TL;DR
- Users click AI citations at 1% vs 15% for traditional search
- Only 7% of sources appear across all AI platforms, while 71% appear on just one. Platform-specific strategies now essential
- Two-stage user journey: Stage 1 prioritizes UGC for discovery; Stage 2 uses official sources for validation
- Practical Guidance (29%) and Writing (24%) dominate AI usage, with most interactions never leaving AI platforms
- Adobe shows AI-referred visitors browse 12% more pages but convert 9% less—requiring new conversion strategies
Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. My previous article that discussed the research on this was a monstrous academic meta-analysis that, while comprehensive, proved impenetrable for most digital professionals who need actionable insights today.
Let’s strips away the theoretical complexity to focus on what actually matters: how the shift from search to AI affects your website traffic, what you can do about it, and why traditional metrics might be lying to you.
This will be Part 1 of a 2 part series with this first article focusing on technical AISEO/GEO (whatever you wish to call it) strategies, and part 2 focusing on organizational adaptation strategies.
So, we already know the implications of the research into this area are profound. Your response needs to start now.
The New Zero-Click Internet
Here’s what’s happening right now: more than 10% of the global population is using one or more AI platforms weekly (Chatterji et al., 2025), and the greatest concentration of this use is in first world countries, so that concentration is higher where you and I live. When they ask questions, the AI provides answers with citations to sources. Users read the AI’s response and move on. They don’t click through. This is the fundamental atomic moment that is driving the new zero-click Internet (Pew Research Center, 2025).
The numbers tell the story:
- Traditional search averages a 15% click on any organic result (Pew Research Center, 2025)
- Google’s Position 1 gets the majority of this, at a 39.8% click-through rate (First Page Sage, 2025)
- AI platform citations? A 1% click-through rate (Pew Research Center, 2025)
Mail Online discovered this the hard way. Despite maintaining top search rankings and regularly appearing in AI citations, their daily traffic dropped from 6,000 to 100 clicks—a 98% reduction (Mediaweek, 2025).
This pattern repeats across industries. Publishers report less than 1% of total website traffic comes from AI platform referrals (TollBit, 2024). The “authority-traffic paradox” means your content gains credibility and influence without generating website visits (SEMRush, 2025).
AI Visibility Depends on Which Platform Users Choose
Each AI platform plays favorites differently, and the overlap is minimal:
ChatGPT loves Reddit (appearing in 141% of prompts—yes, more than once per query) and Wikipedia (152%) according to SEMRush (2025). The platform prioritizes community discussions and user-generated content over corporate websites.
Gemini sticks closest to traditional Google rankings with the lowest source diversity. If you rank well in Google Search, you have better odds here—but the citation click-through remains minimal.
Perplexity emphasizes research-backed content and academic sources. The platform shows citations more prominently, achieving 3-5% click-through rates—still low, but that is still 3-5x better than ChatGPT.
Claude focuses on authoritative, comprehensive content with strong documentation. Professional users dominate here, creating different citation patterns than consumer-focused platforms.
Only 46 sources (7% of the 467 studied) appear across all four platforms (SEMRush, 2025). These universal sources—Google, Wikipedia, YouTube—already dominate traditional search. For every other website, 71% of sources appear on only ONE platform.
What this means: Your AI optimization strategy can’t be platform-agnostic. You need to know your brand, your audience and their behaviors and, most importantly, you need to know where you can win, and where you won’t win.
The Two-Stage AI-assisted Decision Architecture
Forget everything you know about the traditional search-based customer journey. In an AI mediated environment, users don’t follow typical browse and compare behaviors. AI users follow a different path, a different discovery architecture, and understanding it determines whether your content gets cited at all.
Stage 1: Discovery Through Community Sentiment
When users ask “What’s the best project management software for small teams?”, AI platforms don’t immediately cite official websites. Instead, they synthesize discussions from Reddit threads, discussions on X, Quora answers, replies on specialized forums.
User-generated content (UGC) dominates this stage because AI platforms have been engineered to treat community consensus as a proxy for real-world validation. A product mentioned positively across multiple UGC forums carries more weight than any direct brand or corporate PR or marketing claim.
