by Craig Edwardson, Lead Digital Consultant at Flourish
Search marketing is going through its biggest change in decades. The way people look for brands, weigh up their options and decide what to buy is being reshaped by AI-powered search and discovery platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. Traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) still matters enormously – but on its own, it’s no longer the whole picture.
The good news? This is an evolution of the fundamentals we’ve always believed in, not a reason to tear everything up and start again. Here’s what’s shifting, why it matters for your business, and how we’re helping clients stay visible wherever their customers choose to look.
Search doesn’t work the way it used to
Two things are happening at once.
First, people are asking longer, more conversational questions – and increasingly getting their answer right there on the results page, without clicking through to anyone’s website. Google’s AI Overviews (those AI-generated summaries that sit at the top of results) now appear for roughly half of all searches, and that figure has climbed steeply over the past year.
That’s fuelling what the industry calls “zero-click” search. Estimates suggest around 60% of Google searches now end without anyone visiting another website – higher still on mobile. People are forming opinions, shortlisting options and making decisions long before they land on your site, if they ever do.
Second, “search” no longer means “Google” alone. Customers are researching across ChatGPT, Perplexity, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok and online marketplaces, often hopping between several before they commit. Discovery is spread across more places than ever.
Here’s the counterintuitive part: AI isn’t eating into search – if anything, it’s expanding it. When answers come faster and easier, curiosity tends to grow, and people end up asking more questions, not fewer. The opportunity hasn’t disappeared. It has simply moved.
Ranking is no longer the whole story
For years the goal was simple: rank as high as possible, earn the click. That still matters – but being visible now also means being the source an AI chooses to quote.
And those two things are starting to pull apart. Research by Ahrefs found that only 38% of the pages cited in Google’s AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for that query – down from 76% a year earlier. AI systems are increasingly willing to draw from pages that aren’t sitting at the very top of the traditional results, as long as the content answers the question clearly and comes from a source they trust.
This doesn’t mean rankings have stopped counting. A strong ranking still helps – it makes you a candidate. What tips an AI into actually citing you is whether your content is clear, well organised and genuinely useful.
The fundamentals still win – they just work a little harder
If this all sounds like a reset, it isn’t. AI tools are largely drawing on the same well-structured, trustworthy content that good SEO has always produced. Clarity, structure and authority still do the heavy lifting; AI has simply raised the stakes on getting them right.
While our core principles haven’t changed, we’re sharpening our focus in four areas to keep our clients visible and commercially competitive as the landscape shifts.
Technical foundations.
If a page is slow, badly structured or hard to crawl, neither a search engine nor an AI tool can make good use of it. We keep sites fast, cleanly structured and easy to index – the groundwork everything else depends on.
Human-first content.
AI has made it easy to churn out content at volume. We’re deliberately going the other way: expert-led content that answers real customer questions clearly, accurately and credibly. Usefulness beats volume every time – and it’s exactly what AI systems are built to surface.
Authority and trust.
AI tools lean on sources that are already credible and well referenced. We strengthen those signals through PR, digital mentions, reviews and high-quality backlinks. The reputation-building work that has always mattered now does double duty: it earns trust with people and visibility with machines.
Measurement.
As clicks tell less of the story, we’re broadening how we report – tracking AI Overview visibility, referral traffic from AI tools, brand mentions and other signals of presence, so you can still see what’s working even as the old metrics evolve.
“The core principles haven’t changed. Search engines and AI tools still reward clarity, structure and genuine authority. Our job is to make sure the expertise our clients already have shows up wherever their customers are looking – and to keep measuring it honestly as the goalposts move.”
— Craig Edwardson, Lead Digital Consultant at Flourish
A word of caution
The biggest mistake we see is businesses swinging too hard, too fast – dropping proven SEO work to chase AI visibility, and losing ground on both. AI visibility is built on the very same foundations of trust, authority and quality content, and those take time to establish. The brands that pull ahead treat search and AI as one joined-up strategy, not a straight swap.
What this means for your business
AI is changing how your audience searches – but not the need for your brand to be found. Whether someone types a query, asks a chatbot or scrolls a feed, our role is the same: to keep you visible, competitive and a step ahead of the change.
If you’d like to talk through what this shift could mean for your digital marketing, we’d be very happy to have a chat.
