AI Didn’t Kill Paid Search — It Made It More Valuable
April 23, 2026 - 28 minutes read
NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.
Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing ROWhy. I’m your host Shannon Allen, and I’m joined by my favorite person in the world. Krystal, how you doing? Hi.
Krystal Vivian: Hi Shannon.
Shannon Allen: How you doing? Krystal Vivian?
Krystal Vivian: I’m good. I love being that i’ve been upgraded. I used to just be your favorite co
Shannon Allen: co-hosts.
Now you’re my favorite person in the world. Yeah, that’s ’cause you do so much for me.
Krystal Vivian: I try to be helpful because that’s, what you’re supposed to
Shannon Allen: do. You do. You do. And I can’t believe this is, we’re already almost out of April.
Krystal Vivian: May’s gonna be here. Before you know it it’s gonna be summertime.
The sun is shining. It’s beautiful.
Shannon Allen: I love that. it’s hot in here ’cause I’m not gonna complain though.
Krystal Vivian: No, I’m ready for summer.
Shannon Allen: Yeah, me too.
Krystal Vivian: Yeah.
Shannon Allen: Today we’re gonna tackle a topic that I think every business owner with a website needs to really understand. Tying in search engine marketing in 2026 and having the conversation with ai, How do people search now? How has that changed? We’ve talked about this before. I wanna bring it more tied back to SEM. Search engine marketing. We’re gonna really break down what’s happening. I wanna show our listeners some real results from real clients because we did some really great case studies and talk to you about why SEM might be the hardest working dollar in your marketing budget.
Krystal Vivian: Let’s just start with cutting through all of the noise. We’ve got AI killing search. We’ve got zero click searches. We’ve got organic traffic dying, and we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts, What’s actually happening with search right now?
And should business owners be worried?
Shannon Allen: So I always say this when I’m meeting with clients I ask ’em, how has your organic search been? Is it down? Statistically, we’re seeing 25% down organically. That is continuing to grow. We are seeing the way the page delivers in any kind of search changing over time, right?
Google’s AI overviews, those are the AI generated boxes at the top of the search results are now appearing for roughly 47 to 50% of. All Google searches. We’re seeing that.
Krystal Vivian: I feel like that number is almost
Shannon Allen: Like it, it’s like on my
Krystal Vivian: Google searches.
Shannon Allen: And it depends on what you’re searching for.
How are we using it? Are we doing things very specifically? Google’s getting better and better at that, right? We’ve seen organic click-through rates have dropped 42% overall since AI overview has expanded. That’s a lot.
Krystal Vivian: That’s a lot.
Shannon Allen: I’ve been doing training with new hires and we talk about SEO, and I’m not saying SEO is dead, but it’s not the SEO. It was two years ago, five years ago. Like it has changed so dramatically because it’s more about the AI search, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yep.
Shannon Allen: So before I overviews, organic search traffic averaged around 1.7 billion clicks per quarter.
By Q4 of 2025, nearly half of those clicks were gone.
Krystal Vivian: Wow.
Shannon Allen: So what we call a zero click search. Now make up 60%. And here’s what I mean by zero click. We type a question. So is there a question you’ve asked recently
Krystal Vivian: Why am I experiencing this symptom on this medication?
Shannon Allen: So in the past there might have been some blogs, there’s some organic to somebody’s website that there’s a blog on. That’s a great thing with blogs. Now it’s all coming up with the AI generated answers. You’re reading it, you’re getting the information you need and you’re leaving.
You might not ever go to a website because you got all the information right there.
Krystal Vivian: And now the AI overviews, I’ve noticed this happening in the last. month or two when you click to read more of the complete AI answer overview. It takes you. Into a different window. It’s in the same browser on your phone.
Shannon Allen: Right.
Krystal Vivian: But it opens up a different window that then you have to exit out of. You can back to the organic search results
Shannon Allen: and you can keep asking questions, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yes. It
Shannon Allen: makes
Krystal Vivian: it a conversation.
Shannon Allen: So if zero click searches make up 60% of all queries, mobile is 77%.
