Appearing at the top of search engines gives your content the highest chance of being discovered by your audience. It’s a simple concept, with a well-established best-practice framework we’ve all been avidly working with and refining for years. But now, with the rapid growth and integration of AI, there’s a shift happening across the digital landscape. So here’s Fenti’s guide to help you successfully navigate the future of organic search and ensure your content plays nice with AI.
When global research giants Gartner stated, “by 2028, brands’ organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more as consumers embrace generative AI-powered search,” we at Fenti wondered how we could evolve our digital strategies to fully embrace the impact of future AI search integration.
Zero-Click Search = Zero-Click Through?
You will have already noticed that most Google searches now return an AI overview that tops the results page. This feature is known as a ‘zero-click search’, where AI provides an answer to your query without the need to click through to a website. Great news for the user, but not so great for website owners who miss out on traffic visiting their site. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s take a moment to consider the nuance of what’s really happening.
Google is still king of the search engines with five trillion searches per year – several times the volume of daily search queries than ChatGPT sees over a whole month. In a recent Linked-In post from Neil Patel, marketing guru and co-founder of NP Digital, he shows that in 2025, Google’s searches with clicks were at 40.79%, compared to AI-powered zero-click searches with 59.24% – an increase of 2.23% year-on-year.
The Impact Of AI On Informational And Commercial Intent Searches
How much you feel the impact of reduced click-through due to AI-assisted searches varies depending on whether you’re a supplier, service provider or a retailer. Currently, the largest disruption is felt by informational sites, because users grab the returned search result and bail without the need to click through. Navigational, commercial and transactional sites are affected to a lesser extent, but given AI’s rapidly scaling capability to deliver richer search results, there is work to be done to futureproof your online presence and ensure your content is the source from which the AI overview pulls.
Zero-Click Best Practices For AI Authority
Use the following guidance to help steer, encourage and inspire you to develop amazing content and a stronger digital strategy:
- Quality content is more important than quantity – Google sees large volumes of irrelevant content as spammy and an attempt to try and game the system.
- Generic content negatively affects your Google E.E.A.T. (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust) quality rating and ultimately harms your ranking.
- Value social search. Leverage platforms like Youtube (the second largest search engine with 39% and 2 billion active users) by creating video case studies, user and influencer interviews, as well as product showcases and reviews.
- Pack all your content with relevant keywords and meta descriptions.
- If you have commercial focus, tailor your SEO for revenue and conversions, not traffic.
- Build a brand that reflects across all your platforms. 44% of Google searches in 2024 had brand intent, so establish yourself as an expert and authority in your field.
- Embrace third-party content, such as user-generated content (UGC) on platforms like Reddit, Slack and Discord, and engage with ‘ask me anything’ Q&A sessions.
Own Your Own Narrative
Your online presence is your shop window to the world, so dress it however you like. Control and optimise your content for discoverability to rank higher on Google and Bing (the power behind AI giants ChatGPT). Here are Fenti’s top tips:
- Create an organic keyword strategy. 69% of clicks go to the top 5 organic results, so be specific with long tail keywords. Younger audiences use voice search of 4 words or longer and account for more than 70% of searches.
- Visual search is rising, with 20 billion monthly Google Lens search queries, 5 billion of which with commercial and transactional intent, so optimise your product images with titles and alt text.
- Run regular SEO audits and fix any technical issues, redirecting any 404 errors or dead backlinks.
- Don’t try to hack or manipulate your way to the top of search results by leveraging authority from expired domains.
- Detailed content, reputable citations, backlinks and brand mentions matter most when Google evaluates your content.
- Collaborate with industry thought-leaders and infuse your content with experiential insight.
- 60% of Google searches end without a click, so format content that the AI overview can draw from.
Optimise For Zero-Click
Improve your site structure with clear headings and sub-headings, bullet points, concise paragraphs for easy extraction, and implement schema; structured data enhances Google’s ability to understand your content, especially at a local SEO level.
Future-Proofing SEO And Digital Strategies
Be assured you’re still very much in control of your digital destiny. Bookmark this Fenti guide for future reference as AI integration becomes increasingly widespread. Ultimately, our content should offer rich insight, value, knowledge and positive experiences to our audience, in exchange for their custom and data. After all, it’s that data that provides us with the insight to better serve them.
