AI-driven search is rewriting the rules of discovery. 

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are changing how customers find brands. Traditional rankings no longer guarantee visibility. 

Are you appearing where it matters most?

Discover proven strategies to boost your AI mentions and citations.

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Pat Reinhart, VP of Services & Thought Leadership at Conductor, and Luiza Shahbazyan, Sr. R&D Product Manager at Conductor, will show you exactly how to win in the age of AI search. You’ll learn:

• How to maximize your brand’s visibility across AI answer engines.
  
• Key signals that influence AI citations, including content authority and digital PR.
  
• Practical strategies to earn mentions and strengthen trust signals.
  
• How to adapt your SEO workflows for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

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https://www.searchenginejournal.com/maximize-your-ai-visibility-before-your-competitors-do/556164/

Google reports a data center issue is causing a partial Search disruption, affecting some pages in certain locales.

• Google confirms a data center issue causing a partial Search disruption.
• Check the official Search Status Dashboard for updates.
• Avoid reactive site changes.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-experiencing-ongoing-service-disruption/557529/

Yoast announced the release of their Brand Insights tool, which helps track and monitor brand sentiment and visibility in AI platforms like ChatGPT. The new tool, currently in beta, is a new direction for Yoast because it’s not a plugin and doesn’t need CMS access. The complete tool is called Yoast SEO AI+.

The tool offers sentiment-tracking analysis by keywords, competitor rank benchmarking, citation analysis, and the ability to monitor specific brand questions.

The citation analysis is interesting because it tracks brand mentions. The sentiment analysis is also useful because it shows a graph based on keywords broken down by positive and negative sentiment.

Niko Körner, Senior Director of Product at Yoast explained:

“With Yoast AI Brand Insights, our customers can not only track their brand’s visibility, sentiment, and credibility in AI platforms like ChatGPT, but also see how they compare against the competition. As AI answers become a new starting point for customer journeys, this competitive perspective is crucial to staying ahead.

We worked hard to create a simplified KPI that truly reflects brand performance in the age of AI. Our AI Visibility Index combines sentiment, rank in LLM answers, brand mentions, and citations into one clear metric.

Soon, we will also be launching actionable recommendations to help businesses improve their AI visibility. This launch is only the beginning, and we are already working on improvements and expanding support for more large language models.”

The new Yoast tool is modestly priced, a sign that  Yoast is focusing on providing SEO tools for SMBs  who are interested in getting ahead in AI search.

Read more here:
Find out how your brand shows up in ai answers – Yoast SEO AI+

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Xharites

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yoast-announces-new-ai-visibility-tool/557378/

OpenAI released the largest study to date on how users really use ChatGPT. I have painstakingly synthesized the ones you and I should pay heed to, so you don’t have to wade through the plethora of useful and pointless insights.

TL;DR

1. LLMs are not replacing search. But they are shifting how people access and consume information.
2. Asking (49%) and Doing (40%) queries dominate the market and are increasing in quality.
3. The top three use cases – Practical Guidance, Seeking Information, and Writing – account for 80% of all conversations.
4. Publishers need to build linkable assets that add value. It can’t just be about chasing traffic from articles anymore.

Chatbot 101

A chatbot is a statistical model trained to generate a text response given some text input. Monkey see, monkey do.

The more advanced chatbots have a two or more-stage training process. In stage one (less colloquially known as “pre-training”), LLMs are trained to predict the next word in a string.

Like the world’s best accountant, they are both predictable and boring. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I want my chefs fat, my pilots sober, and my money men so boring they’re next in line to lead the Green Party.

Stage two is where things get a little fancier. In the “post-training” phase, models are trained to generate “quality” responses to a prompt. They are fine-tuned on different strategies, like reinforcement learning, to help grade responses.

Over time, the LLMs, like Pavlov’s dog, are either rewarded or reprimanded based on the quality of their responses.

In phase one, the model “understands” (definitely in inverted commas) a latent representation of the world. In phase two, its knowledge is honed to generate the best quality response.

Without temperature settings, LLMs will generate exactly the same response time after time, as long as the training process is the same.

Higher temperatures (closer to 1.0) increase randomness and creativity. Lower temperatures (closer to 0) make the model(s) far more predictive and precise.

So, your use case determines the appropriate temperature settings. Coding should be set closer to zero. Creative, more content-focused tasks should be closer to one.

I have already talked about this in my article on how to build a brand post AI. But I highly recommend reading this very good guide on how temperature scales work with LLMs and how they impact the user base.

What Does The Data Tell Us?

That LLMs are not a direct replacement for search. Not even that close IMO. This Semrush study highlighted that LLM super users increased the amount of traditional searches they were doing. The expansion theory seems to hold true.

But they have brought on a fundamental shift in how people access and interact with information. Conversational interfaces have incredible value. Particularly in a workplace format.

Who knew we were so lazy?

1. Guidance, Seeking Information, And Writing Dominate

These top three use cases account for 80% of all human-robot conversations. Practical guidance, seeking information, and please help me write something bland and lacking any kind of passion or insight, wondrous robot.

I will concede that the majority of Writing queries are for editing existing work. Still. If I read something written by AI, I will feel duped. And deception is not an attractive quality.

2. Non-Work-Related Usage Is Increasing

• Non-work-related messages grew from 53% of all usage to more than 70% by July 2025.
• LLMs have become habitual. Particularly when it comes to helping us make the right decisions. Both in and out of work.

3. Writing Is The Most Common Workplace Application

• Writing is the most common work use case, accounting for 40% of work-related messages on average in June 2025.
• About two-thirds of all Writing messages are requests to modify existing user text rather than create new text from scratch.

I know enough people that just use LLMs to help them write better emails. I almost feel sorry for the tech bros that the primary use cases for these tools are so lacking in creativity.

4. Less So Coding

• Computer coding queries are a relatively small share, at only 4.2% of all messages.*
• This feels very counterintuitive, but specialist bots like Claude or tools like Lovable are better alternatives.
• This is a point of note. Specialist LLM usage will grow and will likely dominate specific industries because they will be able to develop better quality outputs. The specialized stage two style training makes for a far superior product.

*Compared to 33% of work-related Claude conversations.

It’s important to note that other studies have some very different takes on what people use LLMs for. So this isn’t as cut and dry as we think. I’m sure things will continue to change.

5. Men No Longer Dominate

• Early adopters were disproportionately male (around 80% with typically masculine names).
• That number declined to 48% by June 2025, with active users now slightly more likely to have typically feminine names.

Sure, us men have our flaws. Throughout history maybe we’ve been a tad quick to battle and a little dominating. But good to see parity.

• 89% of all queries are Asking and Doing related.
• 49% Asking and 40% Doing, with just 11% for Expressing.
• Asking messages have grown faster than Doing messages over the last year, and are rated higher quality.

7. Relationships And Personal Reflection Are Not Prominent

• There have been a number of studies that state that LLMs have become personal therapists for people (see above).
• However, relationships and personal reflection only account for 1.9% of total messages according to OpenAI.

8. The Bloody Youth (*Shakes Fist*)

Takeaways

I don’t think LLMs are a disaster for publishers. Sure, they don’t send any referral traffic and have started to remove citations outside of paid users (classic). But none of these tech-heads are going to give us anything.

It’s a race to the moon, and we’re the dog they sent on the test flight.

But if you’re a publisher with an opinion, an audience, and – hopefully – some brand depth and assets to hand, you’ll be ok. Although their crawling behavior is getting out of hand.

One of the most practical outcomes we as publishers can take from this data is the apparent change in intents. For eons, we’ve been lumbered with navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional.

Now we have Doing. Or Generating. And it’s huge.

SEO isn’t dead for publishers. But we do need to do more than just keep publishing content. There’s a lot to be said for espousing the values of AI, while keeping it at arm’s length.

