SEO & AEO Strategy

AI Search Traffic Is Surging, but Google Still Dominates the Funnel

The commonly cited "1/15th" ratio comparing AI search to Google search is outdated and was always too generous to AI. The actual picture depends heavily on what you measure.

ChatGPT processes roughly 2.5 billion prompts per day, which represents about 12% of Google's daily search volume when counting all prompts. But only 31% of ChatGPT prompts trigger a web search, making the true search-equivalent volume closer to 3.7% of Google's—roughly 1/27th, not 1/15th. By the metric that matters most to marketers—actual traffic sent to websites—Google sends 190 times more traffic than ChatGPT.

Google maintains approximately 89.6% of global search engine market share and processes 13.7 billion searches daily. Its traffic declined only ~1% year-over-year through mid-2025, making Gartner's February 2024 prediction of a 25% decline by 2026 look significantly too aggressive. However, the quality of Google traffic is eroding fast: AI Overviews reduce click-through rates for position-one content by 58%, and Google's AI Mode produces a 93% zero-click rate.

The strategic implication is clear: AI search represents a small but rapidly growing, high-converting traffic source. Forrester estimates AI search drives 2–6% of B2B organic traffic with approximately 40% month-over-month growth. Semrush projects AI platforms could rival traditional search as a traffic source within approximately three years.

For content planning through 2027, investing in AEO now means capturing an accelerating trend before competitors. As we explain in our Answer Engine Optimisation services guide, the companies that establish themselves as authoritative sources in AI search results today will have compounding advantages as those platforms grow.

Each AI Platform Plays by Different Rules—and Cites Different Sources

Perhaps the most consequential finding for marketers: only 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, and only 12% of cited URLs match across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. Platform-specific optimisation is not optional—it's the foundation of any AEO strategy.

ChatGPT and SearchGPT

ChatGPT retrieves results from Bing's index, with 87% of SearchGPT citations matching Bing's top organic results. Wikipedia dominates at 7.8% of all citations (47.9% of top-10 citations), followed by Reddit, Forbes, and G2. ChatGPT shows the strongest freshness preference of any platform, citing URLs 393–458 days newer than Google organic results.

The most-cited content format is the "best X" listicle, comprising 43.8% of all cited page types. Pages with answer capsules—concise, self-contained answer blocks at the top of articles—are the single strongest structural trait among cited pages. Notably, 90% of ChatGPT citations come from URLs ranked position 21+ on Google, meaning traditional Google rankings have minimal predictive value for ChatGPT visibility.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews has the most diversified sourcing, drawing heavily from Reddit (21%), YouTube (18.8%), Quora (14.3%), and LinkedIn (13%). It maintains the strongest correlation with traditional SEO: 76.1% of AI Overview citations also rank in Google's top 10.

AI Overviews now appear in roughly 50% of US searches, overwhelmingly triggered by informational queries (88.1%). Long-tail queries with 8+ words are 7× more likely to trigger an AI Overview. Content scoring high on semantic completeness—covering a topic comprehensively with self-contained passages of 134–167 words—is 4.2× more likely to be cited.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity is the most community-driven platform, with Reddit representing a staggering 46.7% of top-10 citations—nearly half. It averages 21.87 citations per answer (versus ChatGPT's 7.92), provides the most transparent citation system with visible clickable sources, and indexes against a proprietary database of 200+ billion URLs.

Perplexity favours structured, answer-focused content with definitive statements ("The best X is Y" rather than "Y might be good") and paragraphs of 40–60 words optimised for extraction.

Claude (Anthropic)

Claude uses Brave Search rather than Google or Bing, creating an entirely different competitive landscape. Claude selectively invokes web search—not every query triggers it—and tends to cite content with nuance, depth, and current perspective.

Its smaller market share (~3.8%) means less research data exists, but its visitors show the highest engagement (34.7 minutes per daily user) and highest conversion rate (16.8%) of any AI platform.

Technical Implementation That Actually Moves the Needle

Semrush's landmark study of 5 million URLs cited by ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode provides the clearest evidence on which technical implementations correlate with AI citations.

Schema Markup That Matters

Organisation schema leads, appearing on 25% of ChatGPT-cited pages and 34% of AI Mode-cited pages. Article schema is second (20% and 26% respectively), followed by BreadcrumbList schema (15% and 20%).

FAQPage schema deserves special attention. Google restricted FAQ rich results in August 2023 to only authoritative government and health websites, and HowTo rich results were fully deprecated. However, FAQPage schema remains actively supported—Google's June 2025 schema update removed seven schema types but explicitly kept FAQPage.

It appears on only 10.5% of AI-cited pages despite aligning closely with how answer engines retrieve information, representing a clear optimisation gap. The recommendation: maintain FAQPage schema on genuine Q&A content even without rich results, because it helps LLMs identify question-answer structures.

The llms.txt Standard

The emerging llms.txt standard functions as a robots.txt specifically for AI crawlers. Placed at your site root, it communicates which content AI systems can access and cite. Early adoption is growing, with Perplexity and other LLMs already checking for it.