This explains why officially published content is about half as effective at getting cited as UGC. Polished product pages and carefully crafted blog posts lose to authentic user discussions.
Stage 2: Validation Through Official Sources
Only after users narrow their choices through back and forth conversational interaction do they seek specific information: “Does Notion have Gantt charts?” or “What does Asana cost for 10 users?”
It is now, when highly specific information is required, that AI platforms cite official websites, documentation, and pricing pages. But, still, users might never click through. The AI agent extracts the information it needs and presents the information directly.
This two-stage architecture creates the “mention-source divide.” Brands frequently discussed in communities (high mentions) might never appear as authoritative sources (low citations). Conversely, brands with comprehensive documentation might be cited without being recommended. And this varies wildly depending on the industry vertical.
SEMRush’s (2025) analysis reveals:
- Finance: 22-27 brands achieve both high mentions and citations (institutional authority matters)
- Fashion: Only 3 brands achieve both (community opinion dominates)
- Business Services: 12-22 brands achieve both (mixed signals)
Why Users Don’t Click (And When They Do)
The data from 700 million ChatGPT users (Chatterji et al., 2025) reveals something crucial: only 24% of interactions involve “seeking information”—the behavior most like traditional search. The rest breaks down as:
- Practical Guidance (29%): “How do I…” questions where users want step-by-step instructions
- Writing (24%): Creating and editing content directly in the AI
- Asking (49% of all interactions): Seeking advice and recommendations
- Doing (40% of all interactions): Task completion within the platform
Users rate “Asking” interactions highest for satisfaction. They actually prefer the AI’s synthesized advice over clicking through to multiple sources. This behavior intensifies for non-critical information where a user feels that clicking through citations to validate the information is seen as unnecessary.
The interface matters enormously. Perplexity’s prominent citation numbering achieves 3-5% click-through. ChatGPT’s subtle citation formatting stays around 1%. This 3-5x difference suggests optimization opportunities (Arc Intermedia, 2025).
All that being said, though, this isn’t a static number. Adobe’s (2025) research does offer future hope: citation click-through improved from October 2024 to February 2025 as platforms matured and users grew familiar with interfaces.
We’re still talking about improvements from 1% to perhaps 2-3%—not a return to traditional search patterns-but this may continue to improve as more users master the interface and, who knows, maybe these platforms will increase the prominence of citations.
What This Means for You
The Authority-Traffic Paradox in Practice
What this means for you and your content is that it can now gain massive authority without generating proportional traffic. This hits content-focused websites hardest—news publishers, blogs, educational resources—where the entire business model assumes traffic leads to revenue.
The paradox further intensifies for non-critical content. Users won’t validate restaurant recommendations, product reviews, or how-to guides. They will, however, check official sources for pricing, specifications, health, financial or regulatory information.
The Quality Visitor Contradiction
When users do click through from AI citations, they also behave differently (Adobe Digital Insights, 2025):
- Browse 12% more pages (6.2 vs 5.5 for search)
- Spend 41% longer on site
- Show 23% lower bounce rates
- Paradoxically, they convert 9% less on average
These visitors arrive pre-qualified, having already consumed comprehensive information. They need validation, not education and this might be why conversion rates appear so paradoxical, as the long held assumption is that a visitor is higher in the awareness funnel than they already are. So traditional conversion optimization—simplified forms, CTAs, squeeze pages—might actually work against you.
However, again, this varies wildly depending on the industry vertical.
Fashion and retail see particularly lower conversion from AI platform derived visitors despite higher engagement.
But travel sites see AI-referred visitors generate 80% more revenue per visit. Financial services also show 18% higher conversion rates (Adobe Digital Insights, 2025). This is likely due to the traditional design cues that travel and finance websites exhibit such as up front travel searches, and financial calculators (and financial services also have a longer conversion funnel, and more critical information requirements).
The conclusion then, is optimization for AI visibility is highly dependant upon industry dynamics, and, therefore, expertise.