Think BBC Verify. Content that can’t be synthesized by machines because it adds so much value. Tools and linkable assets. Real opinions from experts pushed to the fore.

But it’s hard to scale that quality. Programmatic SEO can drive amazing value. As can tools. Tools that answer users’ “Doing” queries time after time. We have to build things that add value outside of the existing corpus.

And if your audience is generally younger and more trusting, you’re going to have to lean into this more.

More Resources:

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This post was originally published on Leadership in SEO.

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Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-people-really-use-llms-and-what-that-means-for-publishers/556977/

New research from BrightEdge offers insights into how Google’s AI Overviews ranks websites across different verticals, with implications for what SEOs and publishers should be focusing on.

AIO And Organic Search

The data shows that 54% of the AI Overviews citations matched the web pages ranked in the organic search results. This means that 46% of citations do not overlap with organic search results.  Could this be an artifact of Google’s FastSearch algorithm?

Google’s FastSearch is based on ranking signals generated by the RankEmbed deep-learning model that is trained on search logs and third-party quality raters. The search logs consist of user behavior data, what Google terms “click and query data.” Click data teaches the RankEmbed model about what users mean when they search.

Click behavior is feedback about queries and relevant documents, similar to how the ratings submitted by the quality raters teach RankEmbed about quality. User clicks are a behavioral signal of which documents are relevant. So, as a hypothetical example, if people who search for “How to” tend to click on videos and tutorials, this teaches the model that videos and tutorials tend to satisfy those kinds of queries. RankEmbed “learns” that documents that are semantically similar to a tutorial are good matches for that kind of query. The models aren’t learning in a human sense; they are identifying patterns in the click data.

This doesn’t mean that the 54% of AIO-ranked sites are there because of traditional ranking factors. It could be that the FastSearch algorithm retrieves results that are similar to the regular search results 54% of the time.

Insight About Ranking Factors

BrightEdge’s data could be reflecting the complexity of Google’s FastSearch algorithm, which prioritizes speed and semantic matching of queries to documents without the use of traditional ranking signals like links. This is something that SEOs and publishers should stop and consider because it highlights the importance of content and also the importance of matching the type of content that users prefer to see.

So, if they’re querying about a product, they don’t expect to see a page with an essay about the product; they expect to see a page with the product.

Organic And AIO Overlap Evolved Over Time

When AIO launched, there was only about a 32% overlap between AIO and the classic organic search results. BrightEdge’s data shows that the overlap has grown over the sixteen months between the debut of AI Overviews and today.

Organic And AIO Match Depends On The Vertical

The 54/46 percentage split isn’t across the board. The percentage of AIO-ranked sites that match the organic search results varies according to the vertical.

Your Money Or Your Life (YMYL) content showed a higher rate of overlap between organic and AIO.

BrightEdge’s data shows:

• Healthcare has a strong overlap: 75.3% overlap (began at 63.3%).
• Education overlap has increased significantly: 72.6% overlap between organic and AIO, showing +53.2 percentage points growth, from 19.4% to 72.6%.
• Insurance also experienced increased overlap: 68.6%. That’s a +47.7 percentage points growth from the 20.9% overlap when AIO was first introduced.
• E-commerce has very little overlap with the organic search results: 22.9% overlap (only +0.6 percentage points change).

I’m going to speculate here and say that Healthcare, Education, and Insurance search results may have a strong overlap because the pool of authoritative sites that users expect to see may be smaller. This may mean that websites in these verticals may have to work hard to be the kind of site that users expect to see. A broad and simplified explanation is that FastSearch does not use traditional organic search ranking factors. It’s ranking the kinds of web pages that match user expectations, meet certain quality standards, and are semantically relevant to the query.

Related: Google AI Overviews Impact On Publishers & How To Adapt Into 2026

What Is Going On With E-Commerce?

E-commerce is the one area where overlap between organic and AIO remained relatively steady with very little change. BrightEdge notes that AIO coverage actually decreased by 7.6%. AIO may be a good fit for research but is not a good format for users who are ready to make a purchase.

Final Takeaways

Although BrightEdge recommends focusing on traditional SEO for sites in verticals that have over 60% of overlap with organic search, it’s a good idea for all sites, regardless of vertical, to focus on traditional SEO and also to focus on precision, matching user expectations for each query, and pay attention to what users are saying so as to be able to react swiftly to changing trends.

BrightEdge offers the following advice:

“Step 1: Identify Your Overlap Profile Measure what percentage of your AI Overview citations also rank organically and benchmark against the 54% average to understand where you stand.

Step 2: Match Strategy to Intent. High overlap (>60%) means focus on SEO; low overlap (<30%) requires split content strategies; growing overlap (30-60%) needs comprehensive content serving both.

Step 3: Monitor the Convergence Track your overlap percentage monthly as it has grown +22% industry-wide in 16 months, watching for shifts like September 2024’s +5.4% jump.”

Read BrightEdge’s report:

AI Overview Citations Now 54% from Organic Rankings

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ai-overviews-overlaps-organic-search-by-54/557317/

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about an expired domain that was unable to rank for relevant search queries, including its own brand name. The answer sheds light on how expired domains are handled by Google after they are re-registered.

History Of Expired Domains And SEO

Buying expired domains for their link profiles was a quick way to rank a website about 25 years ago. In those days, it was possible to see the PageRank associated with a domain through Google’s browser toolbar. If the domain was penalized, the PageRank meter would show this with a completely zeroed-out PageRank value. Thus, an SEO could buy an expired domain, regardless of the topic associated with it, point it to their website, and experience a boost in PageRank and rankings.

The expired domain effect was not limited to actual expired domains. A little-known loophole was that links to non-existent domain names could also contain PageRank. For example, many SEO forums used to link to domains like example-domain.com during the course of their discussions. SEOs would purchase those domains and experience the benefit of the PageRank from all the websites linking to that domain.

Another related tactic was to crawl .edu and .org websites to identify domain name misspellings in (broken) links to external websites, register those domains, and within hours a site would have inbound links from authoritative web pages.

The expired domain loophole came to an end in the early 2000s after Google introduced domain PageRank resets. Interestingly, the domain reset also affected domain misspellings that had never been registered. So even that secret loophole was closed.

Google’s John Mueller, in his answer, seemed to provide some information about how the domain name reset works. Mueller specifically referred to the state of being a parked domain and then having that status removed internally within Google.

Expired Domain Is Not Ranking

A person posted about their expired domain issue on the SEO subreddit (r/SEO). They explained that they had recently launched a new website on an expired domain, and it was having trouble ranking for keywords, including its own branded keywords.

They explained:

“I launched a brand-new website on a new domain, everything looks solid:

Indexed in Google (shows up with site:domain).

No errors in Search Console.

Sitemap and robots.txt are clean.

Here’s the strange part: the site refuses to appear in SERPs for even the most basic branded queries. Not ranking for generic terms is one thing, but not showing up at all for my own company name (let’s call it Octigen GmbH)? That feels really odd.

Now, here’s the twist: this domain used to belong to a completely different company (also called Octigen) that went bust years ago. Old links still exist in forums, ecommerce sites, etc. I’m wondering if the domain’s past life could be holding it back — like a reputation penalty or some kind of lingering Google baggage.”

The person then asked the following questions:

• “Can an old domain history actively suppress visibility, even if it’s re-verified, re-indexed, and fully rebuilt?
• Is there a way to “reset” a domain’s reputation, or am I better off cutting losses and starting fresh?”

It Takes Time To “Shake Off” Old State Of Domain

Mueller answers the question with a reference to shaking off the previous “state” of a domain, which he describes as being unregistered or parked. Those are two different states of a domain.

Unregistered means that there’s nothing at a domain; it’s not registered by anyone, and it basically doesn’t exist, even if the domain was previously registered but now is not.