On robots.txt itself, the critical distinction is between training crawlers (GPTBot, Google-Extended, anthropic-ai) and search/citation crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot). For AEO, you must allow search crawlers while optionally blocking training crawlers. ClaudeBot has the most aggressive crawling pattern at a 71,000:1 crawl-to-refer ratio, while GPTBot has the best reputation for respecting robots.txt rules.

Page Performance and Structure

Page performance matters more for AI than for traditional SEO because AI systems impose tight 1–5 second timeouts for content retrieval. Pages with First Contentful Paint under 0.4 seconds averaged 6.7 citations versus 2.1 for slower pages. Server-side rendering is critical—JavaScript-heavy sites challenge AI crawlers that don't execute client-side code.

URL slug length also correlates with citations: 17–40 character descriptive slugs receive the most citations across platforms.

Our SEO services incorporate these technical requirements as standard, ensuring your content is optimised for both traditional search engines and AI citation.

Off-Site Strategy Determines 85% of Your AI Visibility

AirOps research reveals that 85% of brand mentions in AI answers originate from third-party pages rather than owned domains. This makes off-site AEO strategy arguably more important than on-site optimisation.

Reddit's Shifting Dominance

Reddit has been the dominant force in AI citations, though the landscape shifted in late 2025. Profound's analysis of 4 billion+ citations found Reddit was the #1 cited domain across all platforms aggregated. However, after Reddit sued Perplexity for unauthorised scraping in October 2025, Reddit citations on Perplexity dropped 86%.

YouTube compensated immediately, and by January 2026, YouTube overtook Reddit as the most-cited social platform in LLM answers overall (YouTube 16% vs Reddit 10%). AI does not index Reddit content based on upvotes or karma—most cited posts have fewer than 20 upvotes. Q&A threads account for over 50% of Reddit citations, and the average cited post is approximately one year old.

YouTube's Rise

YouTube citations doubled from 18.9% to 39.2% of social citations between August and December 2025. YouTube is cited 200× more than any other video platform. Critically, on ChatGPT, 65% of YouTube citations point to channel pages rather than individual videos—channel-level authority matters far more than any single video.

Review Platforms for B2B

Review platforms are essential for B2B visibility. SE Ranking's 30,000-keyword study found review platforms appear in 34.5% of AI Overviews. G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius dominate, but citation patterns vary by platform: GetApp leads on ChatGPT (47.6%) and Perplexity (39.7%), while Slashdot leads on Google AI Overviews (16.6%), and SourceForge leads on Copilot (21.3%).

Brands with active profiles on multiple review platforms show a 3× higher chance of ChatGPT citation. The January 2026 acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp by G2 is creating a consolidated B2B review platform with 6 million verified reviews.

Building Entity Authority

Building entity authority requires consistent, machine-readable brand identity across the web. Organisation schema with sameAs links to Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase forms the foundation. Presence across 4+ third-party platforms increases citation likelihood by 2.8×. Brand mentions combined with citations together show 40% higher likelihood of reappearing across subsequent AI answers.

Wikipedia maintenance is particularly important for ChatGPT visibility, where it represents nearly half of top-10 citations.

Measurement Is the Biggest Gap—and a Fast-Growing Market

G2's AEO software category exploded from 7 products to over 150+ tools since March 2025, earning its first G2 Grid Report in Winter 2026.

Dedicated AEO Platforms

Profound (G2 Winter 2026 Leader) processes 5 million+ citations daily and tracks across all major AI platforms including GPT-5.2. Conductor positions itself as the only end-to-end enterprise AEO platform combining citation tracking with content workflows. Otterly.AI serves 20,000+ professionals with cross-platform monitoring starting at $29/month.

Traditional SEO Suites with AI Modules

Semrush launched its AI Visibility Toolkit as a $99/month add-on, featuring an AI Visibility Score (0–100), a database of 100M+ prompts, and persona-based prompt generation. Ahrefs introduced Brand Radar at $199/month to monitor brand recognition, placement, and perception across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. HubSpot offers a free AEO Grader analysing brand visibility across GPT-4o, Perplexity, and Gemini.

The Measurement Challenge

The core KPIs emerging for AEO include citation rate (how often your domain appears for target queries), AI Share of Voice (brand mentions divided by total market mentions), Brand Visibility Score (weighted composite of headline mentions, body citations, linked vs. unlinked mentions), and content velocity (how quickly AI picks up new content).

However, measurement faces severe limitations. Google Search Console anonymises all AI-related queries regardless of volume. GA4 is fundamentally click-based and misses zero-click citations—and 73% of brand mentions happen without trackable referral traffic. AI-referred traffic often shows as "direct" in analytics. Only 9.2% URL consistency exists in Google AI Mode across repeat queries, making snapshot measurements unreliable.

The practical approach combines tool-based citation monitoring with proxy metrics: branded search volume correlation, "How did you hear about us?" surveys, and manual spot-checks of target queries across platforms. Our SEO analytics guide covers how to build attribution frameworks that capture AI-referred value.

