How your brand is being discovered online is changing rapidly, with website traffic on a steady decline.

This is reflective of the modern buyer journey, how people search online and how they discover solution providers and products. More third-party touchpoints are happening and influencing choice long before someone goes to your brand’s website.

For many of our clients, driving website traffic is a critical metric for showcasing marketing impact. Understanding the decline and what to do about it will be imperative when explaining results to the C-suite and building new strategies.

Table of Contents:

The State of AI Search + Google’s AI Mode
Overview: What Should Brands Do To Increase AI Discoverability?
The Rise of “No-Click” (or “Low-Click”) Behavior
What AI Search Means for Brand Visibility
The New Brand Discoverability Stack
Earned, Paid and Owned Content that Drives AI Search Clicks

The State of AI Search + Google’s AI Mode

In May 2025, Google announced AI Mode, a major update that replaces traditional blue links with conversational summaries. These summaries pull from trusted sources across the web, offering instant answers within the search experience itself. According to Fast Company, the Google rollout will begin this summer.

AI Mode is a direct response to the growing preference for AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, which have quietly become search alternatives for millions of users.

We’re entering a new era of online discovery—one where your brand’s visibility depends not on how well your site ranks, but on where and how you’re mentioned across the internet.

Overview: What Should Brands Do To Increase AI Discoverability?

If you don’t have time to dive into all that follows, at least check out these bullets.

Invest in earned media. Prioritize brand presence, listicle inclusion and thought leadership. Provide expert commentary in trade publications and national news outlets. These are high-signal sources for AI models.
Show up on social media. Thought leadership and public conversation are indexed, too, especially on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit.
Structure your owned content. Use keywords, schema markup (coding that tells Google and AI what your content is) and publish consistently so your owned content is machine-readable and deemed relevant.
Adjust performance metrics. Track brand awareness, share of voice and AI visibility scoring, as website traffic will drop as a reliable indicator. And if you’re heavily involved with content development, consider these new KPIs.

Let’s unpack each of the points above, diving into what’s happening, why it matters and how PR is emerging as a critical lever.

The Rise of “No-Click” (or “Low-Click”) Behavior

Over the last few years, Google’s click-through rates have steadily declined. The rise of zero-click searches—where users get what they need without leaving the results page—has been well documented. But in 2025, it’s no longer just a trend; it’s the default behavior.

AI-generated answers now serve as the front door to content. These summaries reduce the need for users to click at all. When answers are generated in-line, visibility shifts from your website to whether your brand is referenced—either directly or indirectly—in the sources AI pulls from.

ChatGPT, for example, has become a massive aggregator of attention, still driving traffic off the platform but to a smaller set of sources. The average user clicks 1.4 external links per visit, but 64% of all ChatGPT referrals land on just 120 domains.

In short, the open web is shrinking as a discovery surface. People are still researching, comparing and learning—but they’re doing it through tools and platforms that send less traffic to your website.

This marks a needed shift for marketers who prioritize website traffic as a primary success metric. Brand building and authority are now essential for getting into buyer consideration sets. Tracking brand awareness, share of voice and AI visibility scoring will continue to rise in importance and content metrics should expand beyond views.

What AI Search Means for Brand Visibility

This shift rewrites the rules for digital marketers, SEOs and PR professionals. Codeword’s VP and Head of Strategy, Jordan Leschinsky, told PR News that, “Search is no longer just an index for a brand’s web pages, it’s a brand awareness and engagement platform.” This change to search marketing means there needs to be a change from performance marketing—paying for results like clicks and leads—to brand building.

If your marketing strategy is focused solely on driving traffic to your owned channels, you’re missing where the influence is actually happening. People aren’t just searching, they’re being fed answers. They aren’t navigating, they’re consuming summaries. And they’re doing it on platforms that are increasingly closed-loop.

As a result, brand visibility is now less about optimization for clicks and more about presence within the right context.

In the past, digital visibility was an SEO-only game. But AI doesn’t reward keyword density. It rewards citations. It surfaces brands and voices that appear in credible, contextual and relevant content.

Sources AI search tools cite most often:

Industry articles
News stories
Analyst coverage
Expert commentary
Social conversations

These are now the building blocks of discoverability. They’re what feed large language models. They’re how generative search engines decide which brands to mention and which voices to trust.

It’s important to note a reason why reputable media placements are highly visible in AI results. OpenAI has partnerships with major news outlets and receives access to content, including content behind the paywall. In exchange, ChatGPT provides answers with attribution and links to the full articles for transparency. So when users do click out, it’s most often to these news sources and not company websites.