A parked domain means that the domain is registered and the DNS is pointing to a holding page, maybe even showing some advertising.

Mueller said it takes time for the state of that domain to change within Google:

“Sometimes it just takes a lot of time for the old state of a domain to be shaken off (sometimes that’s also the case when it was parked for a while), and the site to be treated like something new / independent.”

Expired Domain Name Reset

What Mueller is talking about sounds a lot like what we used to talk about over twenty years ago: an expired domain reset. The ways in which Google treats domains may have changed since then, so what Mueller is talking about could be related to a different process, like understanding where a site fits on the Internet.

Could this mean that a domain “state,” such as parked or expired, results in some kind of index notation at Google?

Mueller continued his answer by saying there’s nothing he can do to manually indicate the domain’s state has changed:

“There’s nothing manual that you can / need to do here.”

But he did recommend checking Search Console to make sure there are no penalties associated with the site:

“I would double-check in Search Console to make sure that there are no URL removal requests pending, and that there’s nothing in the manual actions section, but I’m guessing you already did that.”

What To Do If An Expired Domain Is Not Ranking?

At this point, most SEOs would not like to be told to sit tight and wait for Google to discover a new website. The natural inclination would be to increase natural links to a website and other promotional activities. Short of link building, that’s what Mueller advised.

He wrote:

“My suggestion for you specifically would be to keep using it, and to try to grow your visibility on other channels in the meantime. For example, it looks like you’re findable via your Linkedin page, which links to your domain name. If you’re active on Linkedin, and using that wisely to reference your domain, users can find it that way.

Similarly, you could be active in other places, such as YouTube or other social media sites (The YT video for your company name is currently on a private profile, which can be ok, but which you could also do on a company-branded profile. Or, of course, a Reddit profile)

In short, make it easy for people to find your content regardless of location when they search for it, especially for your company name. From there, expanding to the kinds of searches that could lead users who don’t yet know your company to your content, would be the next step — and even there it’s useful to be active on various platforms.”

Expired Domains Can Be Tricky

It’s clear that expired domains have, in the past, gone through a reset process where the link equity of a domain drops off and the domain essentially starts at position zero.

Google’s ranking algorithms can give a new site a temporary ranking boost. That makes it difficult to say with certainty whether a website with an expired domain is ranking because of the residual effects from the domain or because of Google’s new site ranking boost.

What’s important to keep in mind is that promoting a new website is essential, regardless of whether it’s built on an expired domain or one that’s never been registered.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Andrii Iemelianenko

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-explains-expired-domains-and-ranking-issues/557283/

Google rolled out AI Overviews to all U.S. users in May 2024. Since then, publishers have reported significant traffic losses, with some seeing click-through rates drop by as much as 89%. The question isn’t whether AI Overviews impact traffic, but how much damage they’re doing to specific content types.

Search (including Google Discover and traditional Google Search) consistently accounts for between 20% and 40% of referral traffic to most major publishers, making it their largest external traffic source. When DMG Media, which owns MailOnline and Metro, reports nearly 90% declines for certain searches, it’s a stark warning for traditional publishing.

After more than a year of AI Overviews (and Search Generative Experience), we have extensive data from publishers, researchers, and industry analysts. This article pulls together findings from multiple studies covering hundreds of thousands of keywords, tens of thousands of user searches, and real-world publisher experiences.

The evidence spans from Pew Research’s 46% average decline to DMG Media’s 89% worst-case scenarios. Educational platforms like Chegg report a 49% decline. But branded searches are actually increasing for some, suggesting there are survival strategies for those who adapt.

This article explains what’s really happening and why, including the types of content that face the biggest changes and which are staying relatively stable. You’ll understand why Google says clicks are “higher quality” even as publishers see traffic declines, and you’ll see what changes might make sense based on real data rather than guesses.

AI Overviews are the biggest change to search since featured snippets were introduced in 2014. They’re affecting the kinds of content publishers produce, and they’re increasing zero-click searches, which now make up 69% of all queries, according to Similarweb.

Whether your business relies on search traffic or you’re just watching industry trends, these patterns are significantly impacting digital marketing.

What we’re seeing is a new era in search and a change that is reshaping how online information is shared and how users interact with it.

AI Overview Studies: The Overwhelming Evidence

Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) have impacted traffic across most verticals and altered search behavior.

The feature, which was first introduced as Search Generative Experience (SGE) announced at Google I/O in May 2023, now appears in over 200 countries and 40 languages following a May 2025 expansion.

Independent research conducted throughout 2024 and 2025 shows click-through rate reductions ranging from 34% to 46% when AI summaries appear on search results pages.

Evidence from a variety of independent studies outlines the impact of AIO and shows a range of effects depending on the type of content and how it’s measured:

Reduced Click Through Rates – Pew Research Center

A study by Pew Research Center provides a rigorous analysis. By tracking 68,000 real search queries, researchers found that users clicked on results 8% of the time when AI summaries appeared, compared to 15% without them. That’s a 46.7% relative reduction.

Pew’s study tracked actual user behavior, rather than relying on estimates or keyword tools, validating publisher concerns.

Google questioned Pew’s methodology, claiming that the analysis period overlapped with algorithm testing unrelated to AI Overviews. However, the decline and its connection to AI Overview presence suggest a notable relationship, even if other factors played a role.

Position One Eroded – Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ analysis found that position one click-through rates dropped for informational keywords triggering AI Overviews.

Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, stated on LinkedIn:

“AI Overviews reduce clicks by 34.5%. Google says being featured in an AI Overview leads to higher click-through rates… Logic disagrees, and now, so does our data.”

Law’s observation gets to the heart of a major contradiction: Google says appearing in AI Overviews helps publishers, but the math of fewer clicks suggests this is just corporate doublespeak to appease content creators.

His post garnered over 8,200 reactions, indicating widespread industry agreement with these findings.

More Zero-Click Searches – Similarweb

According to Similarweb data, zero-click searches increased from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. While this captures trends beyond AI Overviews, the timing aligns with the rollout.

Zero-click searches work because they meet user needs. For example, when someone searches for “weather today” or a stock price, getting an instant answer without clicking is helpful. The issue comes when zero-click searches creep into areas where publishers used to offer in-depth content.

Stuart Forrest, global director of SEO digital publishing at Bauer Media, confirms the trend, telling the BBC:

“We’re definitely moving into the era of lower clicks and lower referral traffic for publishers.”

Forrest’s admitting to this new reality shows that the industry as a whole is coming to terms with the end of the golden age of search traffic. Not with a dramatic impact, but with a steady decline in clicks as AI meets users’ needs before they ever leave Google’s ecosystem.

Search Traffic Decline – Digital Content Next

An analysis by Digital Content Next found a 10% overall search traffic decline among member publishers between May and June.

Although modest compared to DMG’s worst-case scenarios, this represents millions of lost visits across major publishers.

AIO Placement Volatility – Authoritas

An Authoritas report finds that AI Overview placements are more volatile than organic ones. Over a two- to three-month period, about 70% of the pages cited in AI Overviews changed, and these changes weren’t linked to traditional organic rankings.

This volatility is why some sites experience sudden traffic drops even when their blue-link rankings seem stable.

Click-Based Economy Collapse For News Publishers – DMG Media

A statement from DMG Media to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority reveals click-through rates dropped by as much as 89% when AI Overviews appeared for their content.

Although this figure represents a worst-case scenario rather than an average, it highlights the potential for traffic losses for certain search types.

Additionally, there are differences in how AI Overviews affect click-through rates depending on the device type.

The Daily Mail’s desktop CTR dropped from 25.23% to 2.79% when an AI Overview surfaced above a visible link (-89%), with mobile traffic declining by 87%; U.S. figures were similar.

