Stay Relevant in the Era of AI-Powered Search

Artificial intelligence is set to alter how your clients and potential customers discover and interact with your business. Algorithms are changing constantly, and AI is changing the tools and channels people use to find information. Are you prepared? Have you adjusted your approach to accommodate the changes AI is bringing to your channels?

You must adapt their strategies to align with the AI-driven marketing landscape to ensure you do not fall behind.

Focus on these three areas:

Is your website ready with structured data for AI?
Does your content/SEO strategy follow experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (EEAT) guidelines and come up in AI answers?
Is your data being analyzed using AI to give you better insights and predictions?

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Traditional marketing focuses on pushing content through known channels to segmented audiences. The AI-driven future leans toward a pull mechanism where information, products, and services are discovered by users through AI-facilitated environments. This shift requires marketers to rethink their approach from controlling the narrative to guiding AI that crafts personalized narratives for each consumer in real time.

Impact and Result

Expect to see a more robust and adaptive digital strategy, improved visitor interactions, and better alignment with the evolving AI-powered search landscape by implementing the recommendations in this blueprint.

Enhanced Digital Presence: By adopting structured data, creating high-quality content, and adhering to EEAT guidelines, you can improve your visibility and credibility in AI-driven search results.
Improved Engagement: Developing engaging and original content will lead to higher customer engagement as users find more relevant and valuable information on your digital platforms.
Higher Conversion Rates: Although organic traffic might decrease due to the rise of 鈥渮ero-click鈥� searches, the traffic that does reach your website is likely to be of higher quality and have a higher purchase intent. This can result in better conversion rates and more effective digital marketing strategies.
Adaptation to AI Trends: Organizations that quickly adapt to the changing AI landscape and optimize their digital assets for AI-driven search engines will be better positioned to stay competitive. This includes expanding focus beyond traditional search engines like Google to include emerging AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others.

Stay Relevant in the Era of AI-Powered Search 91制片厂 & Tools

1. Stay Relevant in the Era of AI-Powered Search Deck 鈥� Your company may be the expert on a subject, but will your content appear when people use AI engines to get answers instead of search engines?

The proverbial horse has left the stable. The way people are getting their information has changed. AI is making it more convenient for people to get their information about your organization even without visiting your website. Since you have no direct control over the results 鈥� what if the results are filled with hallucinations? 鈥� check if your website has all the elements necessary to appear in any kind of AI answers. Get practical tips on the best practices to follow to make your chances of appearing for the relevant questions and high intent traffic to your website.

Stay Relevant in the Era of AI-Powered Search

Are you ready to change how your customers and prospects find you in an AI world?

Analyst perspective

The way people are searching for information is changing rapidly. Instead of entering a search term or phrase in a search engine, people are using AI for research. They can collect data in one place instead of going to several places to complete their research. This change is taking place very fast; AI is gaining popularity as a way for people to find information on the internet. Website visit data from Similarweb (2024) showed significant user engagement for AI tools. ChatGPT had over 3.7 billion worldwide visits in October 2024. Newcomer Perplexity garnered 90.8 million visits during the same period.

91制片厂 a foundation based on structured data, a relevant content strategy, and adhere to EEAT guidelines 鈥� experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. You will need to make changes like these:

Reconsider your gated content strategy: Develop high-quality, engaging content, preferably with original research, and be discoverable by search engines.
Change metrics: Measuring organic traffic alone may not be accurate because there will be an increase in 鈥渮ero clicks,鈥� where your website appears in an AI overview with sufficient information, so the user is aware of you but does not come to your website.

It鈥檚 not just Google Search either. Many players, like ChatGPT from OpenAI (using Microsoft's Bing), Perplexity, Apple Intelligence, and Google鈥檚 Gemini, are emerging. You will have to expand your focus from Google Search alone.

Marketing teams that can quickly change information and marketing strategies will win in this scenario.

Shashi Bellamkonda
Principal 91制片厂 Director
Marketing 91制片厂 & Advisory
91制片厂

Executive summary

Your Challenge

It is unclear how any organization鈥檚 organic traffic will be impacted by all the changes happening in how people are finding information.

Investment in traditional search engine optimization (SEO) that was working previously may not yield the same results. Organic traffic may be down, but digital marketing channels may perform better in conversions.

Company leaders face the uncertainty of not being able to forecast what the digital channels will yield and if they will meet their revenue goals.

The public is using large language models (LLMs) that often can hallucinate and provide incorrect information about your organization or even leave your organization totally out of the answers it provides.

Common Obstacles

The fast-changing AI landscape is confusing to many organizations. There are no predictable stages when new AI models emerge, and you can鈥檛 predict where people are going to get their information.

In a multigenerational workplace, different people will use AI differently.

Companies have focused a lot on Google and may not have the resources to start testing new answer engines like Perplexity or expanding their efforts on Bing, which provides answers to AI models like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

It may be difficult to get the technical resources needed to modify digital assets and strategy and to move fast to cope with the changes.

Info-Tech鈥檚 Approach

We always advise our members to follow best practices. In the fast-moving digital space, companies often do not pause to implement best practices like structured data, original content, or regular content updates.

This blueprint walks you through steps to get your digital assets ready for the new wave of AI-generated content that your customers are going to absorb to ensure that you are part of the answers.

AI is significantly disrupting the way users find, interact with, and use your website

People are moving from search engines to AI LLMs for research. The growing number of people using AI tools for search shows that this needs to be addressed now. People are collecting data in one place versus going to several websites from a search engine, as well as conducting comparisons with AI tools.

Source: AIPRM, 2024

The traditional website journey is irreversibly changed by AI

AI will impact how and where your visitors use your site in their buyer journey, necessitating a change in your online strategy.

You will need to change how you evaluate metrics. Google鈥檚 AI Overview could lead to an 18% to 64% decrease in organic traffic for some websites (Search Engine Land, 2024). When you increase your chances of your content appearing for AI answers, your organic traffic may decrease but your conversions may stay the same or increase.

Stay Relevant in the Era of AI-Powered Search visualization

Are you ready to find ways to change how your customers and prospects find you in an AI world?

About Info-Tech

91制片厂 is the world鈥檚 fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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