Billion-Dollar Question Hangs Over AI-Search Marketing

 

“This year's Black Friday weekend delivered a moment of clarity and questions for marketers exploring AI search.

 

The websites of 20 retailers from Best Buy to Etsy averaged 183,000 daily visits from people sent by ChatGPT and other large language models, according to marketing-software firm Semrush. That is tiny compared with traditional search traffic but nearly eight times last year's daily average. In 2023, daily results ranged from zero to the low hundreds for each site.

 

AI search is on a trajectory to drive revenue. How companies should prepare remains up for debate.

 

"Every chief marketing officer today is thinking about how they're showing up in ChatGPT," Anil Chakravarthy, president of the digital-experience business at Adobe, said last month when the company unveiled a $1.9 billion deal to buy Semrush.

 

Benjamin Houy is firmly in the camp of "don't touch that dial." The entrepreneur this year used his own money to launch Lorelight, a tool to optimize the presence of brands in LLM results. It lasted about six months.

 

Rather than revealing new ways to influence artificial-intelligence algorithms, Lorelight's data reinforced the value of time-tested practices for traditional search-engine optimization, like appearing in respected publications and producing content that provides legitimate expertise.

 

"I just stopped believing in the core premise of the product, which was that it could help companies rank higher on AI," Houy said.

 

Another school of thought might be called "SEO is dead," as many business headlines have proclaimed, or at least vastly diminished. Believers this year packed funding rounds for a swarm of startups selling answer engine optimization, or AEO, also known as generative engine optimization, which they say requires different tactics than SEO.

 

AI search might not immediately supplant SEO, but its trajectory over the next five years is "a one-way street," according to Brian Stempeck, co-founder and chief executive of AI search optimization startup Evertune. When Stempeck asked a group of University of Virginia students whether they use Google as their primary search platform, no hands went up, he said. They mainly use AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini or X's Grok, or TikTok, he said.

 

The global SEO and AEO services market will grow to $171 billion by 2030 from $81.4 billion last year, according to research firm MarkNtel Advisors.” [1]

 

1. Billion-Dollar Question Hangs Over AI-Search Marketing. Coffee, Patrick.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Dec 2025: B4.