These numbers indicate we’re facing more than just a temporary adjustment period. We’re witnessing a structural collapse of the click-based economy that has supported digital publishing since the early 2000s. With traffic declines approaching 90%, we’ve gone beyond optimization tactics and into existential crisis mode territory.

The submission to regulatory authorities suggests they’re confident in these numbers, despite their magnitude.

Educational Site Disruption – Chegg

Educational platforms are experiencing disruption from AI Overviews.

Learning platform Chegg reported a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic between January 2024 and January 2025 in company statements accompanying their February antitrust lawsuit.

The decline coincided with AI Overviews answering homework and study questions that previously drove traffic to educational sites. Chegg’s lawsuit alleges that Google used content from educational publishers to train AI systems that now compete directly with those publishers.

Chegg’s case is a warning sign for educational content creators: If AI systems can successfully replace structured learning platforms, what’s the future for smaller publishers?

Reduced Visibility For Top Ranking Sites – Advanced Web Ranking

AI Overviews are dense and tall, impacting the visibility of organic results.

Advanced Web Ranking found that across 8,000 keywords, AI Overviews average around 169 words and include about seven links when expanded.

Once expanded, the first organic result often appears about 1,674px down the page. That’s well below the fold on most screens, reducing visibility for even top-ranked pages.

Branded Searches: The Surprising Exception

While most query types are seeing traffic declines, branded searches show the opposite trend. According to Amsive’s research, branded queries with AI Overviews see an 18% increase in click-through rate.

Several related factors likely contribute to this brand advantage. When AI Overviews mention specific brands, it conveys authority and credibility in ways that generic content can’t replicate.

People seeing their preferred brand in an AI Overview may be more likely to click through to the official site. Additionally, AI Overviews for branded searches often include rich information like store hours, contact details, and direct links, making it easier for users to find what they need.

This pattern has strategic implications as companies that have invested in brand building have a strong defense against AI disruption. The 18% increase in branded terms versus a 34-46% decrease in generic terms (as shown above) creates a performance gap that will likely impact marketing budgets.

The brand advantage extends beyond direct brand searches. Queries combining brand names with product categories show smaller traffic declines than purely generic searches. This suggests that even partial brand recognition provides some protection against AI Overview disruption. Companies with strong brands can leverage this by ensuring their brand appears naturally in relevant conversations and content.

This brand premium creates a two-tier internet, where established brands flourish while smaller content creators struggle financially. The impact on information diversity and market competition is troubling.

Google’s Defense: Stable Traffic, Better Quality

Google maintains a consistent three-part defense of AI Overviews:

• Increased search usage.
• Improved click quality.
• Stable overall traffic.

The company frames AI Overviews as enhancing rather than replacing traditional search, though this narrative faces increasing skepticism from publishers experiencing traffic declines.

The company’s blog post from May, introducing the global expansion, stated:

“AI Overviews is driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews. This means that once people use AI Overviews, they are coming to do more of these types of queries.”

Although this statistic shows a rise in Google Search engagement, it’s sparked intense debate and skepticism in the search and publishing worlds. Many experts agree that a 10% boost in AI Overview-driven searches could be due to changes in user behavior, but also warn that higher search volumes don’t automatically mean more traffic for content publishers.

A number of LinkedIn industry voices have publicly pushed back on Google’s 10% usage increase narrative. For example, Devansh Parashar writes:

“Google’s claim that AI Overviews have driven 10% more searches masks a troubling trend. Data from independent research firms, such as Pew, show that a majority of users do not click beyond the AI Overview— a figure that suggests Google’s LLM layer is quietly eating the web’s traffic pie.”

Similarly, Trevin Shirey points out concerns about the gap between increased engagement with search queries and the actual traffic publishers see:

“Although Google reports a surge in usage, many publishers are experiencing declines in organic click-through rates. This signals a silent crisis where users get quick answers from AI, but publishers are left behind.”

Google’s claim about increased usage needs to be read carefully. The increase is only for certain types of queries that show AI overviews, not overall search volume.

If users have to make multiple searches to find information they could have gotten in one click, their overall usage might go up, but their satisfaction could actually decrease.

In an August blog post, Google’s head of search, Liz Reid, claimed the volume of clicks from Google search to websites had been “relatively stable” year-over-year.

Reid also asserted that click quality had improved:

“With AI Overviews, people are searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more complex. In addition, with AI Overviews people are seeing more links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked.”

A Google spokesperson told the BBC:

“More than any other company, Google prioritises sending traffic to the web, and we continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day.”

Google’s developer documentation states:

“We’ve seen that when people click from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site).”

Publishers are understandably concerned and question the differences between Google’s description of stability and the actual data showing otherwise.

Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, notes:

“Since Google rolled out AI Overviews in your search results, median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers down 10%.”

Kint’s data shatters Google’s carefully crafted image of stability, exposing what many publishers already suspect: The search giant’s promises are increasingly at odds with the realities reflected in their analytics dashboards and revenue reports.

The argument that higher-quality clicks are more valuable doesn’t provide much comfort when revenue is falling short. Even if engagement increases, losing such a large portion of clicks is a serious challenge for many ad-supported businesses.

Echoing these concerns, SEO Lead Jeff Domansky states:

“For publishers, AI Overviews are a direct hit to traffic and revenue models built around clicks and pageviews.”

Although Google claims that AI Overview clicks are of higher quality, many industry experts are skeptical.

Lily Ray, Vice President, SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive, highlights the lack of quality control on Google’s end:

“Since Google’s AI Overviews were launched, I (and many others) have shared dozens of examples of spam, misinformation, and inaccurate, biased, or incomplete results appearing in live AI Overview responses.”

And SEO specialist Barry Adams raises concerns about the quality and sustainability:

“Google’s AI Overviews are terrible at quoting the right sources… There is nothing intelligent about LLMs. They’re advanced word predictors, and using them for any purpose that requires a basis in verifiable facts – like search queries – is fundamentally wrong.”

Adams highlights a philosophical contradiction in AI Overviews: By relying on probabilistic language models to answer factual questions, Google may be misaligning technology with user needs.

This range of voices highlights a growing disconnect between Google’s hopeful engagement claims and the tough realities many publishers are facing as their referral traffic and revenue decrease.

Google hasn’t provided specific metrics defining “higher quality.” Publishers can’t verify these claims without access to comparative engagement data from AI Overview versus traditional search traffic.

Legal Challenges Mount

Publishers are seeking relief through regulatory and legal channels. In July, the Independent Publishers Alliance, tech justice nonprofit Foxglove, and the campaign group Movement for an Open Web filed a complaint with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. They claim that Google AI Overviews misuse publisher content, causing harm to newspapers.

The complaint urges the CMA to impose temporary measures that prevent Google from using publisher content in AI-generated responses without compensation.

It’s still unclear whether courts and regulators, which often move at a slow pace, can take action quickly enough to help publishers before market forces make any potential solutions irrelevant. A classic example of regulation trying to keep up with technological advancements.

The rapid growth of AI Overviews suggests that market realities may outstrip legal solutions.

Publisher Adaptations: Beyond Google Dependence

With threats looming, publishers are rushing to cut their reliance on Google. David Higgerson shares Reach’s approach in a statement to the BBC:

“We need to go and find where audiences are elsewhere and build relationships with them there. We’ve got millions of people who receive our alerts on WhatsApp. We’ve built newsletters.”

Instead of creating content for Google discovery, publishers need to develop direct relationships. Email newsletters, mobile apps, and podcast subscriptions provide traffic sources that aren’t affected by AI Overview disruptions.

Stuart Forrest stresses the importance of quality as a key differentiator:

“We need to make sure that it’s us being cited and not our rivals. Things like writing good quality content… it’s amazing the number of publishers that just give up on that.”

However, quality alone may not be enough if users never leave Google’s search results page. Publishers also need to master AI Overview optimization and understand how to make the most of remaining click opportunities.

