Organic Search Shakeup and AI Adaptations
We’ve been emphasizing how AI tools are game-changers in the organic search landscape for a couple of years now. With existing clients, our teams have been encouraging new tests, new strategies, and new tactics. But we didn’t see it impact B2B analytic trends and marketing KPIs in big, sweeping ways until earlier this year. Now, more B2B companies are popping their heads up and saying, “The rubber has hit the road. This is really impacting us. What do we do?”
What Has Changed Within Organic Search?
Zero-click traffic loss went into overdrive in 2025. AI Overviews had a pretty shaky launch (which we talked about last year) in the U.S. in May of 2024. There were ups and downs for months based on poor results, hallucinations, and loss of search confidence.
Then in March of 2025, Google made another large update. They upgraded to Gemini 2.0 and added some new features, which meant better quality, more complex queries, and a huge expansion of AI Overview coverage. Later in the same month, they expanded to more countries and languages.
With this big Google Search shake up combined with the continued use of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini… new AI chatbots popping up every day, digital marketers and brands across the world really saw strong fluctuations in their organic traffic. Some seeing steady changes that started in late 2023 and early 2024 that continued. But others who saw big dives just starting at the end of Q1 of 2025.
A Whole New Language in Organic Search
These dramatic changes in Google Search have also meant dramatic changes in the world of SEO at large. Large language models (LLMs) have caused brand new terms and methodologies to emerge. And SEO experts and digital marketers have started to review their overall organic strategies and tactics. Let’s look at some new terminology before we jump into strategies.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): Refers to optimization strategies and tactics for quick answers and information searches. This focuses on delivering short, accurate information that deliver immediate results. AEO is tool agnostic—good for Google Search as well as Siri, and ChatGPT. The platform isn’t the focus; the content style is the focus.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Refers to optimization strategies and tactics aimed to improve appearances on AI-powered systems (primarily chatbots but could be other systems).
Generative Search Optimization (GSO): This has mostly lost the acronym competition, but you’ll occasionally still run into people who prefer GSO to GEO. We could argue some very specific semantic differences, but really GSO=GEO.
Zero-click Searches: This is nowhere near new, but it’s super relevant right now, so we’re throwing it in because it’s being talked about everywhere. These are search results that (whether intended or not) result in zero clicks because they provide the answer to everything the user needs within the search results.
We’ve had examples of zero click search for about two decades. From Google business directories in search results in 2005 to weather forecasts and calculations in 2014 to featured snippets in 2018.* But the big uptick in AI Overviews has provided a sharp increase in zero-click results with some studies showing that now less than 40% of searches result in a user clicking on a search result altogether.¹
Agentic AI: First came generative AI, now comes agentic AI. Agentic is a new class of AI that is designed to be more autonomous. Agentic systems are intended to not require human involvement, prompts, or instructions. Generative AI is said to be reactive, and Agentic AI is proactive. Agentic AI is supposed to be able to handle more complex problems and be more dynamic.
How Does Organic Search Marketing Adapt and Thrive?
We’re continuing to evolve our approach to the new landscape of organic search in 2025. Based on what is working and helping our enterprise clients meet their business goals, we’ve seen four strategies rise to the top.
Know Your AI Tools
There are several tools that help marketers analyze performance, get critical data, and produce quality work that will help with organic search. Many of these are the AI-powered tools themselves but also tools that dig in and give us information on AI search trends.
Most of the top SEO tools now include:
Data analysis on ChatGPT and AI Overviews brand and topic mentions.
Google Search placement within featured snippets, knowledge panels, AI overviews and related zero-click placements.
Brand sentiment monitoring that shows how positive or negative your brand results are in SEO, AEO, and GEO.
Content analyzers that help optimize content for SEO, AEO, and GEO
Keep Close Eye on Your Analytics Trends
Not all businesses are seeing the same changes in organic search, so you need to really understand your changes while also keeping an eye on overall industry trends. B2C is showing big differences from B2B. Different markets have very different results. Here are a few things we recommend:
Track granularity within your overall organic search trendline. Where are the decreases versus increases?
Brand versus non-brand
Topic separation
Funnel stages
On average within our B2B clients, non-brand is significantly more impacted than brand, certain topics are hit hard while some have been left untouched, and almost all major drops occur at the very top of the funnel.
Compare organic search traffic to referral traffic. Are you seeing an increase coming from Chatbot links? This traffic usually flow into your referral channel unless you’ve segmented your channels differently.
Compare organic search traffic to direct traffic. Sometimes people click on links within the chatbot (see prior bullet point), but use cases also show that many times people don’t click on links but just go directly to your website after seeing it mentioned (usually only works with easy to find websites/domains).
Look for any other channel anomalies. Did you lose in any area that you seemed to gain in another area?
These are critical items to know when making strategic decisions about next steps in your organic search strategy.
Change Your Goals and Tracking
For too long, many businesses have been thinking of all organic search traffic within the same bucket. Sure, we break into funnels and thinking about educational areas versus lead generation areas. But rarely do we break down full tracking and KPIs based on these funnel sections.
The TL/DR is that high funnel, educational searches while important for awareness do not lead to traffic and lead generations as much as low funnel searches. The goals are different, the tracking is different, and fundamentally… they’re two separate, segmented areas.
Stick with Your Basic Foundations
As much as AI is the new wild west, in certain ways nothing has changed. AI and user experience go hand in hand. At the end of the day, you want to be creating a truly easy, sophisticated, accurate journey for users. You need natural content, messaging that resonates, and smooth lead generation pathways.
AI platforms want you to optimize for humans because they want their results to look like it was created for and by humans. It’s about credibility, clarity, accessibility, responsiveness, and relevance. Great content will still lead businesses to strong results… just in different pathways than before.
Ask the Experts
If you need help analyzing your analytics data, understanding why your organic traffic has changed, or optimizing for AEO and GEO, Cimarron Winter can help. We’re organic search and digital ecosystem experts that help global enterprises drive effective, powerful results. How can we help you?
References
*Yes, featured snippets came out technically in 2014 but they got way better and more prominent in 2018.
1. https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/