AI Search Is Killing Organic Traffic: Here’s How To Show Up In ChatGPT Instead

NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.

Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing, ROI. I’m your host Shannon Allen, and I’m here with Krystal Vivian, the best co-host of 2026. Thought I’d change it up a little bit. I

Krystal Vivian: like it. I like it. That sets us up for a really good rest of the year, so it does. Sorry, other future co-hosts.

You can’t beat me. I’m like the final boss. Yes,

Shannon Allen: yes. You’re the final.

Krystal Vivian: It’s the video game.

Shannon Allen: Oh boy. Whoa.

Krystal Vivian: Oh, that’s funny.

Shannon Allen: And I know the last time we met, we had a lot of discussion on digital trends, right?

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: We had talked about from that we’re probably gonna grab a couple of those ideas and really. Two things I wanted to touch on at the beginning, first quarter for sure.

I wanna spend time right off the bat on the AI conversation and how it relates to search. We’re gonna do quite a few CTV. I’m gonna try to break those up into kind of how we do it. There’s so much confusion over CTV and we’ll get to that. But for today. I am excited because we get to, I love it when we get to switch roles and talk.

Let me ask the questions and pick your brain. There is a lot going on with AI searches we talked about in the digital trends. Yeah. But this is, I think, for a business to really listen to this podcast will give them a better understanding how to prepare themselves.

Krystal Vivian: 100%.

Shannon Allen: My first question for you, Krystal, is what’s actually happening with AI search right now and why should a business care?

Krystal Vivian: That is a great question, and it’s a little bit complex. So there’s two different things happening right now. The first is, let’s talk about Google. Google is incorporating AI more into not just how they’re delivering answers when somebody inputs a search, but in giving the answer itself on the platform with these Google AI overviews.

And we talked a little bit about that in the previous episode. People are typing their questions into Google just like they normally do, but instead of looking for the answer on one of 10 webpage listed on the front page.

Google is giving an AI overview answer that is answering their question there, and that is now led to a significant drop in search traffic to websites. 60% of all searches are now ending without a click because that AI is answering right there. That’s huge. We are seeing more and more. Almost every business owner we’ve talked to in the last several months.

Has said yes, I’m seeing a drop in organic search. So that’s the big one, right? And that is all focused on Google. The other shift is where people are searching. People are asking chat. GPT, where’s the best credit union to get an auto loan at in South Bend?

They are using perplexity to ask about what dental practice in Kalamazoo specializes in sedation? They wanna know, how can I choose the best blinds for large windows in my home? And they’re getting an AI answer from ChatGPT from Claude, from Gemini. Those tools are also taking in information from across the web to be able to answer those questions similar to how Google’s AI overviews are, but it’s very different in what they’re doing.

We’ll talk a little bit about that later. So if your business is not being cited in those AI answers, whether it’s on the Google platform or if it’s on ChatGPT, you’re not existing to that customer. It’s not about being ranked on page one of Google. It’s about being cited by AI as the authoritative source.

So we used to always think about rankings, think about citations, how can we be cited by ai? And that’s a huge shift.

Shannon Allen: I love that you touched on that because that is something I’ve been really pushing of an understanding with our clients and as I train to all of our people is that SEO, we’ve always offered SEO as a solution at FDS, however.

We push more of our businesses into SEM because we have more control over it, and SEO has changed so much. And by the way, SEO is really primarily Google, right? Bing does have its own version, but everything we’re talking about here is it does include Google, but it’s not the only thing we’re talking about, right?

There’s so many other ways to get our answers anymore, and we have to, the, a business owner has to be, if they’re putting all their eggs into SEO. That like SEO, I don’t wanna say it’s dead, but it, organic traffic, as we talked about in the last podcast, it’s really declining. So what you’re saying about the citations and what they should be thinking about, it’s evolved and changed so much and they need to move AI to the top.

Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. And here’s the thing to think about is that all of these different platforms. They are citing things differently, right? So in Google, with the AI overviews that you’re getting, there’s still a level of traditional SEO that still matters if you want Google to take to cite your website in their AI overviews.

