The way buyers find and evaluate information is changing with generative AI, yet many B2B marketing teams are still optimizing for traditional organic search engines
It seems to me that one of the biggest ways generative AI is changing human behavior is learning speed. It’s a useful tool for getting up to speed on a new topic quickly. Brainstorming is a solid use case. I often find the follow-up questions AI presents along with its answer to be very helpful.
While that change benefits me personally, it’s also upending digital marketing because it’s changing how people find and process information. That’s a big challenge in B2B marketing because the entire digital marketing motion is often designed around one resource: a website.
Email, paid media, content marketing and even PR are all engineered, at some level, to bring traffic to a website. The longer people hang around a website, the more likely they are to buy stuff. And for most businesses, organic search is the single largest source of traffic to their website – and AI does seem poised to change much of that.
Below are a few keen observations about how generative AI is changing search.
1. Zero-click searches are a new opportunity rather than an end
Depending on whose research you believe, anywhere from 25% to 40% of searches are zero-click. “A zero-click search is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin,” wrote Paulina Wisniewska of the UK-based digital marketing agency Hallam. “It is a search, on any search engine, that yields zero clicks.”
She offers four reasons why this might happen:
- The question was answered directly AI;
- A bit of the visible text in search answered the query;
- The searcher reformulated their query; and
- The searcher clicked on another part of the SERP.
There are other possible reasons. Pogo sticking searches, for example, but those are probably the most common cases.
Zero-clicks started before generative AI got interested in search and it had many students of marketing, including me, calling for the revival of brand marketing. If no one clicks-through, you’ve got to have another way to stay top of mind and that’s where brand fit in.
Yet Paulina has another take that I think is a creative way to consider the problem: Sure, zero-click might be winding down one form of marketing (search), but it could be the beginning of something new. She calls it “total search.”
Instead of just optimizing for search engines, work to improve discoverability on all your other marketing channels as well:
“Take some time to think about how you can re-purpose or at least mention your website content on other channels, and include links to allow users to visit your site directly. This will help to counteract any negative impacts you may see on traffic to your website.”
It’s a good reminder that other channels are useful for discovery beyond search. YouTube for example is earning a name for podcast discovery. And I’ve observed anecdotally that posts on X seem to be indexed faster and more frequently.
Read more: What zero-click searches mean for your SEO via Hallam
2. Searchers weigh the trustworthiness of a site, not just an answer
Danny Goodwin, an editor with Search Engine Land, wrote up a study that reinforces the observations we all have about AI and search: when AI offers an answer that seems credible, the vat majority of searchers don’t click through to verify the citation.
Here are some of the stats:
- “Just 19% of mobile searchers and 7.4% of desktop searchers clicked on a citation”;
- “The median scroll depth inside AI Overviews is 30%; most users never read past the top third”; and
- “When users leave the AI Overviews, a third go to Reddit, YouTube, or forums.”
That last point is a bit of a puzzle because instead of checking the actual source cited – searchers go off to Reddit and forums, places known for anonymity, to seek out social proof. In other words, they are using these sites in an attempt to verify the veracity of the answer.
This is an interesting observation about human behavior because we aren’t just searching for answers anymore – we are reviewing those answers and contemplating whether or not we believe them.
Read more: Most users only read a third of Google’s AI Overviews: Study via Search Engine Land
3. Generative AI prioritizes relevance over search rankings
In a traditional search world, even the mighty Google won’t rank the best information in the world in search if it can’t crawl and index your website. That’s the barrier to entry on the web that gave rise to the SEO cottage industry.
But that was yesterday’s digital marketing problem, according to Carolyn Shelby, an SEO and AI strategist for Yoast, a popular SEO plugin. “The game is shifting from chasing position to securing presence in the AI layer of search.”
“These systems don’t rank full web pages in a linear list,” she wrote. “They retrieve and synthesize information based on relevance to the query and clarity of expression.”
Generative AI provides an opportunity to skip the ranking line, or so to speak:
“In AI-driven search, retrieval beats ranking. Clarity, structure, and language alignment now decide if your content gets seen.”
The focus needs to shift away from being optimized for search ranking and instead be optimized for the retrieval of precise answers.
Read more: Relevance is the new ranking signal: How AI search redefines optimization via Search Engine Land
4. Buyers using generative AI, but vendors are optimizing for search
Nearly nine in 10 B2B buyers (89%) are using generative AI “at every stage of the purchase process,” according to Forrester. The simplified format AI provides is accelerating how buyers find and evaluate products. This is a new problem for businesses because they are still optimizing content for search as if generative AI didn’t exist.
“Search is no longer about pages and rankings. Instead, it requires presence in AI-curated responses,” wrote Lisa Gately, a principal analyst with the research firm. “If your content isn’t crawlable or structured in a way that AI systems can interpret, you’re not in the conversation.”
It doesn’t matter how many sales and marketing touches you attempt if you aren’t even in the consideration set.
Read more: Shifting Search behaviors demand smarter content strategies via Forrester
5. Traffic from generative AI seems to be less engaged
Generative AI seems to be eating up a healthy dose of clicks, but the news gets worse. The smaller percentage of searchers that do click through appear to be less engaged. So, generative AI is sending fewer users to a site, and the users that do come through are spending less time with your content.
That’s according to a study also written up by Danny Goodwin. The study used event conversions in Google Analytics to draw some comparisons between organic search click rates and those from generative AI.
The key finding?
“In most sectors, organic traffic outperforms LLM referrals in driving engagement.”
That was true for consumer e-commerce and travel sites, but it wasn’t true for B2B e-commerce and SaaS companies. Even so, this finding also stands out:
“LLM traffic appears most useful for early-stage research or informational queries, not high-intent transactional behavior.”
That sure sounds like the two points in a buyer’s journey that are reliant on generative AI are the beginning and the ending. Yet all the steps in between – and there are a lot of steps to a B2B software deal – are still heavily reliant on organic search.
Read more: LLM traffic not as engaged as organic traffic: Study via Search Engine Land
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Image credit: Google Gemini
