AI Platforms Challenging Google

I've been testing AI search visibility across a bunch of companies. The results don't make sense if you're thinking in SEO terms. You can take two companies in the same space. Company A has 500K monthly organic traffic, strong domain authority, thousands of backlinks. Company B has 50K traffic, basic content strategy, decent authority. Ask ChatGPT for solutions in their industry. Company B gets featured. Company A doesn't even get mentioned. The ranking factors are completely different. Google cares about backlinks and domain strength. AI models seem to care more about whether your content directly answers questions with clear sources. Most marketing teams are still optimizing for Google while their prospects are asking ChatGPT for recommendations. It's like everyone's playing by the old rules while the game already changed.

Last week, a former client called me in panic. His voice trembled as he shared the numbers: Their organic traffic had dropped 50% in just three months. "Guy, we built this firm on Google traffic. Our leads are drying up. If this continues, we'll have to start laying people off." This wasn't about website analytics. Real people's jobs were at stake, threatened by an algorithm update they couldn't control. But my client didn't realize that Google's dominance over information discovery faces an unexpected challenge: AI agents. Think about it. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it doesn't search Google first. It goes directly to its training data. The next generation of AI agents will do something more powerful. They'll bypass search engines entirely and interact directly with websites. This will change everything. Websites will expose structured data for AI consumption instead of optimizing content for Google's algorithms. Your expertise will flow directly to AI agents without passing through Google's ranking systems. The implications are significant. AI agents won't care about Google's page rank. They'll evaluate expertise based on content quality. They'll analyze sources independently, finding insights Google might miss. Here's what this future might look like: When someone needs legal advice, their AI agent could scan law firm websites directly, analyzing case histories, practice areas, and published insights. It might compare expertise across multiple firms in seconds, matching specific experience to client needs. Professional content might include machine-readable layers that help AI agents understand context, verify sources, and extract relevant information. Think of it as an API for your expertise. Your website could become a knowledge endpoint, serving different versions of content to humans and AI agents. While people read your insights, AI agents could process deeper layers of structured information. For professional service firms, this shift creates opportunity. The future of expertise discovery won't depend on Google's advertising model. AI agents will connect experts directly with their audiences. My former client's traffic crisis might signal the start of something better. It's pushing us to prepare for a world where Google isn't the gatekeeper of professional knowledge. For twenty years, Google decided how the world found expertise online. Now AI may set it free.

SEO in 2025 is NOT dead... But search is changing. And it’s happening faster than most brands realize. Quick navigation? Still Google. Research questions? Perplexity and ChatGPT. Discovery? TikTok for Gen Z. Product research? Amazon all day. Users are building new habits based on intent; and each platform is getting better at serving those specific needs. Think about it: • Google was built to return relevant links. • AI tools synthesize those links into direct answers. • Social platforms thrive on serendipity. • E-comm sites dominate purchase-driven queries. Trying to do everything well is less effective than doing one thing with precision. Each platform's carved out its strength. It’s a lot like what happened with cable. Netflix didn’t kill cable by offering “better TV.” They nailed on-demand. Spotify owned music. YouTube captured random browsing behavior. No single service "won." Users just started going straight to the platform that best matched their intent. If you're still thinking of SEO as just "ranking on Google," you're already behind. Today’s search is frictionless, direct, and distributed. • 40% of Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram for local search. • Perplexity’s user base grew 10x this year. • ChatGPT sees 200 million weekly users. Smart brands are adapting fast. They’re showing up in TikTok feeds, optimizing for AI answer engines, and building visibility on the platforms where their audience actually searches. While everyone else debates whether Google is "dead," they’re focused on the real shift: Search hasn’t disappeared. It’s fragmented. Your customers aren’t just searching differently, they’re searching in different places, for different reasons. Meet them there. --- Want growth hacks like this that can catapult your business forward?    Sign up to my weekly growth hacks newsletter for easy to implement hacks every Sunday:  <https://lnkd.in/eGMgpwUA>

