IS AI KILLING SEO? WHAT THE LATEST SEARCH DATA MEANS FOR SMBs

AI search tools are growing explosively but still account for less than 1% of total desktop web activity, while Google processes 90% of global searches. The real story of 2026 isn't replacement – it's fragmentation. Zero-click searches now consume roughly 60% of Google queries, AI Overviews have slashed organic click-through rates by up to 61%, and Google searches per US user fell nearly 20% year-on-year. Yet total search volume keeps growing, AI-referred visitors convert at 4.4x to 23x the rate of traditional organic traffic, and every leading SEO expert agrees: the discipline is evolving, not dying.

The AI Search Surge: Impressive Growth, Modest Scale

ChatGPT now commands 800–900 million weekly active users globally, processing over 2.5 billion prompts daily. Google Gemini reached 750 million monthly active users by February 2026 – tripling in a single year. Perplexity AI handles 780 million queries monthly, up more than 3x from August 2024. Microsoft Copilot serves 150 million monthly active users across commercial and consumer products.

The growth rates are dramatic. AI platform traffic collectively surged 721% year-on-year by mid-2025, and AI referral visits to websites jumped 357% in the same period. ChatGPT's mobile app became the fastest to reach one billion global downloads.

Yet the Datos/SparkToro Q4 2025 State of Search report – the most methodologically rigorous tracker of real user behaviour, drawing on a clickstream panel of over 20 million anonymised users – puts this in perspective. AI tools accounted for just 0.77% of all US desktop activity by December 2025, up from 0.42% a year earlier. That's roughly 83% growth, certainly, but still a fraction of the approximately 10% held by traditional search engines.

Desktop dominates AI search usage. ChatGPT's web traffic splits 70% desktop to 30% mobile, Claude skews even more heavily at 89% desktop, and Perplexity sits at 83% desktop. This contrasts sharply with traditional search, where Google's mobile dominance remains near-total at 93–95% market share. The implication: AI search is primarily a desktop, work-hours phenomenon – IAB UK data shows 44% of AI tool time occurs between 9am and 5pm.

Google Is Losing Depth, Not Dominance

Google still processes roughly 90% of global searches – approximately 16.4 billion queries per day. Its UK market share sits at 93.35% as of August 2025. But two metrics reveal cracks beneath the surface.

Searches per user are falling. The Datos Q4 2025 report found that Google desktop searches per US user dropped from 120.7 to 103 year-on-year – a decline of nearly 20%. In Europe, the drop was a more modest 2–3%. As Rand Fishkin noted: "AI answers have dramatically altered the way many users engage with Google, answering their questions before they ever need to click on an organic result or perform a second/third/fourth search."

Google isn't losing users. It's losing repeat queries.

Zero-click searches continue rising. According to SparkToro/Datos data, roughly 58–60% of Google searches end without a click to an external website. For every 1,000 US Google searches, only 360 clicks reach the open web. On mobile, zero-click rates hit 77%. Bain & Company found that 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results at least 40% of the time.

Google's own AI features accelerate this trend. AI Overviews now appear on an estimated 13–25% of search queries. The impact on clicks is severe: Seer Interactive's study of 25.1 million organic impressions found organic CTR dropped 61% when AI Overviews appeared. Google's newer AI Mode is even more aggressive – 93% of AI Mode sessions end without a single website click.

The consequences for publishers are already visible. HubSpot reportedly lost 70–80% of its organic traffic. Forbes saw traffic drop 50% year-on-year by July 2025. News websites collectively lost over 600 million monthly visits between mid-2024 and May 2025. Chartbeat data shows Google organic referrals to publishers fell 38% year-on-year in the US and 33% globally.

When AI Users Do Click, They Convert

When users click through from AI tools, the traffic flows disproportionately to established platforms. ChatGPT generates 77–87% of all AI referral traffic, with Perplexity at roughly 15% and Gemini growing fast at 6.4% (up 388% year-on-year).

The quality of this traffic compensates for its modest volume:

• Semrush found AI search visitors are 4.4x more valuable than traditional organic visitors based on conversion rates
• Ahrefs reported AI traffic drove 12.1% of their signups despite representing only 0.5% of visitors – a 23x conversion advantage
• Seer Interactive measured ChatGPT referral conversion at 15.9% versus Google organic at 1.76%
• Adobe found AI-referred sessions have 23% lower bounce rates, 12% more page views, and 41% longer sessions

This makes sense when you think about it. Someone who's asked an AI for recommendations and then clicked through to your site has already been pre-qualified. The AI has essentially vouched for you. That's a warmer lead than someone who clicked one of ten blue links on a Google results page.

What Makes AI Engines Cite Your Content

The emerging science of AI visibility reveals a different set of ranking factors than traditional SEO. Ahrefs' landmark study of 75,000 brands in December 2025 found the strongest correlation with AI visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews was YouTube mentions (correlation coefficient 0.737). Branded web mentions on third-party sites ranked second (0.66–0.71).

