AI’s impact on search isn’t a secret (How to talk to execs about the new era of search)
I get it, these are uncertain times. Organic traffic is dropping like a rock, and new referral traffic coming in from LLMs like ChatGPT barely scratches the surface of what’s been lost.
The narrative of “traffic is simply coming from a new source” is not accurate. Search and engagement are happening in new ways, but CTRs are dropping significantly across nearly all industries.
It’s no surprise that many in the industry are feeling anxious about the future of SEO and whether AI might eventually render their roles obsolete. Bringing this up with your C-suite team might feel like the last thing you want to do.
But here’s the reality: Now is exactly the time to lean in.
Your leadership team needs to understand what’s happening, and, more importantly, what you’re doing about it.
Use this moment to educate, align expectations, and map out how your search strategy is evolving to meet the new landscape head on. Schedule the meeting. Start the conversation.
I’ll walk you through exactly what to do to maximize the value of this very important meeting.
Don’t avoid leadership — address AI visibility head-on
No, I’m not going to tell you to picture your leadership team in their underwear. That won’t make the conversation easier, it’ll just make it awkward.
What will help is showing up prepared to lead the conversation.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Set the tone from the start. Your leadership team will already respect the fact that you’re raising this issue before they assign someone to investigate it.
Use this opportunity to guide the discussion and provide clarity, not excuses. This isn’t the time to sugarcoat or downplay what’s happening.
Let’s break down the key points to bring to leadership to provide clarity.
Why SEO is down and how that impacts business
This is your opportunity to lead with facts, not fear. Give an honest recap of the current state of the industry and how it’s affecting your business.
To start, here are a few critical events that may help explain shifts in performance:
- Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are changing user behavior and pulling searches away from Google entirely.
- Google has since rolled out AI Overviews (AIOs), which are appearing in more and more SERPs and driving fewer clicks to third-party sites. (Reports of -61% reduction in organic CTR have been reported).
- LLMs are sending some traffic, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s been lost from traditional search.
- Bing launched AI-powered search summaries, but the impact was limited due to its smaller market share.
Next, present a clear, data-driven overview of what’s changed at your company and how it’s already affecting your business. If organic traffic is down 30%, own it, and if revenue has dipped as well, own that too.
Keep the conversation grounded in measurable outcomes and alignment with company goals. And confirm in advance with your analytics team that data you are citing (in addition to LLM visibility metrics you are collecting) are accurate.
Here’s data that needs to be shared.
Discuss revenue, leads (or actions marked as key events), and organic traffic data over time, ideally including year-over-year numbers.
These numbers tie the discussion directly to business impact instead of rankings or other vanity metrics. Year-over-year views help distinguish seasonality and industry trends from real performance drops. Identifying these allows leadership to quickly understand when performance went down vs. a soft market (or shift to a new search ecosystem).
Export and review keywords you’ve been tracking. This is valuable for Google and Bing, and additional insights from LLM rank tracking can add more context.
No, I’m not going against my long standing take that rankings shouldn’t be used as a performance metric on their own. However, in situations like these, rankings are incredibly important to understand if the decrease in traffic is purely lost rankings, lost demand, or shifts in how people search.
Export click/impression and CTR data in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Isolate queries/URLs that saw a CTR decrease and determine if those SERPs are now displaying AIOs.
This further demonstrates when performance is truly down or if everyone playing the game has been impacted. If the pages that saw the biggest dips in clicks also display AI overviews, then the impact is likely very similar for your competitors as well. Just another valuable piece of the puzzle.
Once you deliver the current state of the business, questions will follow. Don’t wait to be asked, own the narrative. Explain the broader context, industry-wide shifts, and emerging technologies behind these changes. A few opportunities to consider:
- Pull traffic estimates and keyword ranking reports for your top competitors. Are they seeing similar results?
- Review Google Trends and Exploding Topics to identify increasing (or decreasing) demand for topics/products within your industry.
- Leverage new AI visibility technology/reports to show your brand’s visibility where the conversation/research is happening (LLMs).
Remember, this isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about showing you understand the change in landscape and how it’s impacting overall performance.
What we’ve learned so far and where we’re going
This is the moment to show leadership that you are not just diagnosing a problem, you are actively working toward a solution. They might not love every answer, but they will respect that you are thinking three steps ahead.
Make it clear that while the rules are changing, your team is already adapting to win in the next era of search. Then be explicit about what you need from them, whether that’s budget, headcount, data support, or cross-functional alignment, so you can actually execute the plan instead of just presenting the problem.
Here are a few ideas to communicate the next plan of attack.
