The rise of AI chatbots is disrupting the way consumers search for information, products and brands.

Here are two surprising stats: 61% of consumer online searches still happen on search engines, according to a survey conducted by NP Digital. But that’s declined from 98% as recently as 2020.

Clearly, Chatbots are taking aim at Google’s once impenetrable market share.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how companies must adapt their SEO strategies in the age of AI and why it’s still important to invest time and energy in SEO is best practices.

A quick recap of the rising importance of AI chatbots:

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached more than 300 million weekly users recently, up from January 2023’s 50 million.
• Meta Platforms could see a “massive financial windfall” from generative AI-powered chatbots on its WhatsApp messaging service, according to William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart ($16.6 billion in incremental revenue in 2025 with potential growth up to $45 billion by 2030). 

Quick side note: Google has been famously late to the game of AI Chatbots, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Google had a ChatGPT-like chatbot around 2018 that was scuttled by Google executives. Google launched Gemini AI in December 2023. The company is now aiming for its Gemini AI chatbot to reach 500 million users by the end of 2025.

“I think 2025 will be critical,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees recently. “The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments.”

An important new development for Google and anyone interested in optimizing SEO: Google introduced AI Overviews in the United States on May 14, 2024, during its annual I/O event.

What are AI Overviews? AI Overviews are search results powered by artificial intelligence to generate concise and informative content. Similar to quick answer boxes that frequently appear at the top of search results, AI Overviews provide users with a fast and efficient way to access information and navigate the web.

There’s good reason for companies not to abandon Google and SEO best practices. For the past 15 years, Google has maintained 90%+ of the global search market share. So while consumers are finding new ways to search for information, Google remains the player in Search Engine dominance.

Additional support for Google Search comes from data compiles by SparkToro showing 44% of all Google searches are for brands versus generic searches. In other words, Google searches are still the best way for brands to reach customers intent on making a purchase.

And finally, a plug for implementing and focusing on SEO. Google says the best way to optimize for the appearance in AI overviews is to just to follow SEO best practices, “There is nothing special for creators to do to be considered other than to follow our regular guidance for appearing in search, as covered by Google Search Essentials.”

SEO Best Practices

Google’s SEO Best Practices are here, but in a recent webinar, “Next-Gen SEO: How to Dominate Search in 2025,” Neil Patel’s NP Digital provided the following helpful insights:

1. Focus on Fundamentals
   1. fix SEO errors, speed up your site, 
   2. make your website mobile responsive and accessible, 
   3. use robots.txt and sitemaps
   4. Redirect broken links
   5. Trim the fat
2. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
3. Content Depth is King: Focus on detailed, insightful content over keyword driven pieces to boost authority and citation potential; aim to make every piece of content the most informative resource on the web on the given topic
4. Build your brand authority: Consumers and search engines prioritize trusted brands; sharing valuable insights, opinions and expertise through thought-leadership content is a great way to strengthen your brand’s credibility
5. Organize your content: Create a clear hierarchy and structure your content by grouping topics
6. Create more structured content: Q&A and FAQ style content is easy to crawl and understand, with better odds of getting picked up in featured snippets or AI overviews
7. Use Schema Markup: Focus on person, place and organization schema; claim your knowledge panels, leverage SameAs schema
8. Get Cozy with Google’s favorites: Study which sites tend to rank in your niche and try to increase your brand presence there.
   1. Consumer guides
   2. Youtube
   3. Social forums like Reddit or Quora
9. Create Truly New content: Find a unique angle or find a new topic; no one benefits from the 24,900,001st article on the nutritional value of a banana and you’re not going to outrank WebMD, Healthline, or Harvard University
10. Jump on New Trends and Topics before they become the Talk of the town
    1. Monitor platforms like TikTok and Reddit to identify new trends before they’re popular on Google
    2. 15% of daily searches are keywords and phrases that have never been searched before
11. Invest in Local SEO
    1. Brands are losing $54.1 billion in revenue each year by ignoring local SEO
    2. Brands that invest in local SEO are 2.3x more likely to be seen by consumers searching for nearby businesses online
    3. Brands with a high local visibility index (LVI) had a 2-3x higher than average year-over-year growth
12. Optimize for Voice & Conversational Searches
13. Become a Visual Search Pioneer
    1. 10 billion visual searches processed by Google lens each month
    2. Visual search is expected to grow at CAGR 17.4% 2024 – 2032
    3. Use custom imagery with optimized metadata to capitalize on this emerging trend
    4. Source: AR insider, Zion Market Research
14. Find Ways to Combine Intent & Traffic: High traffic keywords are still important, but should be paired with intent-rich, nuanced queries
    • “Accounting software” (traffic focused) vs. “best accounting software for general contractors” (intent focused)
15. Understand the importance of reviews: Google had 3 review-related algorithms updates in 2023 
16. Create a great user experience: The google document leak earlier this year highlighted user engagement as part of the ranking system; evaluate performance based engagement-driven metrics such as:
    1. Asset NPS
    2. Idea adoption rate
    3. Time to activation
17. Invest in Digital PR
    1. Boost brand recognition by engaging journalists, influencers, and bloggers
    2. Encourage positive brand mentions through reviews, comments, and forum posts to enhance AI’s perception of your content quality
18. Attract Natural Backlinks With Shareable, Valuable Content
    1. Proprietary studies & data
    2. Infographics
    3. Videos
19. Encourage User-Generated Content
    1. Authentic user experiences increase the chances of being cited by LLMs.
    2. Encourage and summarize UGC (reviews, comments, forum posts) in quotable formats)
20. You can’t afford to ignore BING
    1. BING is the center of the non-Google universe: ChatGPT, Apple AI, Microsoft Copilot

These are great tips to optimizing an SEO strategy.

Companies should continue to monitor how Chatbots, and AI more broadly, are changing how consumers search for brands and make purchases. But, for the time being, following the SEO best practices outlined above is essential for driving high-quality traffic with purchase intent to company websites.