Higgerson notes:

“Google doesn’t give us a manual on how to do it. We have to run tests and optimise copy in a way that doesn’t damage the primary purpose of the content.”

Another path that’s emerging is content licensing. Following News Corp and The Atlantic partnering with OpenAI, more publishers are exploring direct licensing relationships. These deals typically provide upfront payments and ongoing royalties for content usage in AI training, though terms remain confidential.

What We Don’t Know

There are still many uncertainties. The long-term trajectory of AI Mode, for example, could alter current patterns.

AI Mode

Google’s AI Mode may pose an even bigger threat than AI Overviews. This new interface displays search results in a conversational format instead of 10 blue links. Searchers have a back-and-forth with AI, with occasional reference links thrown in.

For publishers already struggling with AI-powered overviews, AI Mode could wipe out the rest of their traffic.

International Impact

The international effects outside English-language markets remain unmeasured. Since AI Overviews are available in over 200 countries and 40 languages, the impact likely varies by market. Factors like cultural differences in search behavior, language complexity, local competition dynamics, and varying digital literacy levels could lead to vastly different outcomes.

Most current research focuses on English-language markets in developed economies.

Content Creation

The feedback loop between AI Overviews and content creation could reshape what content gets produced and how information flows online.

If publishers stop creating certain types of content due to traffic losses, will AI Overview quality suffer as training data becomes stale?

Looking Ahead: Expanded AI Features

Google intends to continue expanding AI features despite mounting publisher concerns and legal challenges.

The company’s roadmap includes AI Mode international expansion and enhanced interactive features, including voice-activated AI conversations and multi-turn query refinement. Publishers should prepare for continued evolution rather than expecting stability in search traffic patterns.

Regulatory intervention may force greater transparency in the coming months. The Independent Publishers Alliance’s EU complaint requests detailed impact assessments and content usage documentation.

These proceedings could establish precedents affecting how AI systems can use publisher content.

Final Thoughts

The question isn’t whether AI Overviews affect traffic. Evidence overwhelmingly confirms they do. The question is how publishers adapt business models while maintaining sustainable operations.

The web is at a turning point, where the core agreement is being rewritten by the platforms that once promoted the open internet. Publishers who don’t acknowledge this change are jeopardizing their relevance in an AI-driven future.

Those who understand the impact, invest in brand building, and diversify traffic sources will be best positioned for success.

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Let’s talk about an agentic future. As task-completing agents move from concept to adoption, their impact on how we discover and transact online will be significant. Websites won’t vanish, but in many cases, their utility will shrink as agents become the new intermediary layer between people and answers. Domains will still exist, but their value as discovery assets is likely to erode. Building and maintaining a site will increasingly mean structuring it for agents to retrieve from, not just for people to browse, and the idea of domains appreciating as scarce assets will feel less connected to how discovery actually happens.

The growth trajectory for AI agents is already clear in the data. Grand View Research valued the global AI agents market at USD 5.40 billion in 2024, with forecasts reaching USD 50.31 billion by 2030 at an annual growth rate of about 45.8%. Regionally, the Asia-Pacific market was USD 1.30 billion in 2024 and is projected to expand to USD 14.15 billion by 2030, with China alone expected to grow from USD 402.6 million to USD 3.98 billion over the same period. Europe is following a similar path, climbing from USD 1.32 billion in 2024 to USD 11.49 billion by 2030. Longer-term, Precedence Research projects the global agentic AI market will rise from USD 7.55 billion in 2025 to nearly USD 199.05 billion by 2034, a compound growth rate of 43.84%. These forecasts from multiple regions show a consistent global pattern: adoption is accelerating everywhere, and the shift toward agentic systems is not theoretical; it is underway. These figures are about task-completing agents, not casual chat use.

Do We Still Need Websites In An Agentic World?

It’s easy to forget how limited the internet felt in the 1990s. On AOL, you didn’t browse the web the way we think of it today. You navigated keywords. One word dropped you into chat rooms, news channels, or branded content. The open web was technically out there, but for most people, America Online WAS the internet.

That closed-garden model eventually gave way to the open web. Domains became navigation anchors. Owning a clean .com or a trusted extension like .org or .gov signaled legitimacy. Websites evolved into the front doors of digital identity, where brand credibility and consumer trust were built. Search rankings reinforced this. An exact-match domain once boosted visibility, and later the concept of “domain authority” helped indicate who showed up at the top of search results. For nearly three decades, websites have been the central hub of digital discovery and transactions.

But we may be circling back. Only this time, the keyword is no longer “AOL Keyword: Pizza Hut.” It’s your natural-language intent: “Book me a flight,” “Order flowers,” “Find me a dentist nearby.” And instead of AOL, the gatekeepers are LLMs and agentic systems.

From Navigation To Answers

The rise of agentic systems collapses the journey we’ve been used to. Where discovery once meant search, scanning results, clicking a domain, and navigating a site, it now means describing your intent and letting the system do the rest. You don’t need Expedia or United.com if your agent confirms your flight. You don’t need to touch OpenTable’s site if a reservation is placed automatically for tomorrow night. You don’t need to sift through Nike’s catalog if new running shoes just arrive at your door.

In this flow, the answer layer replaces the click, the task layer replaces the browsing session, and the source itself becomes invisible. The consumer no longer cares which site delivered the data or handled the transaction, as long as the result is correct.

Proof In Practice: WeChat

This shift isn’t hypothetical. In China, it’s already happening at scale. WeChat introduced Mini-Programs in 2017 as “apps within an app,” designed so users never need to leave the WeChat environment. By 2024, they had become mainstream: Recent reports suggest there are between 3.9 and 4.3 million WeChat Mini-Programs in the ecosystem today. (3.9m source, 4.3m source), with over 900 million monthly active users. And while Mini-Programs are closer to apps than actual AIs, it’s all about task completion and consumers adopting layers of task completion.

In food and beverage and hospitality, over 80% of top chain restaurants now run ordering or take-out flows directly through Mini-Programs, meaning customers never touch a separate website. International brands often prioritize Mini-Programs as their Chinese storefronts instead of building localized websites, since WeChat already handles discovery, product listings, payments, and customer service. Luxury brand LOEWE, for example, launched its 2024 “Crafted World” exhibition in Shanghai entirely via a WeChat Mini-Program, offering ticketing and interactive digital content without requiring users to leave the app.

For many domestic Chinese businesses, this has become the default strategy: their websites exist, if at all, as minimal shells, while the real customer experience lives entirely inside WeChat. And it’s worth keeping in mind, we talked about WeChat serving over 1 billion monthly active users. ChatGPT currently sees over 800 million a week, so roughly three times WeChat’s volume on a monthly basis. An agentic era of direct-to-consumer facilitated by platforms like ChatGPT, WeChat, Claude, Gemini, and CoPilot could bring a massive shift in consumer behavior.

Western Parallels

Western platforms are already moving in this direction. Instagram Checkout allows users to buy products directly inside Instagram, without ever visiting a retailer’s website. Shopify details this integration here. TikTok offers similar flows. Its partnership with Shopify enables in-app checkout so the consumer never leaves TikTok. Even services like Uber now function as APIs inside larger ecosystems. You can book a ride from within another app and never open Uber directly.

In each case, the website still exists, but the consumer may never see it. Discovery, consideration, and conversion all happen inside the closed flow.

The AOL Parallel

The resemblance to the mid-1990s is striking. AOL’s big push came in that period, when its “Keyword” model positioned the service as the internet itself. Instead of typing URLs, people entered AOL Keywords and stayed inside AOL’s curated walls. By mid-1996, AOL had roughly 6 million U.S. subscribers doing this, representing about 13% of the nation’s estimated 44 million internet users at the time.