Additionally, Wikipedia has been used to train AI models and often shows up in results. Inaccurate information on the site can lead to negative or harmful information in AI results. Ensuring the positivity and accuracy of your Wikipedia page is an important part of brand management in the age of AI.

The New Brand Discoverability Stack

This shift presents a quiet but urgent challenge for brands: if you’re not present in the sources AI pulls from, you simply don’t exist in the new search ecosystem.

This is where public relations becomes mission-critical.

To compete in this new environment, brands need to optimize for how and where they appear across the broader web, not just their own properties.

PR News coins it as the “AI Visibility Triangle.” Aka: Taking a holistic approach to tackling content, communications and communities in order to earn AI’s endorsement.

To build authority in the eyes of AI, marketers must go beyond owned content and embrace proactive, brand-first PR that is present in online communities and credible third-party sites.

Here are the three layers where discoverability is earned:

1. Earned Media (Trusted, Third-Party Signals)

Generative AI systems rely heavily on trusted, well-sourced content to power their responses. That makes industry trade outlets, business publications and expert commentary exponentially more valuable. Being quoted or mentioned in these outlets can increase your brand authority and get you into the AI layer of search. Doing so regularly helps even more.

PR tip: Prioritize relationships with trade media and sector-specific publishers. The more your brand is covered by sources AI trusts, the more likely it is to surface in search summaries and generative responses.

2. Shared Content (Social Signals + Engagement)

AI tools are increasingly watching social signals. This means your brand’s presence in conversations, thought leadership and community engagement contributes to its perceived relevance.

If you’re consistently part of public discourse—sharing insights, sparking discussion, adding value in real time—you’re reinforcing your authority and helping AI identify your brand as topically relevant.

PR tip: Double down on thought leadership and earned engagement. Encourage employee advocacy and executive presence, especially on LinkedIn and Reddit, where professional and niche discussions are often crawled and synthesized by LLMs.

3. Owned Content (Structured, Indexable Assets)

While third-party sources carry more weight in AI search, your own website still plays a supporting role. You can help AI tools understand, trust and surface your content by writing about what your audience is searching for and following technical SEO best practices.

Optimize with keywords and use schema markup to tag authors, dates and content types (articles, FAQs, etc.) so that LLMs can appropriately crawl and discover it. Additionally, consistently publish accurate, up-to-date content. The more relevant and structured your site content, the more likely it is to be referenced in search summaries.

PR tip: Audit your existing content for clarity, structure and recency. Add schema where missing, and make sure each piece has a clear author and publish date. AI systems weigh freshness and transparency. And don’t forget to update your KPIs.

Earned, Paid and Owned Content that Drives AI Search Clicks

While website traffic numbers are expected to fall as AI search gains popularity, it still matters as a metric and meaningful referrals can still be generated.

Buyers looking to validate, verify or go deeper into an AI search response will investigate by going to a source website. Those who click are often at a decisive point in the buyer journey, driving quality demand over quantity of visits.

It’s important to note that some question styles tend to generate source links, not just summaries, in AI results and that certain types of content are easier for AI to crawl.

Format:

Avoid PDFs, since AI finds them harder to read.
Use structured webpages with direct answers, tables and comparison summaries.
Prioritize inclusion in third-party listicles, news and reviews.
Publish case studies and unique data or trend reports.

Content Categories:

Solution Discovery Questions / Vendor Comparison: Understand available tools, services or partners to solve a known problem. Evaluate differences between competitors or find alternatives. Results often include links out to news articles, listicles, reviews and awards. Answer questions like “Best service providers for X” or “Top products for Y” on both your own site and in third-party outlets (earned or paid advertorials).
Technical or How-To Questions: How to use, integrate or get more value out of a vendor, service or product. Results often include links out to help docs, product pages, blogs, support forums or downloadable templates. Be a credible source for how-to content, offer tools and be present in third-party conversations.
Research + Insight Validation Questions: Understand trends, benchmarks or support an internal business case. Results often include links to news articles, case studies, proprietary insights, whitepapers or original data. Be present in articles as an expert source or publish original content to answer questions like “Top 2025 menu trends in fast casual” or “Gen Z dining preferences in campus dining.”

What’s Next? PR as the New Discoverability Engine

Public relations is no longer just about credibility or reach. It’s about indexability. A strategic PR program creates the kind of third-party, high-authority mentions that AI systems prioritize and promote.

If your brand is quoted in a trade piece, national news story, mentioned in a product roundup or referenced in an expert’s LinkedIn post, that content becomes a node in the AI knowledge graph.

In 2025 and beyond, visibility isn’t just about clicks—it’s about mentions. It’s about being part of the sources AI trusts, the conversations your audience pays attention to and the content ecosystems that shape perception before a user ever lands on your site.