dominate the traffic pie, while referral traffic from AI platforms is around the same volume you’d expect to see from social media channels.
Glenn Gabe wrote a great piece detailing the negligible volume of AI traffic compared to Google.
Here’s a real-world example from an enterprise B2B SaaS client.
AI platforms and social media platforms have a shared goal
DO NOT SEND TRAFFIC TO WEBSITES!
I have written on LinkedIn about why AI traffic will not “recoup” lost organic traffic and it’s primarily due to incentives and user behavior.
Here is something I am regularly explaining to clients:
LLM traffic is flattening out
My friend Kevin Indig also wrote a great piece on LLM traffic stagnation.
If AI search adoption grows but traffic stagnates, that only further validates everything Rand Fishkin has been saying about zero click marketing.
If traffic from LLMs is plateauing and we can’t recoup lost Google traffic, then what should we do?
GEO is not “just SEO” repackaged. The overlap is strong, but what’s different is the user interface and the approach to measurement.
My friend John-Henry nailed it:
AI search was not designed for traffic generation. It was designed for displaying answers.
With this in mind, my friend Sam Kuehnle wrote a brilliant post about Dark SEO and its implications.
His advice below is money 💰
How to wean executives off the teat of traffic and clicks
What I’m putting less weight behind:
CTR as a primary success metric (or at least, non-branded CTR)
Click traffic directly from SEO
Click-to-conversion attribution models
What I’m putting more weight behind:
AI visibility + citations
Brand search volume trends
Brand lift measurement over time
Self-reported attribution citing things like “online search” or “ChatGPT”
SEO measurement advice in the AI era
1. Track overall visibility instead of just clicks
Focusing on traffic leads to disappointment. Start tracking AI brand mentions, AI overview appearances, and brand mindshare occupancy across important SERPs.
2. Prioritize topics that need citations and brand recommendations
Avoid chasing topics that can be easily answered by AI training data. Prioritize BOFU SEO for maximum ROI on AI search platforms.
3. Use branded search as a leading indicator
There’s a dark funnel emerging in SEO, just like dark social, the term coined by my friend Chris Walker. The search journey may start with ChatGPT, but end with Google. There’s no attribution possible for this type of conversion journey, but rising brand queries is a signal of effective SEO, even if non-branded clicks are flat or declining.
Bonus: Siege Media found that rising homepage traffic is another signal of SEO effectiveness in the zero click era.
4. Don’t panic about declining organic traffic
Traffic is down everywhere, for everyone, pretty much across the board. I’m getting this question nonstop from clients. The remedy is to get clients focused on SEO ROI in terms of organic channel performance, rather than obsessing over traffic. Seer Interactive just came out with some updated research on CTR declines, and the numbers are brutal. This is only going to get worse.
5. Reframe traffic losses as TOFU irrelevance and establish a new baseline
You can demonstrate traffic losses from informational pages. This is due to AI overviews sabotaging consensus queries that are no longer deserving of clicks.
Next, shift your SEO strategy to prioritize BOFU execution in order to maximize ROI, rather than wasting time trying to recover lost volume from TOFU pages.