We’re not trying to get deep dives on mobile. We’re trying to just get our answer right there and we’re never gonna click on it. Yep. People aren’t searching less. Google still processes roughly 14 billion searches per day now. I think it’s becoming fragmented.
Because we decide, do we search on Google? Do we search on Bing? Do we search on our chat GPT app on our phone? Do we have, we downloaded Claude Gemini is, but you could have a Gemini separate app, right?
Krystal Vivian: You could have Grok, you could have all of
Shannon Allen: So the clicks that do happen are higher intent people who need something the AI can’t provide. So that’s where SEM. Rolls in here. Right?
Krystal Vivian: But SEM is paid search. So how are these changes impacting paid search? And I know you’ve talked about always running Google and Bing, does that matter even more now? And if so, why?
Shannon Allen: First, and for foremost, paid search ads often appear above AI overviews and Google search results And I wanna make something really clear. Paid is never going anywhere because Google can’t lose their money. That’s the bulk of their money. And so the way that a page is set up, Google is getting smarter at knowing somebody like you that’s looking for medication symptoms, needs an AI search.
Krystal Vivian: Yeah. There’s nothing paid. There’s no,
Shannon Allen: no,
Krystal Vivian: there’s no company that can solve
Shannon Allen: But if I’m searching for very specifically that I wanna see a. 2026 Bennington Pontoon. Or I wanna see a Kubota zero turn lawnmower.
That’s not an AI search, that is a paid search that you’re gonna see.
And in some cases it’s Google Shopping.
Krystal Vivian: Yeah.
Shannon Allen: So we’re gonna continue to see the game changers of this world. So some of the game changer stats I wanna talk about is brand sided within AI overviews see 91% more paid clicks.
So appearing in paid search and being referenced by AI creates a massive advantage for years. We said that with organic and paid. You wanna show up organically, but you also wanna show up and paid The user that’s using SEM, they are in that zero moment of truth. They want the answer now
They’re done researching. They wanna get to the website, and this is the shortcut. We’re very impatient people, right?
We know that 95% of keywords triggering AI overviews have no paid ads present. So we wanna go after the high intent people with SEM, right? Yes. We wanna really make sure we focus in on that.
Our difference is that most competitors only run Google ads. We run Google and Bing. And so your question about that. Having both, why are we deciding, just like in branding, why are we deciding where our customers are? And as we start to talk more about SEM, we have to Quit dictating the consumer journey.
Yes, Google is huge and it’s dominant, It’s gonna continue to evolve. Bing is gonna continue to grow. And by the way, even if Bing is only making up 3% of an audience, why choose which one you wanna be on? Be fluid. Be on both. And that’s an advantage that we have.
Krystal Vivian: I also think that a lot of times people think that they’re using Google, but they’re actually using Bing.
And I’ll use my husband as an example because he has a PC the default browser , and the default search on that is Bing. And so he does most of his searches on Bing, and there’s a few times where he’ll type in google.com.
Shannon Allen: Right.
Krystal Vivian: But it’s not very clear that, the search is not Google.
Shannon Allen: It’s not Google,
Krystal Vivian: but,
Shannon Allen: And the younger generation isn’t they’re living more in the AI world. Yeah. And I wanna, a takeaway on this is SEM isn’t competing with ai.
Organic is competing with ai. Yes. SEM and ai, they compliment each other, right?
Just like a vehicle listing ad in. On a Google page compliments an SEM ad. They’re different. You can see your ad, your vehicle, but you also can get very specific details if you’re going a little bit deeper. So I wanna bring that up as this is a compliment to each other.
Krystal Vivian: I’d like to talk a little bit about specific examples that we’ve seen with clients because we’ve been managing SEM campaigns for many clients for many years with great success.
So can you talk a little bit more about some of those client examples that we have?
Shannon Allen: I’m gonna start with center for Hospice. We handle their marketing. This is what I would say, the do more with less story. we were tasked with cutting the budget for SEM specifically nearly in half because they really knew, they needed to make sure that they were branding themselves. So we needed to shuffle some money without taking a big hit.
