Navigating AI-Influenced Search

At 5 by 5 Design we believe it’s possible to change the world by posing the right questions, listening to the honest answers, and following the path that emerges from the dialogue. Today’s discussion focuses on how AI is influencing the way customers search online and what that means for your business.

Chris Aburime is an SEO and search industry veteran and a digital marketing leader with nearly 30 years of experience driving growth for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 brands. As a consultant, he partners with executive teams to help them navigate AI-driven search and digital channels and win in competitive online markets. Additionally, Chris is a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits and an expert witness in federal litigation involving search engines, digital advertising, and intellectual property. We’ve asked Chris a series of questions about AI’s role in today’s search landscape. Here’s what he had to say.  

1. How is AI changing Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

AI is changing search in big ways, from how results are presented to how campaigns are run. But perhaps most importantly, AI has fundamentally changed user behavior.

The AI-Powered Search Experience

One of the most significant differences is that major search engines like Bing and Google synthesize web content into direct answers. Search results pages often answer the query immediately (though not always correctly or responsibly), without requiring a user to visit any web page at all, by providing a quick AI Overview as the top listing on the results page.

While AI-generated search results create new opportunities for visibility and brand exposure for those included in AI Overviews, they are also associated with significant drops in click-through rates for both paid and organic search, especially for informational, top-of-funnel queries. In addition, Google’s AI Overviews take up significant real estate, pushing the rest of the results further down the page. Even if your business is ranking well in traditional organic search results, the addition of AI Overviews may have negatively impacted a once-steady, reliable source of organic search revenue.

Implications for SEO

For SEO now, success is less about “ranking” #1 and more about doing things that result in your brand being a cited source within AI-generated answers. If you’ve heard of the term GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), this is where that comes from. There are still “blue links” you can rank for but share of voice and click-through rates are significantly lower than before AI Overviews. Businesses need to shift their approach and thinking in the organic search channel, especially for demand generation and top-of-funnel engagement.

Implications for SEM

For SEM, platforms like Google Ads are leaning aggressively into automation, leveraging AI to handle everything from bidding to targeting to ad creative. Google has doubled down on AI-driven options, ranging from fully automated campaign types like Performance Max to feature suites like AI Max for Search. You can technically build, launch, and manage entire campaigns using AI now. However, while extremely efficient, relying entirely on AI or doing so without a strategy, good brand fundamentals, and a strong understanding of the practice area, channel, and platform comes with major risks related to control, cost/budget, and brand. Regarding the risks, I have seen companies’ paid media programs experience both slow death and sudden catastrophic failure due to over-reliance on AI.

Impact on User Behavior

Many buyers still “search” with traditional search queries on traditional search engines, but user experiences and behaviors are rapidly evolving toward open-ended questions and open dialogue within AI-powered search, the adoption of visual search, and even live visual engagement with AI-powered platforms with access to search. As I mentioned earlier, search results now commonly include AI-driven summaries and conversational search, which also takes real estate away from traditional organic results. These are key drivers of the “zero-click” search issues impacting the organic traffic for many businesses—especially top- and middle-of-funnel traffic.

And increasingly, some buyers aren’t using traditional searches or search engines at all. They’re starting their queries on AI-first answer engines like Perplexity or in various chat-based generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, leading to even more in-depth guidance and richer experiences.

Both AI search and generative AI platforms are increasingly personalized experiences (especially when users opt in to memory/connected data) and have significantly changed customer journeys. It has become a key driver of market opinion and trust, based on access to more sources than a customer would likely ever have seen before, especially user-generated content, owned media, and, of course, earned media. What may have been hours or days of research by a prospective customer across multiple channels and sessions (possibly spanning all discovery and consideration stages) can often be completed in minutes with AI inferring and predicting intent surprisingly well from a simple query without the user ever visiting another website.

What This Means for Businesses

To win in AI search, businesses need to prioritize:

• Information architecture and user experience
• Building credibility and trust
• Building brand authority and expanding their brand footprint
• Creating real value for customers

You need a content strategy that is authentic, consistent, creates unique value, solves real problems, and answers real questions that matter to your customers. These are key signals to AI search platforms.