’cause if you look at the AI overviews, next time you do a Google search, you’ll see it tells you where that information came from and you can click through. Most consumers don’t if they feel satisfied by that answer, but some will. So Google is still taking that traditional SEO approach, but that’s not what ChatGPT is doing.

ChatGPT is looking for information that is authoritative from a trusted source, and they want it now. Google, the other part of SEO that we always talked about with clients is that it’s a long game and you might not see results for 30, 60, 90 days, sometimes six months. Whereas with AI, building citation authority. Now it’s happening in real time. And I remember when ChatGPT had just had. As recently as a year ago, just had information plugged into it through the previous, like a year, up until like April, 2023, and now it is getting fed in information from the internet in almost real time, and you can ask it to research in real time.

So every, there’s a sense of urgency now that if you as a business owner. If you want to be cited by AI, you have to make moves. Now you have to make optimizations to your content to make sure that AI is citing your business as the authoritative source for people who are asking questions.

Shannon Allen: Speaking of citations, how does AI search actually decide what to cite?

Krystal Vivian: So there’s two different steps to this. The first step is AI is scan, is they’re intaking the content, right?

They’re scanning it, they’re breaking it into chunks, they’re putting it in databases, and they are looking for pattern recognition because let’s be clear, we talk about. AI as if it’s this intelligent thing. ChatGPT and perplexity, they’re large language model tools right and Claude. They are looking for pattern recognition.

They’re looking for schema tags on your website. They’re looking for headers. They’re looking for not just what words but the metadata of your website and making sure that they are getting answers to questions, and then they’re taking that to generate when I type in.

What credit union offers the best auto loan in South Bend there? Have all of that information stored. The stage two is generating that answer into giving it to me exactly what I want. And it is choosing which websites to get that information from to get those facts from.

AI specifically is looking for websites that are sharing personal experiences. Individual expertise. These are the situations that we’ve run through this situation. It’s not just about having content to put into AI, it’s making sure that it’s structured in a way that AI understands it and then can regurgitate that to the audience when they’re searching for. That sounds technical, so let me give you a little bit of a real world example of what that looks like.

Sure. So a traditional blog post you might say are you wondering about window treatments? In this comprehensive guide, we’re gonna give you everything you need to know about window treatments. Let’s talk about the history of window treatments and let’s talk about, and there’s a lot of fluff to it, AI optimized content.

If you’re wondering about window treatments, we’ll, here are the type different types of window treatments. Custom window blinds typically cost between 150 to $500, depending on the window, depending on the size material. Here’s the breakdown. Traditional content is more optimized for keywords, ranking signals, all of this SEO that changes every year.

But AI optimized content is answering questions. It is. Here is a question that I am answering. Give me that specific answer. So when we are writing what we call AI answer blogs we’re answering questions and every question has a very succinct answer that’s very direct.

Instead of going into this long history of fluff that has a bunch of keywords that don’t really mean anything to real people. And if AI has to hunt through all of that, all of those extra words, it’s not going to cite you.

Shannon Allen: You and I had this conversation six months ago. Yes. Really for fourth quarter with any of our renewals, we have added a layer of our traditional blogs of what we are calling our AI answer blogs. So it is, that’s our terminology for any of our listeners.

If you go and Google that. Hopefully FDS comes up, but it, we coined it ourselves in a sense. It’s not to say that other businesses aren’t saying that. let’s talk about the difference between what we are calling our AI answer blogs.

How are those different than the traditional blogs that we also write for clients?

Krystal Vivian: Yes, absolutely. And there’s value in both, right? Traditional blogs are gonna be anywhere from 300 to a thousand words, maybe more. It just depends on the topic. We’re optimizing specifically for a keyword. The headline is specific to the keyword.

And we give audiences a bit of information that is useful to them, but really build that trust with the audience. So I read this blog and it answers my question and it’s good enough, and then I trust this business that’s provided the answer, right?