And by the way, SEM is a very high lead generation, right? It’s bringing clicks to the website, but sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. And we needed to get that message across. So we went from a budget of 5,500 a month down to 3000 a month. And performance actually got better because we had to be better on our game.
We had to really optimize the campaign to make sure that we were not just being there for broad, we had to be very dynamic about how we do it. How they search is how we show up. And we had to have exact matches, right? So cost per click dropped 23%, so $6 and 14 cents per click down to 4 73. Keep in mind, national average for hospice keywords is anywhere from.
Five on the low end to eight. Eight is really when you’re getting specific. So the fact that eight is specific and we’re getting a $6 is a win for us, right?
So we’re beating the national average on a reduced budget. Right now, our click through rate, which we always shoot for anything over 2%, and we always blow it out of the water.
Healthcare industry average is 4.8%. Ours was 9.22.
Krystal Vivian: Wow.
Shannon Allen: And I always bring up click-through rate to make sure we understand that. it’s a mathematical equation, right? How many searches divided by how many clicks equals your click-through rate. But remember in this case, we don’t control the searches of the impressions as we call them.
The consumers do. We had the same amount of people searching, but we had less budget to work for. But we actually grew, it made it stronger, which was quality. Quality over quantity. ’cause we focused on the exactness of who we were looking for, right? So in the end, our impressions still grew 34% year over year.
With even with the budget cut our impression share overall.
Krystal Vivian: Wow,
Shannon Allen: 34%. So the secret is really we dialed into the keywords. We really dialed into that optimization to make sure that we weren’t showing up for the things that people were just simply researching, and they had more of an intent behind it. So again, SEM gets better over time with proper optimization, and you don’t always need to spend more.
You need to spend smarter. And that’s what we did. Now I can tell you there’s very few people that work with us right now that are spending at their max, but we’re very strategic about making sure we can do that.
Krystal Vivian: That’s incredible. And that goes the importance of the optimizations.
And when somebody says I can just do Google ads myself, it’s
Shannon Allen: yeah,
Krystal Vivian: you’re not gonna have time to do those optimizations and get those results.
Shannon Allen: Exactly.
Krystal Vivian: That’s incredible.
Shannon Allen: So let me talk about another local business a plumber.
Krystal Vivian: Okay.
Shannon Allen: the story. I’d say a little more goes a long way.
So every year. We renew clients and at the very least we try to stay up with cost of living, So if you’re running, let’s say, 3000 in an SEM campaign, we might say two 50 to 500. Let’s increase just to cover some of the costs that we’re seeing rising cost per clicks, because there’s more competition than ever before.
So our local plumber added just $300 a month to their SEM budget when they renewed They don’t meet with us a lot. They’re busy people, but when we do meet, we meet quarterly as best as we can. But when we went in to talk about more of the year end, what we found that it doubled their leads.
Because we added just a tiny bit of budget, right? Optimization happens. The more strategic we are, the better we can get with cost per click. But in this case, by adding a small budget, optimizing better, we are able to work with that cost per click. And it went from a $3 and 6 cents down to a dollar 70.
Wow. So I can’t take all the credit.
Krystal Vivian: No.
Shannon Allen: But with $300 the click. We went from a dollar 70, and the click through rate went from a one point 36% up to a 9.02%.
Krystal Vivian: Wow.
Shannon Allen: By fine tuning, tightening up just within a little extra $300. And we really focused in on what’s the number one thing you would think?
A plumber? The people are searching
Krystal Vivian: emergency plumbers.
Shannon Allen: So we knew that and we wanted to put the focus into that. It’s also can be the most expensive keyword it
Krystal Vivian: is,
Shannon Allen: we wanted to dive into that and so that’s how we grew this. So when someone searches emergency plumber near me at 10:00 PM they have an urgent need.
In this case, we were able to really dial that focus in because we put a little strategy behind it. So again, takeaway is a small strategic budget increase. Thinking about the optimization, we didn’t take a huge leap, but we were able to unlock so many more doubling of the leads by just being a little bit smarter.