Platform Concentration Creates New Gatekeepers
With 71% of sources appearing on only one platform, your visibility depends entirely on which platforms your audience uses. A dominant position on ChatGPT means nothing if your customers prefer Claude.
This concentration varies by platform:
- ChatGPT: Most democratic distribution but lowest click-through
- Gemini: Highest concentration, favors existing Google winners
- Perplexity: Moderate concentration with better click-through
- Claude: Professional focus with different citation patterns
You can’t optimize for all platforms equally as the strategies often conflict.
Practical Technical Strategies That Work
1. Master the Two-Stage Decision Architecture
For Stage 1 Discovery:
- Participate authentically in appropriate UGC discussion forums about your industry
- Answer questions without promotional content
- Engage in specialized forums where your customers gather
- Create content that users want to naturally discuss and share
Patagonia achieved a 21.96% Share of Voice in fashion not through SEO but through consistent presence in sustainability discussions (SEMRush, 2025). Their community engagement happened organically because their staff participated as community members, not marketers.
For Stage 2 Validation:
- Maintain comprehensive, current documentation
- Structure data with clear schema markup
- Provide transparent pricing and specifications
- Ensure technical details are easily extractable
The brands that win both stages develop dual content strategies.
In this stage, Notion succeeded by maintaining vibrant community discussions while providing detailed technical documentation on how to use their service that was easily accessible and consumable by autonomous/bot/AI agent traffic.
2. Optimize for Citations, Not Clicks
Traditional SEO optimized for search rankings that generated clicks. AI optimization requires a different approach:
Technical Implementation:
- Add credible citations to your content (improves AI visibility by up to 40% according to Princeton research, 2024)
- Structure content with clear question-answer formatting
- Use deep schema markup extensively (30% higher chance of AI inclusion per SearchEngineLand, 2025)
- Create FAQ sections that directly answer common queries
Content Architecture:
- Place answers in the first 75-150 words of sections
- Break content into digestible 200-300 word segments
- Use descriptive headings that mirror user questions
- Include statistical evidence and specific data points
3. Choose Your Platform
You can’t win everywhere. Pick based on your audience:
ChatGPT Strategy:
- Focus on community presence and discussions
- Optimize for conversational queries
- Accept minimal click-through as the cost of authority
Perplexity Strategy:
- Emphasize research-backed content
- Include academic-style citations
- Benefit from 3-5x better click-through rates
Gemini Strategy:
- Maintain traditional SEO excellence
- Focus on featured snippet optimization
- Leverage existing Google authority
Claude Strategy:
- Create comprehensive professional resources
- Focus on B2B and technical content
- Target professional user base
4. Rebuild Conversion Paths for Pre-Qualified Visitors
AI visitors arrive differently prepared. Adjust accordingly:
Remove Education, Add Validation:
- Skip basic product explanations
- Provide detailed specifications immediately
- Show social proof and testimonials prominently
- Focus on differentiators, not features
Trust Signals Over Marketing and Sales speak:
- Display certifications and awards
- Include detailed case studies
- Show actual customer results
- Provide transparent pricing
Buffer increased AI-referred visitor conversions by 34% by restructuring their site around “proof layers”—case studies, testimonials, and third-party validations—rather than traditional landing pages.
5. Develop New Metrics for Success
Traditional metrics mislead in an AI-dominated landscape:
Stop Obsessing Over:
- Raw traffic numbers
- Click-through rates
- Traditional ranking positions
- Page views
Start Measuring:
- Share of Voice in AI responses
- Citation frequency across platforms
- Mention-to-citation ratios
- Quality of citation context
- Conversion rate of AI-referred traffic
This can be done using a combination of manual AI visibility audits on your targeted platforms as well as specialized tooling:
Established Platforms:
SEMRush AI Visibility Index - Tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode
Authoritas SERP & AI Tracking - Monitors both traditional search and AI overview appearances
HubSpot Share of Voice - Accessible solution that can track AI-informing awareness in wider spaces.