Let’s say for a plumber I type in a question or I have a question about. How to unclog my drain. They have an answer of how to unclog your drain based on what’s down there. It’s pretty, broad, not talking about anything specifically, not talking about personal experiences. It’s just here’s the information.

It’s a great way to rank on page one and get clicks, and it’s a great way to build trust with your target audience of the people who are looking for that information. But it’s not gonna help you get cited by AI. AI is, it’s a minimum of a thousand words, so we’re very comprehensive. We’re looking for a lot of information, but it’s very clearly structured.

There’s a lot of subheaders and most of the subheaders within that blog post have our questions. They’re answering questions, and so you might be looking at a comprehensive guide or something that’s a broad overview, but all of the information is chunked down into very clear question and answer format.

Almost like an FAQ, right? We’re also including a lot more quotes, a lot more statistics and data specifically from the business. So for us, when we’re writing an AI Answer blog for FDS, we are talking about very much like how we talk about, in our podcast, we’re talking about a specific example that we have with a specific client, almost like a case study.

Maybe not that detailed, but we’ll reference that exact to show our authorit, to show our

Shannon Allen: expertise. Like the, we started the podcast because. They were more of the FAQs, right? What are some of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to digital marketing? We could almost associate that with AI answer blogs, is we wanna be able to answer the questions that are on top of everybody’s mind for that business specifically.

Krystal Vivian: Yes, 100%. Exactly. And they’re a lot more structured. They’re a lot more factually dense and a lot less flowery language, a lot less we’re still storytelling, but it’s a lot more direct and a lot less just fluffy. And our goal is to make sure that we’re being cited when AI is answering the questions, no matter what question somebody is asking, we have an answer that AI can use and it’s already formatted.

In a way that AI can just pull that very quickly. So instead of saying here’s everything you need to know about window treatments, we might say, how much do custom blinds cost in Kalamazoo? And then we’re answering that question and we’re going in detail and every subheader within there has a question, and then we’re answering that question very directly.

Shannon Allen: Okay. Out of everything you talked about, if you were to summarize some of the citation information. What would you say are the most effective tactics for getting cited by AI platforms.

Krystal Vivian: You wanna do a mix of citing authoritative sources when it makes sense, right?

Let’s say you’re a dentist, you wanna make sure that you’re citing the American Dental Association, when that makes sense, right? You also wanna add in relevant statistics and data. You also wanna provide your own expertise of, as a dentist, this is what we’ve seen in our practice. Use that in a quote from the dentist. Dr.

Roberts said. This is what we’ve seen, or in my experience in my 25 years of practicing dentistry, I have seen X, Y, Z when it comes to dentures, for example.

So making sure that you’re including all of that.

But then the other part of it is making sure it’s the structure. It’s not just what you’re writing, it’s how you’re formatting it. Making sure that, again, it’s the questions and answers. Because if you think about how people are typing into ChatGPT, and even how they’re typing into Google, they’re not just searching, sometimes you might search like best Thai food near me, but you might also be asking ChatGPT, where is the best pad in South Bend?

And being able to answer that in a very conversational way. So having that structure of, here’s my question, here’s my answer. Making sure that your subheaders have the right meta tag on them so that they’re H two or H three appropriately. That’s going down a rabbit hole. And a lot of business owners might not understand what that means, and that’s okay.

The person who’s publishing the content on your website needs to understand, and you need to be asking them, are you structuring this content in a way that AI can answer it? And if as a consumer you can look at it and you can see the different styles of subheaders. When you’re looking through the blog on FDS, you can see, okay, this is all caps in red font.

This is not all caps, but this is in the dark gray font. And then you have the regular paragraph style, which is in the regular black ariel font. That’s really how you do it.

Shannon Allen: Okay. It, what’s interesting to me is SEO has been around for years. I can train it. I understand it.

I don’t wanna be the person that’s optimizing, but I can teach anybody to understand it. There’s so many levels of moving pieces. The average business owner does not understand not only what SEO is, but how to achieve it. What I love about the AI answer blogs is even though I don’t think the average business owner is gonna go write their own, it’s, they can at least understand why it’s so important.