Google users now click on traditional search results just 8% of the time when an AI summary is present. Without AI summaries? 15%. And 26% of users? They leave Google entirely after getting their answer from AI. Publishers are getting hammered. Last year, Google introduced AI Overviews, a feature that places AI-generated summaries at the top of many search pages. According to new Pew Research, these summaries are systematically training users to stop clicking, and it’s devastating traffic for many of Google’s biggest customers… publishers. Business Insider, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and HuffPost are all reportedly seeing traffic drops of 20–50% since the AI Overview rollout. Is this simple user behavior changing? Or, is Google deliberately cannibalizing the foundation of its $280+ billion empire. It’s a bit of both. We're watching the Innovator's Dilemma play out in real time. Twenty-five years ago, Clayton Christensen warned that successful companies often fail not because they can’t innovate, but because they’re too good at serving their current customers with their current model. They optimize themselves into obsolescence. What we’re seeing with Google is not obsolescence, but  choosing self-disruption over slow death. The Pew Research found: 🔷 Users only click AI summary sources 1% of the time. Original publishers are getting decimated 🔷 Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, Inc. dominate both AI summaries and traditional results. Same sources, different presentation 🔷 Only 18% of searches now trigger AI summaries. And that's growing fast This issue isn’t just about search either. It's about every business facing the same choice in this new AI era. Do you disrupt yourself or wait for someone else to.   Leaders need to start asking themselves, if they haven’t already… If your core product can be replicated by AI, what's your actual value? ☑️ Publishers learned this the hard way when AI started summarizing their content. ☑️ SaaS companies are learning it now as AI replicates their features. Service businesses are next. ☑️ Google isn’t waiting for OpenAI’s browser or Perplexity to make search obsolete. They’re doing it themselves, on their own terms. The companies that survive won't have the best products adapting AI to them. They'll be the ones most willing to abandon them and rethink them entirely when the rules have changed.   #Innovation #DigitalDisruption #Future #InnovatorsDilemma #CompetitiveAdvantage Source Article: https://lnkd.in/gvSMJRFm Pew Research: https://lnkd.in/gTvMk7_p Impact on Publishers: https://lnkd.in/geiHJSyH

A lot of people are saying they no longer use Google, instead they just turn to AI solutions like ChatGPT. So, the question that comes to mind is, how likely are AI tools like ChatGPT to replace search engines like Google and Bing? Well, let’s look at the data. According to Similar Web, OpenAI had 1.639 billion visitors in January. Up 7% from the previous month. During the same period, Google had 86.57 billion visitors (up 2.8% from the previous month) and Bing had 1.359 billion visitors (up 3.9% from the previous month). In February, Google and Bing saw traffic declines, but February is a shorter month. If you add 2 more days in February like January, Google’s traffic would have been roughly the same from January to February. On the flipside, OpenAI saw a 1.9% traffic growth in February even though the month was 2 days shorter than the previous one. Now of course Google and Bing are adapting… They may not adapt the way you want though… and you may prefer a specific AI platform like ChatGPT over Gemini… And although ChatGPT has rapidly grown to one of the 30 most popular sites on the web, people still use search engines. And yes, ChatGPT’s popularity has exploded in a short period of time, but the people talking and searching about it have remained fairly steady over the last year as you can see in the graph (instead of it growing at a rapid pace). So will ChatGPT replace search engines, probably not. Somewhat because search engines will adapt, but more so because there is a use case for both search and AI platforms like ChatGPT. Some people may switch which site they use and prefer, but it doesn't mean one will die... Just like how there is still a use case for Facebook when there is TikTok and Instagram. I guess time will tell.

Google might lose one of the biggest advantages it’s had for 20 years. And that could change the future of AI search. As part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google, one of the proposed remedies is to ban them from paying Traffic Acquisition Costs (the billions Google gives to Apple and Firefox) to stay the default search engine. If that happens? It creates a once-in-a-generation opening. That opens space for the frontier AI systems like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity to pay TAC to Apple and Firefox. However, this won’t be easy for them. To do it, they will: • Need to build ad systems at the scale of Google. • Have massive upfront costs ($25–30B annually just for TAC) Right now, these AI companies are experimenting with monetization such as subscriptions, sponsored questions, and contextual ads, but they haven’t built full-funnel, performance-driven ad platforms that can fund massive TAC payouts and sustain long-term distribution. It’s a big shift that could redefine (or further redefine) the user search experience with: → AI at the core → New monetization formats → Distribution shaped by capital and infrastructure, not just tech If you’re in advertising or AI, this is something to watch closely. The next dominant search platform might not look anything like Google.