The move from Search to AI Search Engines – what does it mean for website owners and marketers?

As a result of AI Search the Search Engine landscape is changing. Dramatically. And it will have a big impact on all our marketing efforts, especially on how to be found on the internet.

Search has been dominated by Google’s indexes and algorithms for so long that it has become a keystone of many B2B marketing strategies. But now there’s a quantum shift from Search Engines to AI Search, or ‘Answer Engines’ as they are more accurately described, and it’s happening in front of our eyes. The AI powered search for websites is the future!

AI Search: if you’re not in it you can’t win it.

Everyone wants to be the first there, nobody wants to be a laggard, because leaders always benefit before the laggards catch up. They win the leads and engagement, profiting from their alacrity by driving them ahead of the rest of the market. The laggards risk going out of business.

The simple fact is that AI Search Engines, or rather ‘Answer Engines’ like ChatGPT, Deepseek and Gemini, are rapidly replacing traditional Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

In 2024, Google’s best year ever, they got over 5 trillion searches – 22% up on 2023. That was 34X the next Search Engine (Bing) butt only(!) 26X more searches than ChatGPT. And the gap’s closing fast.

The league table for 2024 looked like this:

So, you can see that Google was easily the market leader and ChatGPT was (also easily) the largest Answer Engine. But it was still a long way behind Google.

In fact, it is not forecast to overtake Google Search until 2031:

Nevertheless, ChatGPT still achieved 47 billion visits in 2024 and it may be that it is more relevant for some sorts of industries than others. So whilst it is important to understand AI Answer Engines and to start using them now, it may not be essential for every company in the short term. Trouble is, by the time you find out it’ll be too late. So you have to act now!

AI is now driving the answers to questions

AI Answer Engines work differently to Search Engines. With AI it’s serving up an ‘answer’ rather than an index-based list of links. So it is more effective at generating a helpful response to a question than a Search Engine.

However the technology doesn’t yet go so far as to allow a ‘transaction’. So if you want to purchase something or sign up to a Newsletter, you still have to visit the actual website that the answer came from.

But we should not write off the principal Search Engine, Google, too soon. As the largest player in the market by far it has easily the deepest pockets, the most experience and the strongest brand to enable them to act as a platform for their own solution.

Google AI Search: ‘AI Overview’ and ‘AI Mode’

They are evolving fast and have already developed ‘AI Overview’ – which you will now often find at the top of your SERPs – which delivers an ‘answer’ rather than a list of linked websites. This AI powered Search is what they call the concept of ‘zero clicks’. In other words, Google keeps the Searches inside their own area of influence, rather than searchers clicking away to destination website. As such, it’s a kind of hybrid Search Engine AI.

AI Answer Engines are particularly helpful to searchers using long-tail keywords. I.e. complete questions and/or phrases rather than just several words, such as ‘how do I supply power to a microprocessor’, rather than ‘microprocessor power supply’ (a quick google of these two will tell you all you need to know about how the different approaches work).

In fact Google introduced their even more advanced ‘AI Mode’ in the USA in March 2025. So now there is no need for anyone in the USA to leave the Google space, unless they want to read a specific website or to make a transaction.

What it means for you

You may think that these developments challenge the need for having a website at all. Especially if it is just a brochure-style site with no ecommerce or sign-up widgets. Indeed the trend is already here, with 65% of searches resulting in zero clicks.

But don’t be fooled: the AI Answer Engines still scour your website to find out whether it deserves to be used to answer the questions it receives. So now it is even more important to be ‘that’ website, as otherwise you will sink without trace (except on your email signature!).

By narrowing the criteria against which your website will be judged (and therefore served up), it is becoming even more important to ensure that yours is the ‘best in class’. The war is getting tougher, the battles harder to fight, and your weapon (ie your website) must be perfect in every way to be ‘the chosen one’.

How do I get chosen by AI Answer Engines?

Essentially they are a ‘Chat’ rather than ‘Search’ interface. In that they use an LLM (Large Language Model) rather than indexes. This then generates AI answers to questions, as opposed to links to websites which claim to have the answer.

To have any chance of success in this space, you should run an Answer Engine Audit. It will highlight what you need to do to your website to make it work hard for you and get the maximum number of brand mentions (which will lead to Answer Engine traffic).

You can actually do this by using Google’s AI Overviews, as well as ChatGPT and other chatbots such as Perplexity.

And while you’re about it, don’t forget to add ChatGPT into your GA4, as well as set up any other tracking tools.

What should your strategy consist of?

Then there are two approaches, organic and paid for.

• Organic: AEO – Answer Engine Optimisation.
• Paid for: AEA – Answer Engine Advertising.

1. Organic/AEO:

• This is primarily about getting the content right. The top pages are critical, and the headings in particular play a key role. So it’s important to refresh your H1, H2, H3 etc to optimise them. They need to answer the likely questions searchers will be asking. And these answers shouldn’t be buried in the text.
• Deeper Landing Pages also take on much greater importance. This is where the really important and detailed product content resides, so therefore the best opportunities for the website owner.
• It’s also vital to update your content frequently – every three months rather than (currently for Search Engines) every year. The effectiveness of this process can be informed by monitoring your ‘Impacts’ on the AEs.

The copywriting advice we would give for AEO is:

• Lead with the answer. A concise and complete answer to the primary question upfront, typically within the first 50-100 words.
• Use clear, unambiguous and concise language with no jargon.
• Ensure the copy is accurate and well informed, incorporating high quality links and citations, if they exist. Quality is key.
• Try and use conversational language, as in speech, rather than a formal style.

Another key aspect of organic AEO is technical:

• The website has to be designed and built on a suitable platform.
• You also have to make sure that the AI bots have easy access to your content and can see the quality.
• ‘Schema’ https://schema.org/ will help with this, involving adding code to your website’s HTML to emphasise the content type.

A further very important aspect of AEO is ‘Authority’:

• This is what used to be known as Domain Authority but is now more like Brand Authority.
• It is earned through (amongst other things) digital PR and consists of articles and brand mentions in highly regarded websites.
• So you will need to create and publish byline articles. As well as try and do some guest posting and earn any other (positive) mentions in trusted websites.

2. Paid for:

• This is a bit of a conundrum in the AE world. At present, OpenAI’s ChatGPT does not support direct advertising or have any sponsored content on the platform. But change is on the horizon
• In a recent interview with the Financial Times, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar confirmed that the company is exploring ways to integrate ads into ChatGPT. She stated that they have to be ‘thoughtful about when and where we implement them’. But it feels inevitable they will adopt advertising in some form soon (2026?). It’s important for us all to watch the space and be first to jump on the bandwagon!
• So it’s worth getting in contact and we can let you know when it becomes available.

Conclusion

Despite all the excitement and hype about AI, its role in the task of users navigating the internet is more of an evolution, rather than a revolution. It’s been going on for several years and it’s not happening overnight.

However it will almost certainly become the norm in due course, and this will profoundly affect all website owners and marketers.

As a website owner, the sooner you act to prepare your website for this next phase of marketing the more likely you are to benefit from it and not get left behind.

Contact us at Marcom and we’ll ensure you are properly prepared.

Footnote: My thanks to Graham Hansel, whose Webinar at CIM provided much of the information on which this article is based.