Today, the “keyword” has become your intent. The agent interprets it, makes the decision, and fulfills the request. The outcome is the same: a closed environment where the gateway controls visibility and access. Only this time, it’s powered by LLMs and APIs instead of dial-up modems.

This is not an isolated evolution. There’s mounting evidence that the open web itself is weakening. Google recently stated in a legal filing that “the open web is already in rapid decline … harming publishers who rely on open-web display advertising revenue.” That report was covered by Search Engine Roundtable.

Pew Research found that when Google displays AI-generated summaries in search results, users click links only 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no summary is present. That’s nearly a 50% decline in link clicks. Digital Content Next reported that premium publishers saw a 10% year-over-year drop in referral traffic from Google during a recent eight-week span.

The Guardian covered MailOnline’s specific case, where desktop click-through dropped 56% when AI summaries appeared, and mobile click-through fell 48%. Advertising spend tells a similar story. MarketingProfs reports that professionally produced news content is projected to receive just 51% of global content ad spend in 2025, down from 72% in 2019. Search Engine Land shows that open-web display ads have fallen from about 40% of Google AdWords impressions in 2019 to only 11% by early 2025.

The story is consistent. Consumers click less, publishers earn less, and advertisers move their budgets elsewhere. The open web will likely no longer be the center of gravity.

If websites lose their central role, what takes their place? Businesses will still need technical infrastructure, but the front door will change. Instead of polished homepages, structured data and APIs will feed agents directly. Verification layers like schema, certifications, and machine-readable credentials will carry more weight than design. Machine-validated authority (how often your brand is retrieved or cited by LLMs) will become a core measure of trust. And partnerships or API integrations will replace traditional SEO in ensuring visibility.

This doesn’t mean websites vanish. They’ll remain important for compliance, long-form storytelling, and niches where users still seek a direct experience. But for mainstream interactions, the website is being demoted to plumbing.

And while design and user experience may lose ground to agentic flows, content itself remains critical. Agents still need to be fed with high-quality text, structured product data, verified facts, and fresh signals of authority. Video will grow in importance as agents surface summaries and clips in conversational answers. First-party user-generated content, especially reviews, will carry more weight as a trust signal. Product data like clean specs, accurate availability, transparent pricing will be non-negotiable inputs to agent systems.

In other words, the work of SEO isn’t disappearing. Technical SEO remains the plumbing that ensures content is discoverable and accessible to machines. Content creation continues to matter, both because it fuels agent responses and because humans still consume it when they step beyond the agent flow. The shift is less about content’s relevance and more about where and how it gets consumed. Web design and UX work, however, will inevitably come under scrutiny as optional costs as the agent interface takes over consumer experiences.

One consequence of this shift is that brands risk losing their direct line to the customer. When an agent books the flight, orders the shoes, or schedules the dentist, the consumer’s loyalty may end up with the agent itself, not the underlying business. Just as Amazon’s marketplace turned many sellers into interchangeable storefronts beneath the Amazon brand, agentic systems may flatten brand differentiation unless companies build distinctive signals that survive mediation. That could mean doubling down on structured trust markers, recognizable product data, or even unique content assets that agents consistently retrieve. Without those, the relationship belongs to the agent, not you.

That potential demotion for websites carries consequences. Domains will still matter for branding, offline campaigns, and human recall, but their value as entry points to discovery is shrinking. The secondary market for “premium” domains is already showing signs of stress. Registries have begun cutting or eliminating premium tiers; .art, for example, recently removed over a million names from its premium list to reprice them downward. Investor commentary also points to weaker demand, with TechStartups noting in 2025 that domain sales are “crashing” as AI and shifting search behaviors reduce the perceived need for expensive keyword names.

We’ve seen this arc before. Families once paid hundreds of dollars for full sets of printed encyclopedias. Owning Britannica on your shelf was a marker of credibility and access to knowledge. Today, those same volumes can be found in thrift stores for pennies, eclipsed by digital access that made the scarcity meaningless. Domains are on a similar path. They will remain useful for identity and branding, but the assumption that a keyword .com will keep appreciating looks more like nostalgia than strategy.

Defensive portfolios across dozens of ccTLDs will be harder to justify, just as stocking encyclopedias became pointless once Wikipedia existed. Websites will remain as infrastructure, but their role as front doors will continue to shrink.

Marketing strategies must adapt. The focus will move from polishing landing pages to ensuring your data is retrievable, your brand is trusted by agents, and your authority is machine-validated. SEO, as we know it, will transform from competing for SERP rankings to competing for retrieval and integration into agent responses.

Another underappreciated consequence of all this is measurement. For decades, marketers have relied on web analytics: page views, bounce rates, conversions. Agentic systems obscure that visibility. If a customer never lands on your site but still books through an agent, you may gain the revenue but lose the data trail. New metrics will be needed. Not just whether a page ranks, but whether your content was retrieved, cited, or trusted inside agent flows. In that sense, the industry will need to redefine what “traffic” and “conversion” even mean when the interface is a conversation rather than a website.

The Fear And The Possibility

The fear is obvious. We’ve been here before with AOL. A closed gateway can dominate visibility, commoditize brands, and reduce consumer choice. The open web and search engines broke us out of that in the late 1990s. No one wants to return to those walls.

But the possibility is also real. Businesses that adapt to agentic discovery (with structured signals, trusted data feeds, and machine-recognized authority) can thrive. The website may become plumbing, but plumbing matters. It carries the flow and information that powers the experience.

So the real question isn’t whether websites will still exist. Ultimately, they will, in some format. The question is whether your business is still focused on decorating the door, or whether you’re investing in the pipes that agents actually use to deliver value.

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This post was originally published on Duane Forrester Decodes.

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All businesses, large or small, must establish a level of authority for the products and/or services they offer in the minds and hearts of their target audience if they expect to convince them to engage and buy.

This universal marketing truth plays out daily for small businesses looking to capture the attention of local customers through a variety of local SEO strategies.

Authoritativeness is the “A” in the much-heralded E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) found in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

In short, a business or organization needs to prove its authority to Google, and all other search engines, to be considered worthy of visibility in search engine results.

The authority of a local business can be established in a few different ways, but most notably:

• Via the helpful, high-quality, well-structured content it creates for its target audience/customers.
• Through validation of its offerings via industry-specific backlinks it maintains to its primary product, service, or other relevant content.
• Via the engagement of its content.
• Through validation of its “localness” via its local existence, appearance, community participation, and engagement.

We are obviously going to focus here on the fourth, often underestimated and overlooked, aspect of local business authority.

However, you’ll see that experience, expertise, and trustworthiness are also prominently referenced here, as all can be boosted via solid partnerships.

It only stands to reason: If a business wants to be visible locally, it needs to truly be visible in the community, with the digital local community merely being an extension of the real world.

While traditional SEO techniques like keyword optimization, content marketing, and link building are still essential, savvy business owners and digital marketers will look beyond these tactics to stand out from the local competition.

Leveraging local business partnerships and collaborations to build your local online authority and extend your web presence will most certainly help increase your visibility.

In this post, we’ll explore the power of forging partnerships with other local businesses and organizations to extend reach, build trust, and drive growth.

Building Authority and Trust Through Partnerships

Authority in the digital realm refers to your brand’s credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise in your industry and/or your location.

For small, local businesses, all this matters.

A business needs to convince its customers and Google, by extension, that it is the definitive local source of answers to their questions about its products and services. In other words, it is not the only game in town, but the primary one.

Partnering with other reputable, authoritative businesses effectively gets those businesses to validate your existence, expertise, and authority.

Google and other search engines consider authoritative websites more relevant and rank them higher in organic search results and local map packs.

Here’s how forging reciprocal local business partnerships can help build authority:

Co-Branding And Trust-Building

Partnering with reputable local businesses and organizations can create a co-branding effect.

