You've been quietly losing traffic from organic search even though your rankings haven't changed. Does that mean traditional SEO no longer works? No. But should you then treat AI as a black box to simply accept and ignore? Also no.
All the things that used to score points with traditional search engine algorithms, like backlinks, website authority, performance optimization, and quality content -- they haven't just stopped existing. AI search just treats them very differently, which is at once both better and worse.
Sometimes, that means good content is more likely to be cited by AI tools, even if your website doesn't have a high domain authority (DA) ranking. Yet it also means that most visitors will get their questions answered without ever leaving the AI platform, since the AI pulls all the information from your website into its responses without requiring users to click into your site.
Luckily, that also means you get more opportunities to show up as a useful resource for your audience, even if they never actually visit your website. As long as you're being cited by AI search engines, people will notice your brand, whether or not they register as inbound traffic.
With that in mind, I'm going to share some advice for earning more citations from AI search platforms without throwing SEO to the curb. I'll also share tools to help you measure your AI search visibility without breaking the bank.
According to Semrush's recent analysis of more than 50,000 websites, AI traffic grew by 66% in 2025 compared to the previous year. But AI still accounts for less than 0.15% of total website visits.
That means two things. First, AI is taking a lion's share of search engine traffic away from websites. At the same time, not all of that traffic is being rerouted to websites through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google Gemini. Instead, AI platforms now serve as both the first port of call and the final destination for these internet users, enabling them to find everything they need without ever leaving the app.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
What's worse is that websites that have been focusing on traditional SEO are suddenly finding that AI tools don't treat them with the same priority. Search engines used to look for websites with a rich library of content and demonstrated authority in a topic. AI values that too, but more importantly, it looks for text that answers a user's question precisely and immediately.
Moreover, AI search engines require more targeted optimization than technical SEO typically provides. Along with a robots.txt and a sitemap, you might also want to consider having a dedicated llms.txt file for agents and bots trying to crawl your site.
All of these are separate problems that, together, contribute to lower traffic and visibility from AI tools. But there are ways to solve them.
There are a few ways to assess your visibility on AI search, depending on how much time and money you are prepared to spend.
There are several things you can do to increase your chances of being cited by LLM-based generative AI platforms, according to a study published by Princeton, Georgia Tech, and the Allen Institute for AI at the 2024 KDD Conference. They tested nine content visibility tactics across 10,000 search queries, achieving improvements of up to 40%. Here's what they found to be working: As the Semrush study clearly shows, there's a lot of misinformation and propaganda floating around about AI search and SEO. While it's true that websites are losing a lot of traffic to AI platforms, referral traffic from these tools doesn't account for nearly as many clicks as they claim. Still, there are plenty of benefits to being cited by AI, even if that doesn't lead users to visit your website directly.
If you've been serious about traditional SEO, you'll find that you already have all the things you need to get started with AI search optimization from existing platforms like Semrush or Ahrefs. More dedicated tooling for analytics and visibility also exists, but not everyone will need it. Also, it's worth keeping in mind that the basic principle of creating useful and informative content hasn't changed. But there are things that AI tools approach differently when it comes to researching answers to user queries, which can help you show up in more responses.