Use the AI Search Threat to Your Advantage

If you’ve found your free organic Google traffic, repeat visits, and online sales dropping at an alarming rate, you’re not alone. Both SMBs and large corporations, news media and even government sites are seeing their free organic search traffic disappear.

Google and other tech monopolies are creating a new content universe to replace the open web. It’s driven by AI and will answer all user inquiries with increasingly less relevance to the real world. It’s an AI version of reality, and it keeps users on their platforms so they can generate more revenue from them. Outbound clicks are viewed as threats to that profitability.

And the rate of loss of Google organic search clickthrough traffic of late is alarming.  US, Canadian and European travel agencies, DMOs, real estate agencies, and SaaS software companies are suffering the same plight – their free website visibility and traffic are falling. Worse, Google and others are using their content to present to users. Google hijacks the value others have created and leverages it for themselves.  This is the zero click universe.

While we look at the general pain of what these companies are doing, be aware that there is a AI-incursion resistant strategy possible. I’ve developed that and would be happy to discuss how to help you.

A Massive Trend Affecting your Business Future

This report below shows how massive the losses were 2025.  Real estate websites, according to the Digital Bloom report saw AI overviews having a 258% increase, which means substantial losses in clicks to real estate websites. 2026’s losses might be just as dramatic. It’s a crisis of visibility that many companies are struggling with, not realizing their businesses might be jeopardy with no return to profitability. Add on the fact that small businesses are hampered with high financing costs, taxes, and regulations they can’t fulfill, and 2026 might be a tough year.

Some good news: is that most of lost traffic is due to informational inquiries, not direct branded or transactional search queries. We still have opportunity in Google search to reach great customers — meaning advanced SEO is important.

I don’t want to get all alarmist, but experts are talking about the dismantling of the web — where Google, OpenAI and META close all gateways to web content. That squeeze has been happening for a while. They want to monetize every second of consumers time online — for massive profits. Their challenge is that if content is no longer created and published on websites, what will Gemini and ChatGPT scrape for their own answers?

Google’s stock price is rocketing due to this AI search opportunity, while META’s not enjoying it.

SMBs Forging a New Approach to Digital Marketing

For you as a business owner, the AI incursion will force a change in your approach to digital marketing. Like many business owners, you might think AI marketing tools and AI agents are coming to the rescue.  A recent post however, shows that businesses aren’t seeing increases in revenue or cost cuts when they’ve adopted AI. It could be, that AI is simply a threat rather than an asset.

In this post, I’ll help you see why your content might not be valued anymore.  

These two Google search queries above show that free organic listings for products/services display real, actual businesses to buy from. Google however, as you may know, has been regularly demoting organic search results in favor of ads, AI overviews and extraneous search boxes, to push what users want deep down the page. That results in less traffic for small businesses.  Travel searches tend to be very informational, thus travel companies stand to see big traffic losses.

In this way, AI overviews and AI search results leverage scraped content from websites for themselves, while ensuring the websites they took the information aren’t seen in searches.

According to a Brightedge report, one year ago, Google AI Overviews were showing for 30% of travel-related queries. That’s likely increased. That trend reflects the threat to traditional Google search referrals.

Big Push By Google and OpenAI to Overviews – the Zero Click Environment

It’s a trend to making websites invisible in search while providing a wider path to their AI-driven information or shopping experience – an alternate world of information experience.

to respond, search engine optimizers are hyping up GEO and AEO as sure fire solutions.  Whether they do prove productive is still ahead of us. Early reports are not promising.

You can improve your content and build the highest success and user engagement, proving strong relevance to users, and be universally loved by thousands, and yet still not show in AI engine answers/rankings. So AEO or GEO likely will not be the sales generating savior SMBs are hoping for. The citations they crave won’t pan out to actual business revenue. The human enjoyment of content isn’t a factor in AI search engines. Whether your content is cited in AI answers (AEO) depends entirely on how it answers a question and is relevant to a specific topic.

And your backlinks from other industry-related websites may suggest your site is authoritative, trusted and valuable, yet AI engines do not follow links. They don’t see those links as a recommendation by real people and authoritative people. Links were the core factor in Google’s search results quality check.

I’ve used AI chatbots (i.e., ChatGPT) with extended sessions of questions and answers, where I challenged  their output. Interestingly, AI search engines are evasive, altering the context, constantly providing excuses, and justified biases.  I found even after continuous questioning and doubting its reasoning, I could not get the bias out of its responses. Many times, there was a Woke bias in it that it would not let go of — it is part of the foundation of the AI system. So clearly, at least to me, the AI engines can present a version of reality, products, ideology, and services that could be highly biased against small businesses – citing small company’s lack of authority, trust factors, and content coverage as reasons for not referring any traffic to their websites. Large corporations on the other hand could meet the tough criteria and still be included in AI answers and citations.

You Can Always Advertise, Right?

Well, small companies can advertise on Google (and soon ChatGPT), or place ads on other industry websites or media sites. With all private websites seeing less traffic, ad placements on them will generate fewer leads.

Given the cost to advertise on Google’s monopoly search sites and on Facebook’s sites (Google and META account for most of the internet advertising market), small businesses may not be able to afford ad-based sales and lead generation. With so few ad spots available, competition is driving up pay per click prices. Advertising might not be a viable option for you in the years ahead. If you intend to rely on ads, then a persuasive content strategy is a wise choice. I can help you build your persuasive content architecture.

Even with the most persuasive and high-converting content experiences, competition and inflation are making the online space difficult to thrive in.

How Will Small Companies Adapt?

In response, digital marketing success now requires:

• genuine expertise
• persuasive content depth/experiences that AI cannot replicate
• multi-platform presence
• optimization for AI citations alongside traditional rankings
• business models that generate value from visibility even when traffic declines

You can fight back and adapt with a new plan a AI-Resistant Content Marketing Strategy –a Complete Action Plan. It’s one that helps you create better content experiences, customer loyalty, and visibility in online search.

This will be the next insight for you to enjoy, hopefully helping you get an edge in this constant struggle for business survival going on.

Your strategy will incorporate AI search engine optimization strategy, given AI Chatbots are improving their output, and users enjoy the tremendous speed and range of knowledge they provide.  Regardless of your traffic sources, persuasive content experience optimization is essential. Persuasion is where marketing is weakest — presenting you with your biggest opportunity.