When consumers (or search engines) see your business/brand associated with other businesses they already trust, it naturally enhances credibility, trustworthiness, and authority.

Local business organizations like Chambers of Commerce, Business Network International (BNI), and many others have been established, at least in part, to help small local businesses extend their reach, build trust, and, thereby, earn authority.

Many of these organizations have categorized online directories, content distribution opportunities (e.g., email newsletters or blogs), and business awards. They also have staff responsible for helping local business partners take advantage of these programs.

All local businesses should inquire, sign up, and take advantage of what these important local groups offer.

Maintaining listings, content, or recognition here provides search engines with potentially powerful local and topical signals.

Basic membership is important, but the more a business owner can do to boost their local offline and online profile through active engagement, the better.

Expertise And Resource Sharing

Collaborating with local, like-minded businesses will enable you to demonstrate your experience and expertise, along with your partner’s, and then showcase it on each other’s platforms.

This can be accomplished through guest blog posts, joint webinars, offline events, or social media takeovers – all of which can enhance your reputation as a trusted local information contributor.

One of the challenges of content marketing, especially for small local businesses, is simply having the time to create the content.

Thoughtful partnering with other business owners provides a viable means to share this burden of feeding the content machine.

For example, a local tax lawyer may partner with a local bookkeeping service or tax preparation firm to create a monthly tax tips newsletter or annual tax prep checklist, to which both firms can contribute.

Content Syndication And Social Collaboration

Similarly, two businesses that choose to share each other’s content on their respective platforms expose each other’s brands to a wider audience and can establish each as a go-to source for local information.

The key is to identify topics and content that will be relevant and interesting to each other’s audience.

While social signals, such as likes and shares, are not Google ranking factors, having partners occasionally like, share, and effectively validate any of your content will certainly extend its potential audience, where it will perhaps again be read, liked, and shared.

Content will typically only be shared once it has been validated by trustworthy sources, which your partner becomes on your behalf.

An example here may be a local auto body shop sharing car maintenance tips from a local mechanic via a customer newsletter. Meanwhile, the mechanic shares paint and detailing information through a series of Google Business Profile or social media posts.

Content sharing, depending on where and how it’s done, may result in the creation of valuable local backlinks and citations.

Backlinks

Backlinks remain valuable in SEO because search engines interpret them as votes of confidence.

Where possible, these links should be put in the proper context relative to your partnership and the related products or services offered.

For example, a local auto body shop might establish a partnership with a local full-service mechanic. Each could link to the other’s respective service pages as a reference for those customers looking for a trusted referral.

However, even a non-service-specific link for a local partner can be beneficial, too – as it is at least a local, if not topical, validation.

And yes, Google’s algorithm is sophisticated enough to identify when one local business has linked to another.

All backlinks (except for those without any relevant value) contribute to authority.

Supporting Local Organizations And Events To Gain Citations

Another aspect of growing local trust and authority is becoming involved in local service organizations, sports teams, clubs, or local events.

Whether you provide monetary or volunteer support, most organizations have websites or social media presences where a logo, contact info, perhaps a short business overview, and preferably a link can be shared.

These types of mentions, with a link or not, are considered citations and can have significant value.

These types of relationships serve to bolster localness online and provide more evidence of your business’s role as a contributing, engaged member of the community.

Furthermore, if approved by the supported organization(s), who are no doubt also looking for any positive local exposure, content and links to their websites, programs, events, etc., should be published on yours.

Typically, this is done in the “About Us” section or perhaps on a page dedicated to your business’s community support initiatives.

Local Competition And Content Differentiation

Depending on your location and level of competition, establishing local partnerships and collaborations may simply be a way of differentiating your business from all others when competitors don’t have the time, resources, or foresight to leverage this important opportunity.

The introduction of generative AI used to produce content has raised fears in some circles around the potential for a lack of “unique” informational content, as some marketers, while not advisable, will post what AI has generated verbatim.

Local collaborations can be a great way to complement what AI has to offer by injecting local partner contributions into standard service-related blog posts and FAQs.

A Local Collaboration Case Study: Fitness Food

Here’s a quick example of a local business partnership scenario and some of the potential benefits to be realized.

The Collab

A local fitness studio partners with a healthy café, offering a stay-fit meal deal to gym members.

The café provides fitness class discount vouchers with qualifying fitness-focused meal purchases, which are prominently promoted on the homepage of their websites while linking to each other.

They also collaborate on a weekly Fitness Food blog post with reciprocal links, which they publish and share on their respective websites and social media platforms.

Lastly, they create a health challenge and contest on social media for their customers, where participants are asked to share their fitness and nutrition journeys – again, cross-promoted.

The Results

• Combined, the businesses positioned themselves as leading community advocates for healthier lifestyles, reinforcing their authority as wellness experts.
• Blogs linked to their offers and primary service pages, shared via each other’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, trigger a boost in each business’s service page rank in organic search and, subsequently, organic search traffic and conversions.
• The program attracts local influencers who post user-generated content with links to their offers and blog posts, further enhancing their reach and authority.
• The health challenge and contest become a trending topic on local social media platforms, leading to likes and shares and thereby attracting a broader audience.
• The partnership created a mutually beneficial cycle – as more people joined the fitness studio, they frequented the café, and vice versa.

Practical Steps To Building Local Business Partnerships

With the potential benefits of local business partnerships outlined above, here are some practical steps to establishing and maintaining effective relationships:

Identify Compatible Businesses Or Organizations

Seek out local businesses and groups that ideally complement your products or services and share your target audience, as shown above with tax, automobile, and wellness-related businesses.

Ensure their values and marketing goals align with yours. This will form the foundation of a successful partnership.

You will naturally want to identify a business whose online presence reflects its understanding and commitment to this important marketing channel.

A few quick Google searches should quickly reveal solid prospective partners who can be easily found via organic search.

Develop A Clear Value Proposition

Clearly define what each party brings to the table and what outcomes are possible.

Consider how you can benefit each other, whether through collaborative content creation and distribution, co-promotion, shared events, or other tactics.

Create A Partnership Agreement

Consider putting a written agreement in place outlining the terms and responsibilities of each party.

This document should include details like the duration of the partnership, resource/time contributions, content ownership considerations, and any other mutual expectations.

Leverage Both Online And Offline Channels

Promote your partnership through various channels, both online and offline.

Depending on the promotion and budget, utilize your website, social media platforms, email marketing, or pay-per-click advertising, as well as in-store physical signage or offline documents, to showcase your collaborations.

Collaborate On Content

Partnering on content creation, such as blog or social media posts, is an excellent way to leverage each other’s expertise and resources.

If the plan is to create a joint blog post or email newsletter per week or month, alternate scheduling can be used to spread out the workload.

This will no doubt resonate with most local business owners who are generally taxed for time.

Monitor, Measure, And Adjust

Any good digital marketing campaign should be monitored and measured to see what’s working and what isn’t, i.e., messaging, channels, etc.

Part of your campaign planning should include a determination of what to measure and the goals you both hope to meet.

Start small with simple metrics both parties can easily obtain, such as newsletter signups, website traffic, or campaign-specific measurements.

Analyze organic search results, website traffic (and particularly referral traffic from your partners or other local sites), social media engagement, and sales at regular intervals to gauge impact.

Consider creating unique branded campaign URLs or QR codes to differentiate traffic or business received via the partnership.

With smaller businesses, it may be simple enough to measure new social media followers or shared content anecdotally.

Analytics is meant to be actionable, so be ready to suggest and adjust if something isn’t working as expected.

Ultimately, analytics will help you determine where to focus your attention, especially if one channel or source produces noticeable results.

Plan, Engage, Collaborate, Grow

Growing your business in your local community is all about extending your reach to the broadest audience possible.

Partnering with like-minded, non-competitive businesses and organizations is a quick and effective way to amplify your message – online and offline.

