You only click page 2 if you are desperate.
Are you still chasing the first page of Google? With AI searches taking over, being on page one isn’t enough anymore!
Remember: Established brands have an edge, but new players need to innovate fast!
This is the final part of my series this week, but tune in next week as we look forward to 2026!
SOURCES:
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search https://www.getpassionfruit.com/blog/are-ai-search-referrals-the-new-clicks
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so we’ll close out 2025 with some short episodes about the lessons we’ve learned from marketing this year and also the things we need to consider about 2026.
So we need to talk about search engines, and specifically, how 2025 has changed how people search for information on the internet. Over the last 20 years, it’s been pretty common knowledge that Google is the front page for a lot of the internet, and even very popular sites like Facebook or Amazon tend to begin with a Google search because most people are lazy and don’t know how to use bookmarks.
For many years, the idea of being among the first page results for search has been the goal of many marketers because research in the past has shown that requiring people to go to that second page to find you tends to be accompanied by a steep reduction in traffic.
But Google’s been slowly working to change how people search by introducing informational cards that appear on the side of search results and also with more and more prominent ads that take up a lot of real estate on the main page. I know I’ve avoided Google and I’ve been using DuckDuckGo, which is basically just Google like it was about 10 years ago, but even DuckDuckGo has become infested with a feature that Google has been pushing like crazy this year:
AI summaries of searches.
And this has led to turning search from a top page experience into what’s now being called a zero click experience where the search engine produces information without actually requiring anyone to go to a specific webpage.
In fact, according to a report from McKinsey & Company dated October 16 of this year, 50% of consumers are using AI-powered searches of some sort, and traditional search channels are seeing declines of anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.
And this leads to another unfortunate statistic: data from the research firm Brightedge found that AI searches account for less than 1% of referrals and that Google refers 345 times more traffic than all dedicated AI platforms combined.
And the search results that generate actual clicks to websites still tend to happen on the first page most of the time, particularly for mobile searches.
But those clicks might also be meaningless because further research from the group Ahrefs, detailed in an article I’ve provided in the show notes from the growth engine software Passionfruit, suggests that AI search engine visitors generate 12.1% of signups despite accounting for a fraction of 1% of overall traffic.
In other words, AI search has a huge impact on the purchase funnel, because it means that content needs to be pivoted away from the general information AI-powered searches will provide to later-stage decision-making targeted to more informed consumers.
In fact, the research McKinsey provided suggests that by the time consumers reach an actual search result, the AI tool they started with might have already helped them make up their minds.
And herein lies a problem: AI tools are notoriously complex black boxes that aren’t easily influenced by current data. Many of them are running on training data that represents years and years of information, and even when they search the internet, they don’t always return valid information.
As I was writing this, I went to several AI platforms and asked who you could go to for research services in St. Louis, MO.
Gemini had my firm, RPG, in the top results along several other current research agencies with a presence in the area. That makes sense. We’ve been doing this for 43 years!
Claude also returned my firm in the results along with a firm that has closed down 4 years ago and another one that doesn’t have any presence in St. Louis.
CoPilot mentioned my firm – again, great! – but also listed several either that are either closed or which have rebranded to different names.
And ChatGPT returned a bunch of old firms that don’t exist anymore before I instructed it to search the internet, at which point it was more in line with the other platforms.
If I were searching for research services in St. Louis, I’d probably find RPG, which is great! But I’d also find a lot of misinformation and unhelpful summaries of services that these firms don’t provide. My decision-making process would be less about evaluating what these firms actually provide and more about what the AI summary tells me these firms can do.
On a whim, I asked CoPilot to give me a recommendation from its list on which firm to hire. It recommended one that’s out of business and another that’s operating under a totally different name right now. In fact, out of the five firms it recommended, three aren’t viable anymore.
I thought I’d try something else, so I asked these AI tools and overviews to help me find a doctor. Here in St. Louis, you generally want to see a physician associated with a major health care system that accepts your insurance – BJC Healthcare, SSM Health, Mercy or maybe HSHS or St. Luke’s or a few other providers.
The AI summaries typically recommended physicians associated with urgent care or smaller practices and made up a comparative analysis of them based on very little factual information.
I had to restructure my prompt to indicate my insurance and specific needs before I could get anything useful.
This worries me, because it means that historical information about products, brands and service providers are going to be contending with current information when it comes to AI-powered searches, and if zero-click searching really does become the more common approach to internet searching, we’re all going to have to rethink how we position ourselves online.
If there is a bright spot in this, it’s that those of us who have been in business awhile are more likely to benefit from zero click searches than those who’re just starting out. Having an established name and a history will help marketers who’re hoping to hold on to market share and will create barriers to entry for newcomers.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how rebranding and mergers are going to fare in this new world, and given that the current AI results and information cards aren’t up to date or accurate much of the time, that could spell trouble. One of the things we’ll talk about next week when we discuss 2026 is how to position your brand for the new largely AI-generated world we’re stepping into.
But that’s enough for now. I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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