Google Search is dead. AI put the nail in the coffin.
Does that mean SEO is dead as well?
Not really.
But Google Search is not what used to be. AI is rewriting the rules.

Why read this article
If you’re a business owner or a marketer who relies on SEO for organic traffic, you need to understand how AI is shifting user behaviour and what you can do about it.
Organic search traffic has been a significant and profitable marketing channel for many businesses over the last decade. However, many SEO strategies and tactics that worked before are not effective anymore.
Gartner predicts a 25% drop in traditional search engine usage by 2026 and by 50% by 2028
What you will learn from this article
- The evolution of user behaviours with information storage and retrieval, and how that can inform us of the future.
- Current state of the search market and the trends for the future
- How can a business can adapt to the changing search landscape
The paradigm shift in search
The way we searched for information and discovered brands via Google Search has changed forever. And as a result, the SEO process followed by everyone for the last decade is no longer effective or relevant.
What has driven this change? Innovation and tectonic shifts in the digital landscape.
With the advent of every new technology in history, whether it was the Gutenberg’s printing press, the internet and now AI, our behaviours have adapted. Our constant desire for information serves two needs – satisfy our innate curiosity and to solve problems that make our lives better.

For starters, smartphones changed how we access information and how often we engage with it. Social media now plays a bigger role in our lives than ever before.
In Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?, the authors argue that customers don’t just adopt new products, they become different people through their interactions with the new technology. Henry Ford transformed people into drivers with his cars. Google trained its users to expect instant search results. Facebook trained us to be more open and share information with others than we otherwise would.
Google Search changed users behaviour by making web search fast, accurate and reliable.
We became good at queries, learning to ask Google with the right keywords to get better results.. For example, we intuitively knew that “where can I find the best biryani” would not give us good results compared to “best biryani in Bangalore”.
Our thinking process became “search-first” and we let go of memorizing facts in the process (the Google Effect).
We learned to click through links to gather and compare information for our decision making process. And there was a sub-conscious trust in results that ranked at the top. Over time Google got more intelligent to give us personalized answers based on our location, history and context.
But more recently, Google has been pushing featured snippets, knowledge panels and instant AI Overviews, in what could be described as as a zero-click search environment. Here’s an example of “zero-click environment”:

The prime real estate on Google Search is no longer allocated to the organic search results aka the blue links. Google’s claimed goal here is to give the user an accurate answer without having to navigate through to websites (a walled garden). However, what upsets many independent websites is that the AI Overview is generated based on content written by people whose websites are now no longer getting the click-through traffic.
With AI now going mainstream, new search entrants like ChatGPT and Perplexity have disrupted the market. AI enabled search interactions is changing user behaviour as we speak by providing intelligent, context-aware answers to our questions. We’re on the cusp of this shift in behaviour from using a traditional search engine for information to having a conversation with a AI powered search engine that answers all our questions.
If you happen to use ChatGPT regularly you will notice a change in your behaviours already. AI will make us dependent on automation as we outsource our thinking and even decision making to LLMs. We will come to expect greater and more accurate personalization with AI. Just like how Google trained us on instant search results, we will develop a low tolerance for inefficient workflows. AI-generated music (The Beatles won a grammy with an “AI-restored song”), art and video could mean that our views and definition of creativity will evolve.
The Google autocomplete seemed magical at one point as it seemed to know what we were thinking, but AI is going to take that to the next level.
Instead of “searching” for information, we will now just “ask” and expect answers that doesn’t require reading and cross-referencing multiple articles. Instead of visiting websites to read, we will consume content and get our questions answered through chat interfaces or two-way voice conversations with AI. Instead of reading reports and finding templates, we will auto-generate them instantly and customized to our needs.
So what is the future of search?
Ever since Google has dominated internet search, many businesses have relied on SEO to drive massive amount of organic traffic to their website. It’s has also been a cat and mouse game between Google optimising the search engine for quality and SEO professionals trying to reverse engineer the Google ranking algo to rank at the top. Over the years many bad SEO practices have run afoul of Google’s guidelines and received ranking penalties, some never to recover.
Today we’re in a unique situation where Google themselves are under pressure from new players in the market, regulatory pushback and dealing with their own search quality issues. HCU algo updates in the last 2 years have been particularly devastating for many businesses. With so much AI-generated content getting published, Google is playing catch up to identify quality content and content created by human experts.
If you thought you can churn out dozens of articles using AI and publish them on your site for quick SEO results, think again.
Many types of websites have been affected by Google HCU, but the key takeaway is to double down on content quality – original, research-based, expertise-driven and focused on a core group of topics. The last part is important – a website that has content on topics not directly related to the main purpose of the website has come into Google’s cross-hairs.
As Google comes to terms with the AI disruption, it is worth noting that Google is still the dominant player, even if you think of it as a legacy player. Rand Fishkin at SparkToro has done some excellent research on web traffic which I’m linking below. The data gives a snapshot of the current state of the search market and user behaviours.
When I spoke to a class of young students on SEO at NIFT HSR Bangalore in April of 2024, Google’s market share was at 91.37%. A year later when I was updating my SEO deck to talk to a small group of founders, I looked up the same stat. A drop of 1.39% doesn’t seem much, but reinforces the trend we’re witnessing.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
Here are some key stats and insights on the current state of affairs:
- 1 in 6 traditional search users also use an AI platform. 99% of AI users still use traditional search [Consumer Search Behaviour in the Age of AI – Datos]
- 37% of US based users considered AI-enhanced search results to be better
- 55% think search engines that incorporate AI will make it easier to discover products and services.
AI entrants are still small, but growing rapidly
- ChatGPT gets 9 billion page views per month
- Monthly active users of Perplexity increased 3.4x
- Claude.ai’s total MAUs rose 107% since the website launched in July 2023.
- Copilot’s total MAUs rose 8x since Microsoft unified its AI experiences under Copilot in November 2023.

