Search marketing loses ground as AI reshapes discovery

Instead of surfacing website links, AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and others now deliver direct answers — often without the user ever clicking a link that leads to a website. That transformation has big implications, experts said. The traditional SEO model, built around keywords, backlinks, and content density, is losing effectiveness as AI-driven tools dominate the discovery phase.