AI Agents and Multimodal Search Will Reshape the 2027 Landscape

Three developments deserve immediate planning attention for 2026–2027.

Autonomous AI Agents

Autonomous AI agents represent the most transformative shift. BrightEdge reports AI agents now account for approximately 33% of organic search activity and climbing. OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol has been open-sourced, letting Shopify merchants enable AI-agent checkout with one line of code. The global AI agents market is projected to grow from $5.4 billion (2024) to $50.3 billion by 2030.

The implication for content optimisation is profound: agents don't render JavaScript, require machine-readable data formats, and make autonomous purchasing decisions. Structured data (Product, FAQ, MerchantReturnPolicy schemas), headless CMS architectures, and llms.txt files become non-negotiable.

Multimodal Search

Multimodal search is accelerating rapidly. Google Lens processes approximately 20 billion visual searches monthly, with 20% being shopping-related. GPT-4o processes text, images, and audio natively with 320-millisecond response times.

YouTube's rising dominance in AI citations reflects AI systems' growing ability to analyse video transcripts, chapter markers, and visual content. The multimodal AI market is projected to grow from $2.5 billion (2025) to $42.4 billion by 2034. Content strategies must expand beyond text to include optimised video transcripts, structured image data, and alt-text optimisation.

Regulatory and Copyright Developments

Regulatory and copyright developments will reshape the playing field. Over 70 copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against AI companies, with the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic settlement being the largest. No major fair-use decisions are expected until summer 2026.

The EU AI Act's GPAI obligations are now in effect, with text-and-data-mining reservation-of-rights protocols being developed. These developments could significantly affect which content AI systems can access and cite, making robots.txt and licensing strategy increasingly important.

B2B Companies Face Unique AEO Dynamics and Opportunities

B2B buying behaviour has shifted dramatically toward AI search. G2 research shows 50% of B2B software buyers now start their purchasing journey in an AI chatbot rather than Google—a 71% increase in just four months. 89% of B2B decision-makers use generative AI during their purchasing journey, and 55% of enterprise buyers rely on AI search more than traditional Google search.

The B2B AEO opportunity is distinct from B2C in several ways. B2B buying committees search different aspects from multiple stakeholder perspectives—a CFO asking ChatGPT "best SOC 2 compliance platforms for mid-market SaaS" is deep in the buying process, not browsing casually.

Brand weight matters far more: branded mentions correlate 3× more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks in B2B contexts. Deloitte.com and McKinsey.com lead B2B visibility because AI systems recognise them as authorities for complex commercial queries.

For B2B platforms, the G2/Capterra consolidation is the most significant development. The combined entity will hold 6 million verified reviews and serve 200+ million annual buyers, likely becoming the dominant AI citation source for software evaluation queries.

LinkedIn content is increasingly cited by Google AI Mode and Perplexity for B2B queries, making executive thought leadership on LinkedIn a high-leverage investment. Reddit participation in relevant industry subreddits remains critical—Stripe engineers' authentic engagement in r/startups drives 67% of their AI citations.

As we outline in our Inbound Marketing Blueprint, the companies that combine strong traditional SEO foundations with AEO-specific optimisations are seeing compounding returns.

A Strategic Framework for the Next 18 Months

The AEO landscape in early 2026 reveals a clear hierarchy of priorities.

First, platform-specific optimisation is the foundation. With only 11% domain overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity, a one-size-fits-all approach fails by design. Optimise for Bing to reach ChatGPT, invest in Reddit and YouTube for Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, ensure Brave Search indexing for Claude, and treat each as a distinct channel.

Second, off-site authority drives 85% of AI citations, making third-party platform presence, digital PR, and entity consistency more impactful than on-site technical changes alone.

Third, content freshness has become a ranking factor comparable to domain authority. Pages not updated quarterly are 3× more likely to lose citations, and the most-cited content across platforms skews heavily toward recent publication dates.

The 18-month planning horizon must account for AI agents transitioning from information retrieval to autonomous action, multimodal content becoming a citation requirement rather than a differentiator, and regulatory developments that could restrict or expand AI access to publisher content.

Companies that build measurement infrastructure now—even with imperfect tools—will have the data foundation to adapt as the landscape accelerates through 2027.

Frequently Asked Questions

References and Sources

1. Ahrefs (2025). How Search Engines vs AI Chatbots Drive Traffic to Websites. Ahrefs Blog.
2. Semrush (2025). Generative Engine Optimization: Study of 5 Million URLs. Semrush Blog.
3. SparkToro (2024). New 2024 Zero-Click Search Study. SparkToro/Datos Research.
4. G2 (2026). AEO Software Category Report Winter 2026. G2 Grid Report.
5. HubSpot (2025). Free AEO Grader Tool. HubSpot.
6. SE Ranking (2025). AI Overview Citations: 30,000 Keyword Study. SE Ranking Blog.
7. Seer Interactive (2025). The Impact of AI Overviews on Organic CTR. Seer Interactive.
8. Princeton University (2024). GEO: Generative Engine Optimization Research Paper. arXiv.