A seismic shift in how people find information online is forcing businesses to completely rethink their digital strategies. As artificial intelligence tools increasingly provide instant answers, companies are scrambling to adapt or risk becoming invisible to potential customers.
HubSpot, a business-to-business software provider, experienced this disruption firsthand when it lost 140 million website visits in a single year. The culprit wasn't a competitor or market downturn—it was AI fundamentally changing search behavior.
"What you have now is access to all the world's intelligence in an instantaneous way," explains Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot's chief marketing officer. "How people find information and subsequently take action is very, very different."
Three key factors are driving this transformation:
- Search engines have modified their algorithms to combat low-quality AI-generated content, making website credibility more crucial than ever
- Users are increasingly bypassing traditional search engines for AI tools like ChatGPT
- Search engines themselves now feature AI overviews that often answer queries without requiring users to click through to websites
"The click-through rate for searches that have AI overviews is about 60% to 70% lower," Bodnar reveals.
This dramatic change has given rise to a new digital marketing discipline: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Unlike traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which focuses on ranking in search engines, AEO aims to help websites appear prominently in AI-generated responses.
"I don't know how you are a competitive business in the future without having a strong competency in this," Bodnar asserts.
The strategy requires understanding how search behavior is evolving. While traditional searches might involve four to six words, AI searches average 40 to 60 words—representing "an order of magnitude of specificity change," according to Bodnar.
He illustrates this with a hypothetical example: "Someone might ask AI for a complete holiday plan for a family of five visiting New Zealand, including opportunities to see specific animals. To be cited in the answer, a motorhome rental company might need to publish content about the most popular animals for children to see in New Zealand."
Businesses across industries are adapting their approaches. HubSpot has restructured its content from lengthy articles to smaller, easily extractable information chunks that AI tools can readily process. Meanwhile, Spice Kitchen, a spice gift set company, is building a comprehensive content cluster about spice trade history to establish authority and attract AI search bots.
"In order to survive, you have to adapt," says Ann Lowe, Spice Kitchen's head of PR and communications. "This content won't be a shop—it will look almost like a training course for people doing research who discover us along the way."
Nathan Pearson, co-founder of digital agency Lumos Digital, observes that the focus is shifting from optimizing for the purchase moment to winning customers during the research phase. "AI loves buying guides with clear recommendations," he notes, suggesting that companies create content that identifies clear winners in product categories.
For MKM Building Supplies, an independent builders' merchant, the impact has been direct and measurable. "We are seeing fewer people come to the site because they're getting answers from AI models," says digital director Andy Pickup. "If that trend continued, you'd potentially see your site traffic almost dwindle to nothing."
Pickup has implemented what he calls a "defensive strategy," creating detailed blogs about best-selling products and ensuring content is structured for AI comprehension with summaries, bulleted lists, and FAQ sections.
"It's about making sure your content is very clear and concise and easy to understand," he explains. "The content evolves from just talking about a product to explaining how this product's going to help you solve a problem."
The results are promising. MKM's AI-driven traffic has grown from nearly nothing to "a low double-figure percentage" in the past year and continues to rise. Perhaps more importantly, AI visitors convert to purchases at higher rates than traditional search visitors.
"My theory is that customers have got the information they need from the AI answer, which gives them confidence to make a purchase," Pickup suggests.
As businesses navigate this new landscape, experts emphasize the importance of establishing expertise, authority, and trust through quality backlinks, credible content policies, and clear author biographies. The race to remain visible in the age of instant AI answers is just beginning, and for many companies, their future relevance may depend on how well they adapt to this fundamental shift in how information is discovered and consumed.