AI and the New Economic Landscape of Organic Search
Alistair Hague
Alistair leads Organic & AI SEO at Open Partners, with 27 years of web development and search optimisation experience.
For nearly two decades, Google was the undisputed foundation of organic search. Marketers and SEO teams knew how to navigate its ecosystem, optimising websites, targeting keywords, and building content strategies that aligned with Google’s ranking signals.
Even major updates that affected performance (i.e. Google’s Core Updates like Panda & Penguin) gave marketers time to prepare and mitigate against disruption. Largely, the rules were clear, and those who knew them were capable of driving sustainable growth through a tried-and-tested strategy.
That era is over.
Below, we explore AI’s snowballing impact on organic search, quantifying the impact on user behaviour, how this shift has fundamentally affected the way organic success is measured, and how this has changed the economic landscape of the channel overall.
We also dive into what industries are most affected and what brands can do to drive more impactful organic strategies with material outcomes in the current AI landscape.
AI’s Impact on Organic KPIs, Attribution, and Forecasting
Traditional organic KPIs are becoming increasingly unreliable
The rise of AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot is fundamentally reshaping the digital landscape. In fact, Gartner’s projection that up to 50% of organic traffic will be lost to AI search platforms by 2028 already appears conservative.
In Q1 2025 alone, Google’s search traffic saw a 12% year-over-year decline (Similarweb), while ChatGPT reached 2 billion visits in May, a 30% increase since late 2024. Concurrently, 22% of shopping journeys now originate within AI tools, a figure that has more than doubled in just two years (Shopify, 2025):
Google Traffic vs. AI Search Growth (2023–2025)
Where Consumers Begin Their Search (2023 vs. 2025)
Not only is AI-driven search contributing to declines in traditional KPIs like clicks and traffic – it’s also making those metrics less reliable as standalone indicators of performance.
As user journeys fragment across traditional search engines and AI platforms, marketers face a new complexity: understanding a landscape where visibility doesn’t always equal engagement. This shift makes it increasingly difficult to track how users are discovering, engaging with, and converting from organic content as AI becomes a core part of the discovery process.
“The great decoupling” is just one example of this: a phenomenon where impressions remain stable or even increase, but clicks and traffic decline. This is a direct consequence of AI-driven platforms surfacing answers without sending users to websites, causing organic performance metrics to appear healthy while conversions and engagement quietly erode underneath.
The impact on the economics of search
In the traditional search ecosystem, attribution models (while imperfect) were relatively stable, and marketers could link performance metrics like traffic, rankings, and conversions back to defined search behaviours. But with traditional organic metrics losing clarity, so does a marketer’s ability to track attribution, calculate ROI, and forecast accurately – key levers in securing future marketing investment.
Attribution ROI Impact
As attribution becomes less reliable, so does the ability to confidently calculate ROI. Traditional SEO and content investments may appear to underperform – not because they’ve lost effectiveness, but because legacy measurement frameworks are no longer capturing their full impact. Marketers are left with an incomplete view of what’s working, making it harder to defend budgets or demonstrate return.
Forecasting Challenges
The knock-on effect is a weakening of forecasting. Projections based on past performance lose accuracy in a landscape where consumer behaviour is shifting rapidly and unpredictably. Forecasting models that previously informed quarterly targets or annual growth plans are now built on increasingly unstable ground.
For brands, this creates a high-stakes scenario: revenue expectations tied to organic may begin to falter, not due to a lack of demand, but because the systems used to measure and plan are no longer built for the environment they’re operating in.
Without a strategic reset ( both in measurement and in how organic search is understood) businesses risk flying blind in one of their most important acquisition channels.
Who’s most at risk?
While AI-led search will eventually impact all online businesses, the disruption is currently hitting a handful of sectors hardest, particularly those that are information based and rely heavily on site traffic / clicks to drive revenue.
Informational sites
- Media and publishing are seeing sharp declines in referral traffic as AI tools summarise articles directly within search interfaces, reducing click-throughs.
- In travel and hospitality, AI-generated itineraries are streamlining the planning process, decreasing reliance on conventional travel sites.
- Software and professional services are now turning to AI assistants for vendor recommendations, often skipping the early funnel research that once drove organic traffic.
Retail & E-Commerce
While not informational, E-commerce / retail brands are also facing challenges. With product comparisons increasingly occurring within conversational AI platforms, users are bypassing product pages and going on AI’s recommendation of what to purchase.
Fuelling this is the recent announcement that ChatGPT will be rolling out in-app shopping. Appearing as organic search results within the app, users will also be able to bypass the likes of Google ads to shop, which will irrevocably impact the effectiveness and returns of paid advertising.
AI readiness demands strategy and investment
