Digital Marketing Insights

Your competitor is showing up in AI-generated results, and you’re not.

When someone asks tools like ChatGPT or Google’s AI what to buy, which brand to trust, or which product to choose, certain companies consistently appear in the answers. Others don’t.

This shift is already underway. In fact, around 50–60% of discovery queries are now happening inside AI systems instead of traditional search. At the same time, Google’s share of search has dropped to around 88% for the first time in 15 years, as more users turn to AI systems for discovery. 

That means a growing number of decisions are being shaped before a user ever clicks a website. This gap isn’t random. It’s driven by how AI systems decide which brands to recommend.

Links Are No Longer Enough

For years, SEO was built on one core idea: backlinks. The more websites that linked to you, the more authority you had. And the more authority you had, the higher you ranked.

That system still exists—but it no longer translates cleanly into how AI systems decide what to recommend. Today, nearly 90% of Google queries trigger AI-generated overviews, where answers are given directly instead of sending users to a list of links.

As a result, click-through rates are dropping, and traditional rankings are becoming less visible. Because AI isn’t just ranking pages, it’s selecting which brands deserve to be included in an answer. And backlinks alone are no longer enough to earn that place.

AI Runs on Conversations

If backlinks are no longer the primary signal, what replaces them? AI systems don’t just scan websites, they read conversations happening across the internet.

“AI systems are scraping and crawling the entire internet… reading what is said out there.” -Benedict Hayes, Director at Ethinos Digital Marketing

That includes platforms like YouTube, Reddit, review sites, forums, and even social media. These sources are constantly being analyzed to understand how people talk about different brands and products.

In some markets, AI platforms like ChatGPT are already among the top 3 to 6 most visited sites, showing just how quickly this shift is happening.

Instead of counting links, AI looks for patterns:

• Who is talking about your brand
• Where those mentions are happening
• And whether those mentions are positive, credible, and relevant

In other words, it’s no longer about how many sites link to you. It’s about how often and how well you’re being talked about. Because that’s what AI uses to decide which brands deserve to be recommended.

Search Behavior Has Changed. Has Your Brand?

This shift isn’t just happening behind the scenes, it’s changing how people actually search. Instead of clicking through multiple websites, users are now turning to AI tools to ask questions, compare options, and make decisions in one place.

“AI is doing that homework for the user.” Benedict Hayes, Director at Ethinos Digital Marketing

In many cases, the AI pulls information from across the internet and delivers a single, consolidated answer removing the need to visit multiple sources. This shift is already visible at scale. AI-driven platforms have rapidly climbed into the top tier of global traffic, with tools like ChatGPT now ranking among the most visited platforms in multiple markets.

That means fewer clicks are happening overall. In fact, for roughly every 200 AI prompts, only one results in a click-through, as discovery increasingly happens without users leaving the interface. By the time a user reaches a brand, much of the decision-making has already been done. That’s why visibility in AI-generated answers matters more than ever.

Because if your brand isn’t part of that conversation early, it won’t be part of the decision later.