Krystal Vivian: Correct.

Shannon Allen: They don’t need to know how to put the car together. They just need to know that you’re gonna drive the car. You’re gonna come up with it for them and they can be part of it because they can be part of that frequently asked questions. They can help us now that we can go in and do an interview with them and say.

Help us to understand what’s the average questions that you’re getting asked that you wanna make sure your consumers know that the customers out there are gonna know about your business and the services you offer and all those. So I think it’s better, it’s easier to understand for the average person versus what SEO is.

So that’s one of the reason I really love to explain this to a client, because 99% of the time they’re like, oh, yeah, I need that. Yeah.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. Absolutely. And you know that your audience is searching on ChatGPT and Claude in general because you

Shannon Allen: are.

Krystal Vivian: Because you are. And yeah, this is a great experiment for a business owner is type into ChatGPT, a question about your business and see if your business comes up.

Shannon Allen: Yeah. Yeah.

Krystal Vivian: And that’s a great way to do it and see how your business is mentioned and what do you know about this

Shannon Allen: or your products and services because Yes, what I’m seeing, the AI when you type in a business owner’s name, AI’s not showing up because Google’s not directing it to, but when you say.

Can I fix this plumbing drip myself?

That is when it comes into play, that the plumber can walk you through it, or somebody might be like, yeah, I can do it myself, but I’d rather call this plumber that showed up in an AI answer blog when I did my search.

Krystal Vivian: Yes, absolutely. And like you said earlier, you talked about having the expertise and being able to talk about, not just what questions are you getting as a business owner from your customers, but also being able to answer those questions as the business owner, as the named expert.

And so we like to interview. We really wanna make sure that we are quoting the business owner and saying that this is, who said this, but also making sure that we have author bios on the website too, and making sure that we are just showing that these are experts, that this is a person.

That is going to make so much more higher with the ai, but it also ranks a lot higher with consumers because then they can say, it’s not just, oh, it’s

Shannon Allen: credible.

Krystal Vivian: A B, C credit union is answering this question. No, the, the chief financial officer, A, B, C credit union is the one answering this.

The person in charge of business loans is the one answering this.

Shannon Allen: It goes back to trust and credibility. Yes. So before I ask my typical ROI, how does this actually work in practice from strategy to results? As we start to talk about ROI let’s talk about from a strategy and then we launch?

Krystal Vivian: Yes, absolutely. So the first thing that we do is we start thinking about what kind of topics do we need to address? What kind of questions do we need to answer? And so we do that through fruit, through a couple of different sources. First is we’re gonna look, especially if you’re doing SEM with us, we’ll look at your page search data.

What keywords are converting, what are people actually searching for? Yeah. What keywords are they searching for and how are they searching for them? How are they phrasing those keywords? That tells us a lot about what we need to focus on and prioritize. We’re also gonna be doing some research on search volume, not just on Google, but also on ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude of what.

What questions are people asking in your industry and in your area? We’re gonna look at how AI platforms are answering those questions and what is actually coming up, what does AI know about your business? And then finally, we’re gonna talk to the business owner. We wanna talk to you or your marketing director and say.

What kind of questions are you hearing from your audience? When people are calling in for the first time, what are they asking? When people are becoming paid customers, what are they asking you? What do you wanna make sure that people know? What questions are you not getting that you wish somebody would answer?

Because we can weave that into a question that they actually are answering, and so we take all of that information. And prioritize it, especially based on the paid search volume, right? Because that is the biggest key that we have. We’ll put together the list of topics and get that approved by the business owner and say, okay, this is what we’re doing.

This is what we recommend based on all of this information that we’ve put together. And then our writer is asking you questions via email so it doesn’t take a whole bunch of time. And if you wanna do it on the phone, we absolutely can, but we’re getting your individual expertise as a business owner, knowing that in your industry, being able to talk about the experiences that you’ve had, that your team has had and then we are writing those blogs and putting them together for you and.