And the way we do that is we have a human on it. We’re not just setting it and forgetting it. And that’s the kind of stuff that I don’t think business owners always think about.
Krystal Vivian: Having somebody who’s physically looking at it on a regular basis, making those optimizations, looking to see if something is going wonky.
That makes a huge difference. Let’s talk about car dealers real quick. Because they’re always asking about digital and there’s some unique stuff going on.
What is SEM doing in the auto space?
Shannon Allen: I’ll talk to you about what I will consider the innovation story. We work with a local car dealer that is running, used cars with us and they were always just running search engine marketing and it’s a competitive market.
So our budget was sitting at 8,000 a month in just straight SEM, and we decided in August of 2025 to layer in the vehicle listing ads because we saw so much value. But the thing is, with vehicle listing. SEM is, you don’t wanna do one or the other. You wanna do ’em combined because they work off of each other.
So what we decided to do is we shifted a little bit. I took a thousand dollars away from the 8,000 and added a $3,000 minimum. ’cause you really don’t wanna do under 3000 for VLA. So now we went actually from an 8,000 budget to a $10,000 budget. We actually had about the same flat of spend in 2024 versus 2025. we were looking at 91,000 versus 91,600. So it was almost flat. Even though we only did that for those five months. But the big thing is we grew, we had 5.3% more clicks. Cost per click dropped 4.3%, and that’s really hard to do because used stays very consistent.
But we were able to drop that 4.3%, which is a great win. We found almost 25% more people searching, You got two different audiences. You got an upper funnel and you have the SEM, which is like lower funnel. We also brought in 923 phone clicks than we hadn’t had before.
Krystal Vivian: Wow.
Shannon Allen: So that was huge for us. So in the end, by combining it using almost the same amount of budget, we grew clicks. We grew quality clicks because if somebody’s picking up the phone and calling, that’s a more of a quality click. And VLAs have more of that phone call conversation. So basically the same budget, better results, plus an entirely new lead source, which was the VLAs that now we can see a visual of it.
And for this local dealer, he’s doing it better than any of his competition. And when you type in his brands, if there’s eight across the page, he’s five or six of ’em.
Krystal Vivian: That’s incredible.
Shannon Allen: Yeah. So all of his inventory’s listed there, that
Krystal Vivian: Let’s bring it back to the name of our podcast, ROI.
With all of these case studies and everything happening right now with AI in search, how does a business owner know that their SEM investment is delivering a return?
Shannon Allen: So the number one thread that everything we talked about was how did we drive cost per click down, right?
We did that through optimization.
Performance went up. And in most cases the budget was the same or less. And so that’s compounding that ROI right off the bat. So in any of those situations that I talked about, that’s what we do a case study for is to show ROI. And if we bring it back to, general math, we are doing what we need to do.
With either the same amount of money or less money, or a very slight increase. And so ROI for SEM is probably gonna be any business owner’s number one form of return on investment. Because you see it, you feel it, and it’s on your website. What happens at that point is up to you to turn them. So that’s the biggest thing I would talk about is really make sure you’re getting the money out of your SEM to make sure you can tie it back to how many units sold in a car, how many services calls did you get, how many times is the phone ringing?
How many people came to your website, right? Yeah. That’s the ROI, right? Across the board and for all of our clients, the common threads were clicks going down. We continue to see click through rates consistently two times or more. That combination of Google and Bing. Small strategic budget adjustments and optimizations.
Those are the things that you really need to dial in on. That’s the ROI right there.
Krystal Vivian: I think that’s incredible.
Shannon Allen: Yeah. I hope everybody took something away. Thank you
Krystal Vivian: Thank you, Shannon. I’ve learned a lot and I think that our audience definitely should have a much stronger understanding of SEM and what’s going on with AI search right
Shannon Allen: I would say don’t sleep on SEM. The landscape continually changes, but SEM is your steady Eddie. thanks everybody for listening to today’s episode of Digital Marketing ROWhy. This is Shannon Allen, and we’ll see you next time