We are working to increase our brand’s presence outside of traditional search, focusing heavily on AI-generated answers and emerging discovery platforms.
That includes tracking which questions matter most to our buyers, understanding where our brand appears today, and prioritizing content, PR, and partnerships to increase our odds of being named in those answers.
The goal is simple: If people are getting answers without clicking, our brand still needs to show up in the answer. This is done by repetition and consistency in our brand mentions/citations across the web.
We are rethinking content strategy around entities and topics, not just keywords and rankings.
LLMs reward brands that have deep, consistent coverage of a topic and clear signals of expertise. That affects what we publish, how we structure content, and how we collaborate with PR, product, and subject matter experts to build authority over time. This is the 2.0 version of “SEO content” and it won’t be easy, but the results will be worth it.
We are investing in visibility measurement across both traditional and non-traditional search channels.
Google organic traffic is no longer the single source of truth. We are building reporting that accounts for AI surfaces, social discovery, referral ecosystems, and even offline demand, so the broader team sees the full picture instead of assuming “SEO is down, therefore demand is down.” This helps quantify the broader shift in search ecosystems.
AI Overviews are a permanent shift, not a test.
This means resetting traffic baselines, forecasts, and goals to reflect fewer clicks from classic blue links within the SERP. We are not planning our pipeline in the hope that Google turns AI Overviews off, we are planning for a world where this is the new normal.
Some version of “AI Mode” will likely become Google’s default experience in 2026.
If more searches are answered directly in Google’s interface, fewer visitors will hit our site. That changes how many leads or sales we can expect from SEO alone, and it will force us to rethink everything, including budgeting and how we attribute performance across channels.
How we’ll be proactive and adapt to the new search landscape
You’ve explained what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how your team is adapting. Now, make it clear to leadership that to succeed in this shifting landscape, it can’t be done in isolation. You’ll need alignment, resources, and ongoing support.
Use this opportunity to preemptively answer questions like “What do you need from us?” and to shape the path forward. Leaders like nothing more than an actionable plan that they simply have to bless to get done.
Here are some critical needs to outline.
Search success in the AI era looks different, is measured differently than we are used to, and will take time to optimize.
We should agree up front on realistic timeframes, what leading indicators we will track, and how often we will report back. Rankings, traffic, and last-click revenue will not always move neatly in sync, so leadership needs to be comfortable with a period where we are learning and recalibrating, not just chasing last year’s dashboards.
Executive buy-in is needed to prioritize long-term brand-building alongside short-term performance metrics.
This means leadership agrees that some SEO and content initiatives will not pay off in this quarter’s reporting but are required to keep the brand visible in search and AI-driven experiences over the next 12 to 24 months. It also means updating KPIs so the team is not punished for investing in assets that compound over time instead of quick, last-click wins.
Budget flexibility to invest in experimental channels, new content formats, and tools that help track AI visibility.
A portion of the marketing budget will need to be earmarked for testing, for example: new AI visibility tools, structured data implementations, interactive content, and partnerships that increase the odds of being cited in AI answers. The goal is to learn fast, kill what does not work, and scale what does.
Cross-functional collaboration with analytics, product, PR, and content teams needs to happen to shift how we measure and execute organic growth.
SEO can no longer operate in a silo. We need analytics to help us build new dashboards that track visibility and assisted impact, PR to prioritize stories and placements that feed both search and AI systems, and product and content teams to align roadmaps with the topics and entities that matter most. Without that alignment, we end up with fragmented efforts and noisy data that no one trusts.
This is your moment to lead the AI visibility discussion
You’re not just reacting to change but guiding your organization through it. AI and LLMs are rewriting how people search, discover, and click. This isn’t the time to panic, let alone support the “organic search is dead” rumor. It means the game has changed, and good businesses aren’t afraid. They adapt.
Part of that strategy is ongoing monitoring. One-time pitches for buy-in are great, but all marketing efforts need to be measured. Set a regular cadence—for example, a monthly AI visibility update metric alongside your “normal” SEO KPIs.
As AI and LLMs evolve, you can leverage the data you’ve measured to brief leadership on what has changed and how you have adapted to the situation.
Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform.
By getting ahead of the conversation, grounding your message in data, and proposing a realistic path forward, you’re showing exactly the kind of strategic thinking that executives value.
This is no longer only about SEO, it’s about future-proofing how your business earns visibility, trust, and traffic in a radically new environment. It doesn’t matter if that happens on Google, ChatGPT, Reddit, or anywhere else. What’s important is being visible in the spaces where your customers are hanging out.
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