Almost three years into the era of AI, we can conclude that the old way of working is never coming back. It has completely lost its relevance (good riddance).
I remember the old days when I was working at a digital agency telling our customers the importance of writing blog content, searching for the right keywords and placing them all over the place, why they needed URL backlinks, and hey, don't forget that # in your social media posts!
This was relevant for almost 12 years of my professional career until it wasn't.
Why is the new AI search better?
Let's start with the basic concept of what AI is doing. By now we can assume that AI has scraped the entire internet, it has a copy or interpretation of all the content out there. It knows you and it knows what you write about and if it deems it relevant or not to suggest this.
You putting in an extra keyword will not make any difference, AI reads your site or blog like a user would. It gets the full picture and is not designed to work according to the methodology of the previous monopoly called Google.
Same goes for the good old # sign. A wise man once said:
Please stop using hashtags. The system doesn't need them anymore and they look ugly.
And this is completely true, the AI can actually understand what you wrote and the context of it, it classifies in its own way without the need of a "human" telling the algorithm explicitly what the content is about. That's so primitive!
What's the impact of this change?
There are a lot of companies out there that still have a business model focused around generating content and getting income based on views that get to see ads (oh the monstrosity).
Just for this reason alone I would prefer to ask an AI to get me the content I need so that I don't get to see any ads.
You can make a paid version of your site or blog without the ads but that is now at least 6 years too late. And eventually that is also what AI did, we are paying a monthly subscription for AI to give us clean, understandable content without the ads.
But fortunately for those businesses this won't happen overnight. There's still time. You can't change the minds of the Googler generation that easily.
Let's look at the facts:
ChatGPT usage:
In 2025 OpenAI confirmed that ChatGPT users send over 912.5 billion requests to the AI chatbot each year. Comparing this to Google's 5 trillion annual searches this is only a share of approximately 18.25% (not including other AIs).
Considering that ChatGPT had 180 million users in 2023 and 500 million in 2025 we can conclude that this is still growing rapidly with an estimated impact of 25-30% of market share by the end of 2026.
If 50% market share is the tipping point, we can assume that traditional companies still have 2-3 years before they need to change their business models.
Other initiatives boosting this trend:
- AI companies are developing their own browsers competing with Google Chrome, see Perplexity's Comet and OpenAI Operator
- Apple integrated ChatGPT into iOS 18, this cuts Google's default advantage on Apple devices. However Google is still paying Apple billions of dollars just to be the default search engine.
- Microsoft embedded Copilot into Windows and Bing, with a long history of competing with Google they'll do everything they can to gain traction in this field.
- Browsers like Arc and Brave are prioritizing AI-based search and summarization features by default, training users to expect cleaner, direct results without ads or links.
- Content consumption patterns are shifting: Users expect instant answers, visual summaries, or chat-style formats, not long lists of blue links. This pressure is forcing traditional search to morph or lose relevance.
What can marketeers do?
Time to throw away that Google certificate, get ready to learn new methods and tools.
When an AI visits your website they leave behind a small mark, the "User Agent" gives away who visited your site and most of them are not shy or hiding this (with some exceptions like Grok). Have a look at your user agents for: ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and others… This should be your indicator to see whether your site is already being scraped by AI or not.
Tools which are gaining traction in boosting AI search traffic that we can recommend to have a look at:
What this means:
- Your site needs to speak AI‑native: Structured, semantically rich content and schema markup optimized for AI understanding and surfacing.
- Visibility is now measurable: Using AEO/GEO tools, you can track brand mentions and tune for AI "answers", not clicks.
If you need assistance or information on how to navigate this new chapter feel free to contact us for more information.
Final thoughts
We've entered a new era, one where humans still search, but the gatekeepers of answers are no longer wearing Google badges. AI doesn't care how many backlinks you have or if your blog post has the perfect keyword density. It cares about clarity, context, and actual value.
For those of us who've lived through the evolution of SEO, it's both wild and refreshing. The rules have changed, and honestly? They make more sense now. It's not about gaming the algorithm anymore. It's about writing like a human, for an AI that reads like one.
So if your strategy still involves outdated SEO tricks and chasing algorithm updates like it's 2015, you're already playing catch-up. The good news? You've still got time. The bad news? Not much.
Welcome to the future of search. It's cleaner, smarter, and a lot less interested in your hashtags.