Perplexity Pages Analytics - Native analytics for Perplexity citations (limited but free)
Emerging Specialized Tools:
Otterly.ai - Dedicated AI search optimization platform with citation tracking
AIVisibility.io - Tracks performance across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity
How to Measure What You Can’t See
AI Visibility Audits
Here are some example queries you can test at regular intervals such as weekly, fortnightly, monthly across all target AI platforms:
- “What are the best [your product category] for [target audience]?”
- “How do I solve [problem your product addresses]?”
- “What’s the difference between [your company] and [competitor]?”
- “[Your company name]” (brand query)
- “Pros and cons of [your product/service]”
Document:
- Which platforms cite you
- Context of citations (positive, neutral, negative)
- Whether you appear in Stage 1 (discovery) or Stage 2 (validation)
- Competitor citations for the same queries
Use the technique of query fan-out to map out the conversational journey your target user demographic might follow on a target AI platform. Use this to inform your content strategy and next campaign to get cited.
Platform-Specific Tracking
ChatGPT: Monitor Reddit and forum mentions. Track discussion sentiment.
Perplexity: Analyze citation frequency in research-style queries.
Gemini: Maintain traditional SEO tracking alongside AI citations.
Claude: Focus on professional and technical query performance. Is your technical documentation being cited correctly?
Treat audits on these platforms as if they are a 24/7/365 on-demand focus group.
The Uncomfortable Truths:
You will lose traffic. The 95-96% reduction some publishers experience (TollBit, 2024) might be extreme, but significant drops appear to be inevitable and permanent.
Platform control is minimal. Unlike SEO, you can’t reverse-engineer your way to visibility. AI models at the core of these platforms are probabilistic, not deterministic.
User generated content beats PR and corporate marketing.
Citation without traffic is the new normal. Your business model will either need to account, or be re-invented, for this.
You won’t be a universal source. The 7% of universal sources are globally recognizable, ubiquitous platforms. You’re likely not one of them. However, you could be an authoritative source on a couple of them. But it requires expert audience targeting.
The Path Forward: Accepting the New Reality
What You Need to Do This Week
-
Run the visibility audit. Test those five queries across all four platforms. Document your baseline.
-
Pick your primary platform(s). You can’t win everywhere. Choose based on where your customers are.
-
Start community engagement. Search for your relevant communities or forums where your customers are talking to each other. Begin participating authentically—no promotion.
-
Restructure one key page. Pick your most important landing page. Restructure it for pre-qualified AI derived visitors.
-
Set up new tracking. Stop watching traffic. Start measuring citation counts, citation quality and Share of Voice.
What Success Looks Like Now
Success in the AI citation economy doesn’t look like traditional SEO wins. Instead:
- Your brand appears consistently in AI responses for relevant queries
- Community discussions mention you positively without prompting
- You get less visitors,but the visitors you do get convert at higher rates
- Your authority grows even as traffic continues to diminish
- You maintain visibility on at least one major platform
Wistia exemplifies this new success. Their traffic from search dropped 40%, but leads from AI-referred visitors increased 60%. They achieved this through consistent participation in marketing communities, comprehensive documentation, and conversion paths optimized for pre-qualified visitors.
Letting Go of Control
Traditional SEO gave us the illusion of control, and too many practitioners ended up falling into repeatable blueprints (admittedly, doing it right resulted in remarkably consistent performance regardless of industry or search query). Change these factors, improve these metrics, climb these rankings.
The comfort of this consistency goes away with AI citations.
You cannot control:
- Which sources AI platforms choose
- How they present your information
- Whether users click through
- Which platforms gain market share
- When algorithms change
However, you can influence through:
- Your community presence and authenticity
- Content quality and structure
- Documentation comprehensiveness
- Conversion optimization for AI visitors
- Platform-specific strategies
Industries at a Crossroads
Some sectors face existential challenges:
Publishers and Media: With 95-96% traffic reduction potential, ad-based models collapse. Subscription or licensing become essential.
E-commerce: Product discovery shifts entirely to AI platforms. Direct relationships with customers become critical.
B2B Services: Community reputation matters more than corporate messaging. Thought leadership happens in forums, not blogs.