When done purposefully and properly online, the result is a boost in your all-important local and perhaps topical authority.

Consumers, particularly local consumers, buy from businesses they know and trust.

We all ask our friends, family, and those we do business with for advice or references when we need certain products or services.

Well-established partners can become trust proxies to bring in customers you might otherwise not have access to.

In short, building local online authority and trust boils down to being a highly visible and sincerely engaged member of your broad community that Google cannot ignore.

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Despite years of digital transformation talk, too many CEOs and CFOs still treat the corporate website as a necessary marketing expense, a sunk cost with limited upside. I have far too many CEO’s of billion-dollar companies who view it simply as an expensive interactive brochure, setting the tone for the company and dooming the web as just that, a brochure without strategic value.

But the modern website is not just a cost center. It’s a capital asset. One that, when strategically managed, generates revenue, lowers acquisition costs, accelerates growth, and protects brand equity.

In my previous articles (“Closing the Digital Performance Gap” and “Who Owns Web Performance?“), I outlined how poor internal ownership and misaligned incentives drag down web effectiveness. Now it’s time to reframe the economic value of performance. Because digital visibility, findability, and functionality aren’t just tactical wins – they affect shareholder value.

Web Execution: Expense Or Asset?

Let’s speak the CFO’s language. If you build a new manufacturing line, you evaluate its contribution to output and margin. If you invest in a retail expansion, you track foot traffic, conversion, and revenue per square foot.

Why don’t we evaluate digital the same way?

Here’s how most companies currently think:

• SEO: Free traffic driver.
• Content: Sales and marketing copy.
• UX: Design polish.
• Analytics: Reporting tool.

Here’s how performance-minded leaders think:

• SEO: Organic demand capture engine.
• Content: Business development asset.
• UX: Funnel velocity multiplier.
• Analytics: Optimization flywheel.

When you stop viewing digital as overhead and start seeing it as infrastructure, the return on investment (ROI) math changes completely.

How Underperformance Drains Enterprise Value

If your digital infrastructure is fragmented, under-optimized, or reactive:

• You spend more on paid channels to make up for poor organic performance.
• You lose visibility to competitors in AI and search environments.
• You deliver confusing or outdated experiences that erode brand trust.
• You waste employee and agency hours chasing after misaligned key performance indicators (KPIs).

None of these are minor problems. They compound.

They show up in:

• Lower customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Higher customer acquisition cost (CAC).
• Missed revenue from unindexed products or inaccessible content.
• Declines in organic search traffic and authority that paid cannot make up for.

The Invisible ROI Leak: Misalignment

As explored in “Who Owns Web Performance?,” when multiple teams touch the website – but no one owns outcomes – you get:

• Wasted spend on underperforming campaigns.
• Lost traffic due to crawlability errors and excessive technical issues.
• Duplicated content with no central taxonomy.
• Security or compliance risks from unmanaged pages.

These are not theoretical. They show up on the balance sheet as missed revenue, higher CAC, and lower conversion rates.

The Capital Efficiency Of SEO And Organic Visibility

Capital efficiency is one of the most underappreciated components of shareholder value, but increasingly, it’s a critical factor in CEO evaluations. Boards and investors are looking beyond topline growth to assess how effectively a company turns investment into output to achieve growth. That means efficient, repeatable, high-margin systems like SEO and web performance become strategic levers, not support functions.

SEO is often dismissed as “free traffic,” but that’s misleading. It’s not free and has been rebranded into MBA-friendly buzzwords like “organic visibility” and “owned media.” But behind those terms is real effort. SEO teams must optimize content that was often created in a vacuum, retrofit pages with structured data, and resolve infrastructure gaps just to make that content accessible to search engines. These are real costs and costs that wouldn’t exist if SEO were embedded earlier in the workflow. When viewed holistically as a strategic function, SEO becomes a high-efficiency, compounding return channel. One that gets stronger with alignment and investment, and weaker with neglect.

Properly funded and governed SEO:

• Reduces dependency on paid media.
• Enables customer self-service and support at scale.
• Increases discoverability across multiple intent stages.
• Builds durable search equity and authority.
• Fuels AI citations and rich result presence.

More importantly, it improves capital efficiency, the ability to turn inputs (budget, time, content) into outputs (qualified leads, revenue, brand trust) with minimal waste.

AI Search Just Raised The Stakes

Search is no longer about blue links – it’s about recommendation systems. AI Overviews, summary blocks, and generative results are now front and center. If your content isn’t:

…then you’re invisible. Or worse – you’re used as a data source without receiving attribution.

As I wrote in “The New Role of SEO in the Age of AI,” platforms now monetize the experience, not just the click. They extract content, retain the user, and collect behavioral data to improve their own models.

“If your content can’t be reused, monetized, or trained against – it’s less likely to be shown.”

Your site is not just competing with others – it’s competing with the platform itself.

Let’s Talk Shareholder Value

When SEO and digital performance are working:

• You lower CAC.
• You increase CLV through better segmentation and nurturing.
• You strengthen brand equity via visibility and trust signals.
• You improve operational efficiency through centralized platforms and reusable modules, and reduce customer support costs through effective self-service experiences.
• You protect valuation by owning your digital demand footprint.

When they aren’t working, you erode those same advantages.

Let’s take a real-world example.

I worked with a public company preparing to spin off half its business into a new entity. The leadership’s attention was focused almost entirely on launching the new brand and website, yet there was no plan for preserving or migrating organic search performance. The new entity’s success depended on leveraging an existing client base, maintaining current sales momentum, and hitting aggressive growth targets. But SEO wasn’t even on the radar.

I was brought in to develop the business case for making organic search a strategic pillar of the post-divestiture digital platform. I argue that we would only get senior executive buy-in not by forecasting traffic loss, but by reframing SEO’s contribution across the three drivers of shareholder value:

• Financial: Conservative modeling, based on current performance rates, showed that a poorly managed migration could result in $350 million in lost lead value. In addition, regaining that visibility via paid media would require tens of millions in unplanned ad spend.
• Operational: The company continued operating in 45 countries across 10 languages. Without localized optimization and scalable global templates, international lead pipelines would suffer dramatically.
• Strategic: To stand apart from the legacy business and support complex enterprise sales cycles, the new digital platform needed to rapidly establish authority, build trust signals, and differentiate itself not only in search but in ease of use and depth of information.

By speaking the language of shareholder value and showing how SEO impacted financial outcomes, operational continuity, and long-term strategic position, we secured executive alignment. SEO was integrated early into the platform roadmap, ensuring scalability, visibility, and global readiness from day one.

A Call To Action For Senior Leaders

If you’re a CEO, CMO, or CFO reading this, ask yourself:

• Do we treat the website as a strategic asset or a sunk cost?
• Is there executive ownership of performance or just distributed responsibility?
• Are we capturing, measuring, and maximizing organic opportunity – or plugging gaps with paid media?
• Is our content structured and usable by AI systems, or just accurate but invisible?

This is about mindset and governance, not just tactics.

Final Thought: Web Performance Is A Leverage Point

As digital channels drive more business outcomes, functions once considered tactical (like SEO or load speed optimization) can now contribute meaningfully to operational leverage, customer acquisition, and profitability turning them into strategic priorities.

Your website is where your brand, product, content, and promise converge. It’s your most visible, scalable, and measurable asset.

Treating it like a brochure is like owning an F1 race car and only polishing the paint.

When you design for performance, staff for cross-functional excellence, and govern for outcomes – you stop leaking value and start building leverage.

Because in today’s market, digital performance isn’t just good marketing. It’s good business.

And good business drives shareholder value.

More Resources:

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Featured Image: Master1305/Shutterstock

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/from-line-item-to-leverage-how-web-performance-impacts-shareholder-value/552889/