Notably, there was almost no relationship between the volume of pages on a site and AI visibility (0.194). Quantity doesn't drive AI citations – authority and presence across platforms does.

Content freshness matters significantly. Ahrefs' analysis of 17 million citations showed AI-cited content is 25.7% newer than typical Google SERP results. ChatGPT shows the strongest recency bias, with 76.4% of its most-cited pages updated within the last 30 days.

Other factors that boost AI citation likelihood include:

• Presence on Reddit and review platforms – domains with millions of Reddit mentions have roughly 4x higher citation chances; profiles on Trustpilot, G2, or Capterra triple ChatGPT citation probability
• Page speed – pages with First Contentful Paint under 0.4 seconds average 6.7 citations versus 2.1 for slower pages
• Content depth – articles over 2,900 words average 5.1 citations while those under 800 words receive 3.2
• Heading structure – pages using 120–180 words between headings receive 70% more ChatGPT citations

Perhaps most importantly, 80% of URLs cited by LLMs don't rank in Google's top 100, according to Ahrefs. Traditional SEO ranking position does not determine AI citation. As Tim Soulo, Ahrefs' CMO, summarised: "Brand mentions are the new backlinks for the AI search era."

The Expert Consensus: Evolving, Not Dying

Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy at Amsive, published the most detailed 2025 industry assessment in January 2026. She directly challenged the "SEO is dead" narrative, noting that many of the loudest voices lacked context about how modern SEO works, and that some emerging tools had allegedly funded coordinated campaigns promoting the narrative through paid micro-influencers.

Rand Fishkin has consistently argued the AI threat is overblown in absolute terms while acknowledging real shifts. Google still drives 210 times more searches per day than ChatGPT, and ChatGPT's usage remains smaller than DuckDuckGo's. But Fishkin concedes "the SEO opportunity pie is shrinking" and predicts peak employment in the sector may have passed.

The operational consensus across experts can be distilled to four principles: brand authority and authentic expertise (E-E-A-T) matter more than ever; traffic as a primary KPI is declining in relevance; LLMs fundamentally depend on traditional search engine indexes for their citations; and diversification across platforms – Google, YouTube, Reddit, AI tools, social media, newsletters – is no longer optional.

What This Means for UK Businesses

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) represents the practice of structuring content so AI tools can understand, trust, and cite it as a direct answer. It differs from traditional SEO in its focus: where SEO targets rankings and clicks, AEO targets citations, brand mentions, and visibility within AI-generated responses.

But as Ray and others emphasise, AEO builds on SEO foundations rather than replacing them – 99% of URLs shown in Google's AI Mode appear in the top 20 organic results. You can't optimise for AI if your traditional SEO fundamentals aren't solid.

For UK businesses specifically, the Ofcom Online Nation 2025 report provides the most authoritative data. ChatGPT accumulated 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, a fivefold increase. An estimated 30% of UK Google searches now display AI-generated overviews. Among 15–24 year olds, 63% had used AI tools by July 2025, with over a fifth using them daily.

However, UK AI sentiment lags the global average. The EY AI Sentiment Index scored the UK at just 54 out of 100 versus a global average of 68. Among UK sole traders, 42% have no plans to adopt AI at all. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity: businesses that move early on AEO face less competition than in the US market.

The ONS reports that UK business AI adoption has risen steadily from 9% in September 2023 to 23% by September 2025, with IT and telecoms leading at 93% and finance at 83%. Europe's regulatory environment adds another layer – the EU AI Act's full high-risk compliance requirements take effect in August 2026 – but the UK's post-Brexit regulatory approach remains lighter-touch and more pro-innovation.

Practical Steps for 2026

Based on the evidence, here's what we recommend for UK B2B businesses looking to adapt their strategy:

The Strategic Imperative

The data paints a nuanced picture that neither catastrophists nor dismissers get right. AI search is real, growing fast, and already reshaping user behaviour – Google searches per user are down 20%, zero-click rates approach two-thirds, and publisher traffic losses are severe.

But AI tools still represent under 1% of total desktop activity, Google dominates 90% of search globally and 93% in the UK, and the vast majority of internet users supplement rather than substitute.

The strategic imperative for B2B marketers isn't to abandon SEO but to expand its definition. Brand authority, third-party mentions, YouTube presence, structured data, and content freshness now drive AI visibility alongside traditional ranking factors. The businesses winning in 2026 are those treating AI search as an additional channel requiring its own measurement – tracking citations and brand mentions in AI responses, not just organic rankings – while maintaining the SEO fundamentals that still power the majority of web discovery.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Sources & References

• • Datos/SparkToro Q4 2025 State of Search Report
• • Search Engine Land: Google searches per US user fell nearly 20% YoY
• • SparkToro: 20% of Americans use AI tools 10X+/month
• • Ahrefs: AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors – 75,000 Brands Analysis
• • Ofcom Online Nation 2025 Report
• • Semrush: AI Search Traffic Study 2025