Digital Marketing Insights

Gartner projects organic search traffic could drop 50% by 2028. Not surprising, because people aren’t Googling like they used to, they’re now asking AI to just answer the question.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews don’t hand you a list of links anymore. They synthesize an answer, pull from whatever sources they find most useful, and deliver it before you ever click anything.

For brands, that changes everything. Ranking on page one used to be the whole game. Now you can rank and still be completely invisible inside the answer that actually gets read. The new competition isn’t for position. It’s for reuse.

Search Engines Rank Pages. LLMs Reconstruct Answers. 

Google’s job is to find the best existing webpage and point you to it. That’s it. Relevance, authority, backlinks. All of that optimization exists just to influence that one decision: which link goes first.

LLMs work nothing like that. When you ask ChatGPT or Gemini a question, it doesn’t retrieve a page, it builds a response on the spot, stitching together pieces from dozens of sources into one coherent answer. Your content doesn’t get a ranking. It either gets used or it doesn’t. That’s a fundamentally different competition. With traditional search, you’re fighting for position. With AI, you’re fighting for inclusion and those require completely different strategies.

Google’s AI Overviews alone already reach over 1.5 billion users a month. The audience is there. The question is whether your content is the one being reconstructed into the answer they’re reading.

The Goal Isn’t Just To Rank First In Seo

Usability is the new SEO. And most brands aren’t writing for it. AI systems don’t reward the most optimized page. They reward the most extractable one. Clear structure, direct answers, credible sourcing, those are the signals that get your content pulled into a generated response.

According to BrightEdge, 68% of AI Overview citations come from pages that don’t even rank in the traditional top 10. Meaning Google’s own ranking system is not the filter AI uses. The numbers back this up. AI Overviews cite an average of 8 to 10 unique sources per answer according to Search Engine Land, and first position on Google only captures around 27% of clicks according to Backlinko. Two completely different games running at the same time, with two completely different rules.

So the question for any brand right now isn’t just “where do we rank?” It’s “are we written in a way that AI can actually use?”

This Is What Successful Content Looks Like

Clarity is a competitive advantage. That’s new. AI models don’t reward keyword density or long-winded thought leadership. They reward content that’s easy to extract. Clear headings, direct answers, factual statements that can be lifted and trusted.

According to Siege Media, pages included in AI Overviews are 2x more likely to use structured formatting like headers and lists than pages that aren’t. The bar is simple. If an AI can read your content and immediately understand what you’re saying, you’re in the game. If it has to wade through filler and vague claims to find the point, you’re not.

HubSpot found that content with a clear single-topic focus is significantly more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers than broad catch-all pages. Depth on one specific question beats width across many. Write like you’re answering someone directly. Because now, you actually are.

What Brands Need To Do

Stop writing for rankings. Start writing for answers. And that means being specific. Brands that cover one question thoroughly and credibly are far more likely to get cited than brands that publish broad, surface-level content trying to capture every keyword. According to Semrush, pages that directly answer a question in the first 100 words are picked up by AI Overviews at a significantly higher rate.

Structure matters too. Use clear headings, short paragraphs, and factual claims that can stand alone without context. Think of each section of your content as something that could be lifted and dropped into an AI response and still make sense.

Credibility is the third piece. AI models favor sources they can trust, which means author credentials, cited data, and consistent publishing on a clear topic all carry real weight now. Edelman’s Trust Barometer found that credibility signals are increasingly influencing how AI systems surface and recommend content.

The brands that win in AI search won’t necessarily be the biggest or the most optimized. They’ll be the clearest, the most direct, and the most trustworthy. Those are things any brand can actually control.