How the semantics of search are changing amid the zero-click era

“People don’t search anymore. They’re prompting, they’re gesturing,” said Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer at Code and Theory.

It’s a deceptively radical change to an area of the web that evolved from the old business of print directories and classified sections — one that may redefine how both web users and marketing practitioners think about search itself.

Fittingly, for a sector obsessed with the mechanics of meaning, there’s a linguistic term for this: “semantic widening,” a process through which a word or phrase begins to collect new meanings, broadening the span of its usage. The work of search is widening, too. Specialists are increasingly expected to offer AI expertise, social nous and brand marketing.

What’s behind this shift?

Google launched its Gemini-derived Overview feature a year ago. Between March and January, the number of searches that triggered an AI Overview on Google almost doubled. The feature’s rollout has had a significant impact on the readership models of publishers, affected brand click-through rates and organic search traffic, and prompted advertisers to query the impact on their paid search. Meanwhile, usage of ChatGPT and Perplexity for search has increased among users (albeit from a very small base).

Marketers have been peppering their agency partners with questions. How can they measure the effects of these new tools? And how can they colonize this digital terra nova?

In response, agency specialists have been working to keep clients abreast of the changes. For one, a traditional metric of success in organic search — a brand’s ranking on a results page — no longer translates directly to web traffic. A brand’s presence on a search engine results page is now “disjointed” from click-through rates, according to Jodie Simpson, content and SEO consultant at performance agency North.

“We’re trying to slowly change clients’ expectations,” said John Campbell, head of innovation at performance agency Roast. “We’re going to have to not look at click-through rate and traffic. We’re going to look at it as a kind of a brand and impression exercise.”

Jim Robinson, founder of SEO consultancy Clickseed, told Digiday he expected clients to begin “treating SEO as more of a brand channel” as AI search becomes more common.

How is the work of SEO actually changing?

To achieve that, they’re borrowing implements from the toolboxes of other marketing subject areas.

Prior to the advent of AI-enabled search, the practice was a relatively narrow, technical discipline — one that was umbilically linked to Google’s advertising ecosystem. The only significant challenge had been the tech giant’s gradually rising prices and the rise of social search, particularly among younger users.

Now, organic and paid search specialists alike are repositioning the practice — paying attention to a wider variety of platforms and methods of search. This comes as Google’s grip on this corner of the market shows signs of loosening — Google’s global market share in April fell to 89.65% (the lowest since 2013 when it dropped to 89.4%). Its share in the U.S. in the same period was 86.7%.

Search marketing specialists have been developing proprietary means of analyzing a large language model’s (LLM) perspective on a given brand — giving them a window into what ChatGPT or Gemini are saying about its products or services. Jellyfish, for example, began selling such a tool at the close of 2024, while digital agency R/GA launched an AI search optimization tool to provide sentiment and visibility analysis earlier this month.

Another common task they’ve been carrying out for clients is overhauling a brand’s online presence to make it more welcoming for the machine reader. “You need to be thinking about creating content for the machines as much as you are for the humans,” said Ryan Wareham, svp and managing director EMEA of R/GA.

That might entail simplifying a website’s structure, or producing simple and concise FAQ content, in some cases reinforcing earlier best SEO practices.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing that AI has pushed content writing to give higher clarity,” noted Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja.

Their work now overlaps with content marketing and AI consulting, in the hope of influencing the AI summaries indirectly. Per Katie Tweedy, director of SEO and content marketing at Collective Measure, tasks now include “auditing and understanding the questions and types of queries people are asking about your brand, proactively answering those questions, and making sure you have that content on your website so that you’re controlling as much of that brand narrative as possible.”

The lexicon of search is expanding, too. Forget SEO: we now have GEO, AEO, GSO and AIOs to contend with.

There’s more for search specialists to care – and worry – about. “It’s definitely making our lives a little bit harder,” said Daniel Moreno, senior organic search strategist at VML.

Meanwhile, CMOs are focusing their time and investment on emerging areas of search, such as social. Hiroki Asai, CMO of Airbnb, told Digiday that the travel brand was leaning into the social search trend for a campaign touting its recently re-launched app, among other platform updates.

“People are searching more on social platforms for travel than they are on Google, and I think that is going to meet and maybe fairly soon eclipse traditional Google search,” Asai said. 

Airbnb’s solution has been to hold paid search investment steady while increasing paid social, particularly on Instagram. “We need to spread ourselves out,” he said, without providing financial details.

Search experts aren’t hoping to increase a brand’s ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) any more – they’re looking to increase its exposure to every kind of customer discovery, whether from a search engine (or, indeed, a real person) or not.

“The job isn’t necessarily rank, it’s resonance,” said Elimeliah.

Sara Guaglione contributed to this report.