To put these impressive growth numbers of new players into perspective:
- Desktop users’ webpage visits: Google has 200 events/user/month and Perplexity has 15, ChatGPT 12.2

It is true that we seek information in places other than Google now more than before. For example, Reddit communities are popular for getting raw and unfiltered opinions on topics. X, formerly Twitter, can be another lively place for engaging on topics and asking questions. However, social search is not as big as often spoken about. Youtube amongst them has the largest share.
Google search may not cool anymore, but YouTube is firmly entrenched in today’s pop culture zeitgeist.
A web of walled gardens – Internet is not as open as it was before.
How does the traffic flow on the internet today?


Google still sends the most traffic by a big margin, followed by Youtube and then MS sites.
The web has fragmented and large parts of pie has been cornered by the tech companies. While a lot of the web traffic is acquired by the big players then what happens to small and independent websites?

We have two kinds of players in this web traffic ecosystem – referrers and traffic hoarders.
There are websites which hoard traffic, meaning for the traffic they receive, they send out very little traffic to other websites. And those that send out a good proportion of traffic they receive to other websites.
Good news is that Google still sends large amounts of traffic to what is considered the “long tail of the web”. But interestingly, LinkedIn and Reddit still contribute a fair amount. Given how restrictive LinkedIn algorithms are to any external link shared on their platform, its surprising to see this stat. Users on these platforms resort to sharing links in the comments or in the case of X (formerly Twitter), share the link in the replies.
My sense is that while the stats show these platforms are not all “evil” in their pursuit of revenue, the experience of most users suggest we have entered a phase where platforms that grew to be huge multi-billion dollar companies on the back of providing users free and unrestricted organic growth are now employing various measures, some obvious and others more subtle, to generate revenue from a captive audience.
Observations from the stats:
- Traffic percentage of long tail compared to the top websites is decreasing as large brands and monopolies corner more of the eyeballs
- Wikihow is surprisingly a traffic hoarder. On the other hand, search engines by design send out the most traffic. Sites like Facebook and Reddit contribute a smaller portion.
- The trend though among these major platforms is tending to decline as they build walled gardens and retain the users within their platform and host all types of content.
- LinkedIn recently started promoting video content as a way to increase engagement within the platform and avoid losing people to Youtube for video related content.
- On mobile, Google and Facebook send out less referral per visitor compared to desktop, while the Youtube and Reddit send more referrals on mobile.
Monopolies are incentivized to build walled gardens.
Every major platform has carved out a part of the internet for itself. None of the major platforms want to send users away from their website. Google was a gateway to discovering new information and new website and new brands. But it now sends fewer people to websites. More ads. More featured snippets. And most recently AI Overviews. Space is shrinking for organic search results as we saw above.
The maturing of platforms as seen on TV and Radio previously is playing out on digital channels.
Many businesses built entirely on organic search traffic have been wiped off due to changes in algorithm. Many large publications with a wide spread of topic categories have also faced the brunt in recent times. The solution to that is not to ignore Google search completely.

Hubspot (Source – SEMRush)

Forbes (Source – SEMRush )
Google was the place you first went to when looking for information to solve a problem. So you invariably discovered a brand on Google that promised to solve the problem.
Today brands are discovered on Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, whereas Google is used as a navigational directory to find the brand’s properties like the website.
44% of searches on Google are related to brands. [How people use Google in 2024 – SparkToro]
We classify search intent as informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. While most of the keywords and number of queries are informational in nature, i.e, user seeking information about a topic of interest, more than 30% of search is navigational. These users know what they want and are using Google to find the exact location.
Focus on brand building and optimizing for search intent.
The evolution of major platforms into walled gardens, the rise of AI and the resulting change in user behaviours will have the following impact on SEO:
- Fewer clicks to your website
- The old keyword optimization approach will no longer be effective
- AI Overviews will take precedence over traditional top 10 links
- Guest posts and old backlinking strategies to build online reputation won’t work as well
- Word count driven long content pieces without originality will not be effective
- AI-generated content will have a short shelf life
- Text only blog posts will be outranked by those which have multiple content formats embedded in them
How to adapt your SEO strategy in the new landscape
- Brand: Build your brand on platforms where you audience spends most of their time. This effort can benefit your search rankings too as Google starts to recognizes the brand’s authority and expertise. Not to mention the direct traffic you will get as a result of your brands awareness among your target audience.
- Expertise: Writing expertise led authoritative content with original research is going to be a key principle in any content marketing strategy.
- Search Intent: Instead of obsessing over keyword optimization, which we’ve been guilty of in the past as well, focus on search intent – what is the user trying to find.
- Technical SEO: Finally, do not ignore the website fundamentals. Technical SEO ensures the website is optimized correctly to maximise your ranking potential.
Case Study: In the last 6 months we started a SEO project with a large private university in India. The university has a well established brand with great PR. The website has never been SEO optimized though. The substantial organic traffic they received was purely down to the brand awareness. Our work therefore focused on technical SEO and less on keyword optimization. The research papers regularly published on this website gets the most amount of backlinks boosting the website’s domain ranking significantly. This reinforces our belief that when your brand and content is top tier it impacts other areas positively.
Here’s a website AI Readiness Checklist you can use to make your website AI and LLM friendly.
Or just use our free AI SEO Analysis tool to get detailed analysis and actionable recommendations. Try it now!
P.S: The alt-text for all images in this post have been generated using our AI Image Alt-Text Generator.