When a user is ready to buy, there are more options. Major AI search providers are building or already offering native checkout or direct-to-cart integrations through new, planned, or existing integrations. Organizations must be ready to evaluate how these programs and new integrations with AI search platforms impact their business, whether or not they participate, because their customers will certainly be influenced by them.

2. How do you optimize content in the AI-driven search landscape?

I’ll cover some fundamentals that consistently drive results and will get you very far, when followed. Highly competitive markets may call for more complex strategies or specialized tactics.

To optimize content for AI features in search engine results, like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google’s official guidance is actually that the same SEO fundamentals still apply, and there aren’t special optimizations required to appear. You may have seen some sensationalists or opportunists proclaiming, “SEO is dead,” but they’re very wrong. Since the 90s, these types of headlines have circulated with every major evolution in how people use the internet to discover information, and the fundamentals don’t really change.

Google Fundamentals

For Google’s AI features, you don’t need a brand-new playbook, and you don’t need to do anything fancy. I'd recommend taking a few minutes to skim through these fundamentals below and share them with your marketing and technical teams.

• Google Search Central—AI features and your website
• Google Search Essentials

Businesses need to make sure these basics are covered.

Basic Content Optimization

If you’re strapped for time, here is much of what you need to know to optimize your content for AI search. I’ve also added some key tips that I’ve seen improve visibility on AI search engines like Perplexity and generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini.

• Create helpful, reliable content written for your audience (write for people, not for Google!).
• Focus on creating high-quality, consistent content that genuinely solves meaningful problems for your audience.
• Your content must be easy to understand, provide clear answers, and be well-structured. 
• Make sure your page and content can be crawled and indexed by search engines, and accessible to major AI crawlers (for example, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic crawlers).
• Build trust through engagement and sharing authentic stories and build credibility by sharing case studies with your own data and research.
• Build authority by investing in digital and traditional PR efforts to expand your brand footprint through mentions from trusted, authoritative sources. 
• Gain earned media and valuable social proof by developing your social media presence, engaging with your audience, and encouraging user-generated content.

3. How do you measure success and ROI in the AI-driven search landscape?

This is where many businesses are struggling, because the traditional metrics we’ve relied on for years are becoming less meaningful. Judging an AI search strategy using pre-AI metrics is misleading and can mask real success.

Measure the Right Thing

Clicks from traditional search are dropping, especially when AI-generated answers are included, because the search page answers the question before anyone visits your site. 

Seer Interactive’s research found that organic click-through rates fell 61% and paid click-through rates fell 68% on average for informational queries when AI Overviews were present (based on analysis of 3.1k+ queries from June 2024 to September 2025). If you’re only measuring sessions, this can look pretty damn bad. But you should be asking, are customers still buying? Are we losing demand, or just low-intent clicks?

Here are some simple ways to approach this without completely changing your current strategy.

Track AI Visibility and Outcomes

Track whether you are showing up in the answers when people ask AI about your category. There are now many platforms for tracking AI visibility and share of voice, and the space is evolving rapidly. Here are a few solid options at the time of writing this: OtterlyAI, Keyword.com, ZipTie.dev, and Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. I am a heavy user of the Semrush platform, so I use the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit to track my clients’ AI visibility (FYI, on Nov 19, 2025, Adobe announced an agreement to acquire Semrush). New powerful tools are popping up almost daily, so do a little research before making your decision to find one that aligns with your specific needs.

Shift your reporting from obsessing over the volume of clicks and sessions to quality metrics. Is the conversion rate or revenue per visit rising? How about engagement and other intent signals?

Measure downstream demand. AI often influences the decision, then people come back through other channels to convert. Watch branded search lift, direct traffic trends, and assisted conversions. 

Add a “Where did you hear about us” field to your lead forms and sales calls and include AI platforms. It is not perfect, but it stops this demand from disappearing into “direct.”

