Possibly. Let’s Index Growth To Normalize the Search Data.
Like most SEO’s, I’ve been staying on top of the latest news around AI (especially Google AI Overviews / AI Mode and ChatGPT) to see how this might impact our industry. I’m currently working on three sites, two of which have enough AI referral traffic data to analyze so I used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 to index my search traffic to reveal insights. The results were interesting.
Site #1 Search Traffic Growth Index
Site #1 Search Traffic % of Total Sessions
If I’m looking purely at % of total sessions then AI Search would almost seem like a waste of time to even ponder. But if we’re indexing the growth of these channels then that tells a much different story. There also appears to be a correlation between AI Search growth and decrease in Organic Search % of total sessions despite SEO traffic continuing to increase YOY on this site. My hypothesis here is that AI is playing a part in influencing traffic even if it’s not directly attributable via clicks. “Zero-Click Search” is really a thing now.
Site #2 Search Traffic Growth Index
Site #2 Search Traffic % of Total Sessions
For the 2nd site here, both the AI Search growth index and % share of sessions follow a similar trend as site #1 despite being in a different vertical.
Site #1 % of Zero Click Keywords Growth
It’s of no surprise that there have been large increases in the number of searches where AI Overviews and People Also Ask are showing up in the SERP. As a follow-up I uploaded the April month-to-date query data from Google Search Console and the SEMRush AI Overviews keyword list into Gemini to do semantic topic matching on the GSC query impressions. The idea here is that SEMRush is a 3rd party tool that doesn’t actually have 1st party data, meanwhile Google is not being transparent on their side either so let’s triangulate this and estimate AIO presence on our own GSC data. What this reveals is that 23% of total search impressions actually have AIO. If we compare with six months ago there was almost no AIO presence and now it’s about a quarter of our searches here has AIO in the SERP this is certainly having an impact on organic search traffic. If I really wanted to get fancy with this then I would have converted both CSV files into vector embeddings then estimate the impression share based on cosine similarity but this is good enough.
Site #2 % of Zero Click Keywords Growth
What’s interesting about site #2 is that the % of keywords that have AIO is higher than the estimated % of search impressions with AIO. If we look at the pie charts below that might be due to site #2 having a lower % of informational search queries than site #1 does. Both sites are potentially impacted but #1 much more so.
Site #1 AI Overviews by Search Intent
There are definitely ethical issues to say the least with AI Overviews dominating informational search queries by stealing content from publishers then not linking back to their sites. Google’s limited attempts to link to-date have been half-assed at best. You can’t justify that you’re increasing user satisfaction by doing this while directly ripping off content. Would AI know anything if it weren’t for 3rd party websites? No.
Site #2 AI Overviews by Search Intent
Is GEO & SEO The Same Thing?
Rarely does a day go by when I don’t see someone arguing whether SEO & GEO are the same thing or are they different. I personally don’t think there is a need to differentiate at this point aside from the method of tracking visibility on each is drastically different. Here’s a comparison of the same two sites. I wanted to see if there was any similarity of the top 25 landing pages on both organic search and AI search from February through March 2025. I chose the top 25 because AI search is obviously a smaller amount of traffic so there would be less long-tail URLs. Top 25 is a reasonable number to compare however. Based on this, there are a lot of similarities between the two mediums which makes sense as both rely on web content to inform the results. There’s only so many ways to cook a steak or describe Bora Bora for example without deviating from the consensus answer.
Site #1
Site #2
Conclusion
I didn’t include April 2025 metrics in these charts since it’s only April 11th as of this writing but both sites have nearly a 2% share of site sessions so far in April. That’s about double from March. These are only two websites but based on what I read on LinkedIn, I’m pretty sure that my hypothesis here is correct. AI Search & SEO traffic are interrelated. Now if SEO traffic starts to decline in earnest is that a bad thing? One of the two sites analyzed here had 7.41% conversion rate on AI Search traffic vs 2.78% for organic search traffic. The other site didn’t have any attributable conversions from AI Search traffic. Whether AI Search is beneficial or not likely comes down to search intent traffic mix, as informational search queries tend to be most impacted by AI at this point. Now if you’re a publisher that relies on web traffic to monetize (vs leads or sales) then yes, you’re going to be screwed.