Local Businesses: AI platforms aggregate reviews and recommendations. Individual website traffic becomes almost irrelevant.
Looking forward, in the next 24 Months
Based on current trends, we might expect:
Citation click-through rates will improve as interfaces mature. They will improve much more if the interfaces of these AI platforms give more prominence to AI citations. The growing concern about content provenance and authenticity leads me to believe that the pressure for this increased visibility will increase over time.
Platform consolidation. We are in an AI induced bubble. There’s too much money sloshing around in the AI industry that is subsidising our usage. This will inevitably come to an end, and likely sooner than we expect, given how quickly we are barrelling through the hype cycle. It may not happen in the near term, but I do expect one of these four major AI platforms may be absorbed by another.
New monetization models will necessarily emerge for content—likely involving direct platform enablement (such as intra-platform markets, premium content consumption pricing for AI agents/specialized publisher AI agents) or partnerships. Right now the most prominent model is data/content licensing.
Community-generated content will continue gaining importance over official sources. An optimist might foresee a renaissance in forums and bulletin boards. A pessimist might foresee enshittification as these third places become infested with marketers performing GEO/AISEO (whatever you want to call it).
Me? I think there will be a “barbelling” or stratification. Some platforms (that can afford to invest in the technologies to enable this) will retain and even increase in importance due to restrictive access, strong moderation and protection, and selective monetization of access (for both GEO/AISEO marketers and autonomous/agentic traffic) and the content. Some forums (most likely smaller, more niche ones that don’t have the capital to invest in this type of development) will fail to do this quickly, and will be “enshittified”.
Specialized AI agents will further reduce the need for users to visit websites. These will become the new mobile apps, and we will likely see an entire ecosystem of AI agents that will interact with users and each other-an agentic fabric, if you will (no, seriously, research is already emerging that supports this).
Final Thoughts
The shift from search to AI citations reshaping the way that we, as digital professionals share stories, market products and build brands. Those that built sustainable businesses on genuine value will most easily adapt. But those that relied on gaming algorithms and maximizing vanity metrics will struggle.
We’re going to need to go back to the basics:
- Create genuine value for users
- Build authentic community relationships
- Provide clear, accessible information
- Solve real problems effectively
What is changing is the mechanisms. Instead of optimizing for a single algorithm that sends us traffic, we’re optimizing for models that synthesize information. Instead of measuring success through visits, we measure it through influence first and authority second.
This transition period offers opportunities for those willing to abandon old assumptions. Small brands with authentic community presence can outrank giants. Niche expertise becomes more valuable than broad coverage.
The winners will be those who accept this new reality fastest and adapt their strategies accordingly. The authority-traffic paradox isn’t a problem to solve—it’s the new normal to embrace.
Your website will get fewer visitors. But those who arrive should be better qualified, more engaged, and have definitive expectations. Your content will not be for generating clicks, it will be for building authority and influencing decisions.
Welcome to the age of the zero-click.
References
Adobe Digital Insights. (2025). The explosive rise of generative AI referral traffic. Adobe Systems.
Arc Intermedia. (2025). Digital transformation impact study: AI chatbot traffic analysis. Arc Intermedia Research.
Chatterji, A., Cunningham, T., Deming, D. J., Hitzig, Z., Ong, C., Shan, C. Y., & Wadman, K. (2025). How people use ChatGPT. NBER Working Paper No. 34255. National Bureau of Economic Research.
First Page Sage. (2025, May 27). Google click-through rates (CTRs) by ranking position. First Page Sage.
Li, R. (2025). Adapting Your WordPress Site to AI Sense-Making Compression. Retrieved from https://drli.blog/posts/wordpress-ai/
Mediaweek. (2025, April 22). Google’s AI overviews linked to sharp CTR declines. Mediaweek.
Pew Research Center. (2025, July 22). Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Pew Research Center.
SearchEngineLand. (2025). Schema AI overviews: structured data visibility. Search Engine Land.
SEMRush. (2025). AI visibility index study: Market transformation analysis. SEMRush Enterprise.
TollBit. (2024). State of the Bots Q4 2024 Report. TollBit Analytics.