Look into adding some of these to your dashboards:

• AI Visibility and share of voice
• Citation count
• Key query categories
• Branded search lift
• Conversion rate trends
• Revenue per session metrics
• Assisted conversions

4. Does every business or organization need to consider AI when marketing their brand? Why or why not?

Yes, absolutely, if your business or organization relies on being discovered, researched, or trusted, you need to embrace AI. We’re past the point where this is about efficiency gains or cutting costs. AI has fundamentally changed how people discover and research businesses.

When was the last time you scrolled through page two of Google results? How often are you getting your answer before even seeing a traditional search result? We’ve moved beyond the “ten blue links” era. According to McKinsey’s recent research, half of consumers are already intentionally using AI-powered search engines. And, in B2B, especially, AI tools have become central to how buyers research and shortlist vendors.

AI-driven search is becoming a critical filter, and in many cases, the primary channel through which the world discovers your brand. If major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can’t confidently explain what you do, who you’re for, and why you’re different, you won’t be “penalized,” you’ll just be skipped. That means you won’t be part of the conversation.

If you’re not sure where you stand, try this: Ask a few different AI tools to describe your business or organization and compare your brand to competitors. See what comes back. If the answers are vague, outdated, or missing your key differentiators, that’s your signal to prioritize making your digital presence more structured and accessible to these systems.

5. What are the most common mistakes businesses and organizations make when using AI marketing tools?

Generally, AI rewards businesses and organizations that already have clear positioning, decent PR, helpful content, and good information architecture. AI tends to ignore everyone who tries to use it as a shortcut around those things.

I see a lot of teams making the same handful of mistakes related to skipping the marketing fundamentals, outsourcing common sense, and using AI as a magic wand.

Here are a few common mistakes:

Using AI to crank out volume instead of insight. If the goal is “publish more,” you end up with generic, samey content that doesn’t earn trust (or links or leads). AI should help you express your expertise faster and with your POV and unique experience. Google’s been pretty clear that what matters is whether the content is genuinely helpful, not whether a human or a tool typed the first draft.

Burying the answers where machines (and humans) can’t find them. Long walls of text, accordion/tab content that hides key info, “everything’s in a PDF,” no clear headings—these are all bad for readers and increasingly bad for AI-driven discovery. If you want AI systems to pull accurate details about your services, locations, policies, pricing ranges, etc., you need a clean structure and clear and obvious answers.

Skipping human review. AI can sound confident even when it’s wrong. If nobody is accountable for fact-checking, compliance, and brand risk, you can publish mistakes at scale. This can be hard to rein in once they’re picked up by other sites.

Over-automating paid media without guardrails. Automation can work really well, but only if you feed it strong signals and strong inputs. The common failure mode is “set it and forget it” with poor conversion tracking, weak creative, vague landing pages, and then trusting algorithmic recommendations to fix fundamentals. It will not.

Not having governance around data and tools. I still see teams pasting sensitive customer data into chatbots and tools without a policy. Even basic guardrails like approved tools, what data can/can’t be used, and who reviews outputs can prevent a lot of avoidable mess.

Instead, use AI to reach target audiences and stand out from the crowd by using these tips:

Use AI to amplify what’s already working for your team and brand. Most of the businesses I see succeeding aren’t doing anything crazy. They're just being ruthlessly clear and helpful.

Listen to your customers and prospects and identify what they’re actually asking before they buy. Don’t just guess, but ask and listen to what is driving their decision—pricing models, implementation timelines, how you stack up against alternatives, what could go wrong, what real problems you actually solve, frustrations, pains, etc. Then build regularly updated content with clear intent that has these specific answers. Use the right formats for your audience and use case, whether long-form, comparison tables, Q&A, or checklists.

Don’t make content because you’re trying to rank or gain wins in AI search. That’s a thin foundation. Make content because it will be super valuable and provide actual answers for your real prospects. You’ll probably be in the conversation if you have the clearest, most specific answer to your prospect’s question.

Trust matters more than ever, too. Focus on developing authorship, actual credentials, case studies with real numbers, and being transparent. AI platforms and search systems want to cite sources that won’t make them look bad.

Standing out in AI search often means being deliberately straightforward. Be the source that’s easiest to verify and cite in your niche.