Our business owners, our clients get to review the blogs as they should, making sure that we’re talking about their products and services the way that they do, right? So we wanna match how people are searching versus how the business owners are talking. And then we’re publishing the blogs. The really cool thing is that AI citation improvements happen faster than traditional SEO.

You used to be able to say, okay, maybe in 30 days, but probably more like in six months, you’ll really see a big impact with AI answer blogs. Depending on how frequently you’re doing, you can see an initial impact. Within 30 to 45 days. Within that two to eight weeks, especially if you’re doing,

Shannon Allen: It’s closer to SEM, right?

That’s tied to SEM.

Krystal Vivian: Yes it’s much faster, especially if you’re doing, at least if you’re doing one a month, I think that’s a pretty good cadence. And there are some businesses that might need two a month, but I think that you can start off with one and see a good impact. And then you’re building that authority over time.

And within that, that first three months, you’re gonna see a lot more. Of your answers coming up, you will see how you’ll be able to do searches on ChatGPT on Gemini and be able to see how your answers, how your business is coming up.

Shannon Allen: I love that. As this is called Digital Marketing ROWhy, let’s end with where we always do.

Can you give me what you would consider, we’ve talked a lot about it, but. What’s the ROI advantage for AI Answer blogs?

Krystal Vivian: Right now the ROI advantage is that people are asking questions on these platforms on Google and getting the AI over answer overviews and on chat CPT and local businesses, most of them are not there yet.

If you can assert yourself as the authority in your industry, in your location especially, you are gonna be the authority for your industry for months and years to come because you were there first and you got that information first, and you’re continuing to include more information and answering more questions from there.

So just being there first being is going to give you an ROI, but let’s look at the math of what is the investment versus what is the ultimate revenue. Depending on the package that you do with us, depending on how many you’re doing, whether you’re doing six in a year or 12 in a year or even more, you’re looking at an average of about $500 a month.

If you’re thinking about how much is one customer worth, and if these AI answer blogs, if you are getting cited by AI and people are making those decisions of, I’m gonna go with this business because this is what AI recommends because you were there first. If you just bring in one or two extra customers a month, maybe even one customer a month, it’s gonna pay for itself.

That’s the ROI.

Shannon Allen: Perfect. I love that.

Krystal Vivian: And i’m not just saying that this is gonna happen, right? We know that visitors from AI platforms are converting at twice the rate in a third of the SES sessions.

So if on an average basis somebody is looking nine times in a Google search, they might only convert one time, right? If they’re on ChatGPT and they’ve asked three questions in their research, they’re gonna convert in three questions. Twice as likely as they twice as many times as they are on a traditional Google search.

SEM Rush has talked about clients investing in AI optimized content are seeing 60% more qualified leads within six months. So if you’re getting 60% more qualified leads in fewer sessions, converting it twice the rate, you will have leads coming into your website and they will be converting into paying customers.

Shannon Allen: That’s awesome. That’s a great stat in itself.

I think that we’ll continue to have more conversations on AI this year. However, I think this is a great start for our listeners. To, this is something, and I don’t usually do this on our podcast, but this is something I would say reach out to your FDS rep. This is something we’re doing that we’re seeing a huge success in.

And when we talk to our clients, our current clients, we’re getting a lot of buy-in because they see the need for it. So I think this was important for me to make sure we put this out there to our listeners. But it’s really a great just understanding of basic AI and how it affects your search.

Right?

Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. And it’s happening now. This is not something that is five years away. There is a long game strategy to this Sure. Where it will impact your business over the next several years, but this is happening right now. And so if we can be able to adapt and own the market before other local businesses do, then they’re gonna be spending years catching up where you’re already

Shannon Allen: Exactly. And that I would say, I think you asked me a question the last time about. Why should somebody jump on board with CTV? Now I can really answer that with AI answer blocks, which is you need to not just wait for it to happen.

You need to be ahead of the game. And you can’t wait on this. You can’t sit on this.

This was great information. I appreciate everything. Thank you to our listeners and join us for our next episode of Digital Marketing, ROI.

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