By Matthew Forzan

Imagine a future where landing on a homepage isn’t the shop-front brand experience it is now. Instead, websites are functional data hubs providing real-time answers, availability and pricing to third-party platforms and AI models.

Search engines have changed considerably in recent years and websites as we know them will have to adapt to the growing trend of AI driving search results in the form of featured snippets and knowledge panels.  

Today, more than half of Google searches end without a click or website visit. While showcasing the new demand for instant answers to search queries, ChatGPT alone is outpacing Google for some age groups, with users aged 18-34 using ChatGPT more than Google in 2024.

SEO isn’t dead, but marketers will need to pivot to new strategies that prioritise AI citations in the coming years, leaving the traditional website model unrecognisable.

Websites will prioritise ‘conversion’ over brand experience

The emphasis for websites in the future will be less about design and aesthetics and more about the back-end functionality. The website will house resources, collect data and act as verification points, signalling to search engines that it is an authoritative source of information.

Search engines rank based on authority. To improve the likelihood of being cited by AI, marketers will need to work much harder to convert website visitors to paying customers, with email capture becoming more crucial – that means more freebies, downloadable assets or newsletter sign-ups.

To increase the chances of Google recognising your site as an authoritative source on a particular topic, information must be carefully organised on your site and point to other, related sub-topics that can be categorised underneath a broader topic. This is known as ‘clustering’ your content and involves creating a series of related blog posts, for example, that perhaps lead to a bigger, more valuable resource such as an e-guide. The interlinked nature of these resources should be reflected in the URL structure too, so that search engines can detect when a site is providing multiple sources of valuable information.

Structured data will enhance pages

Structured data means organising information in a standardised format, such as rows and tables, making it easier for engines to understand the relationship. There is no guarantee, but optimising structured data and incorporating FAQ schemes, how-to schema and product and review schema dramatically improves your chances of landing a snippet or panel placement, which is why more importance will be placed on this optimisation process.

Marketers will also turn to author markup schema to position their content authors as trusted sources by offering transparency about the author’s credibility and allowing ‘thought leadership’ to boost their website’s authority overall.

Direct questions will prevail

The content on your site will be written in a way that answers the direct questions users are typing into search engines and large language models. To mark out your content as providing an answer to a potential search query, marketers will utilise H2 and H3 headings with direct question phrasing, a table of contents, and easily navigated content blocks. Then, in the section directly below, questions will increasingly be answered in 45-60 words. Numbered and bulleted lists are great too.

Impressions will become more valuable due to lack of data

Marketers have long sought clicks for the ultimate measure of success, but, as user patterns change, brand impressions will become a much more representative indicator of reach and brand awareness. 

The marketers’ mindset is set to change and analytics will soon be much more focused on featured snippet mentions, brand search volume and impressions. 

The caveat is that there has been a dramatic drop in impression data following an unexplained ending of Google’s support of the num=100 URL parameter, forcing many marketers to adapt to how they are tracking search results.

Marketers will make every click count

As ‘zero-click’ search becomes the new normal, marketers will view the changing landscape as an opportunity to improve brand visibility. On the rarer occasion that a user clicks through to an external site, marketers will up the ante considerably to keep users’ attention and hook them in.

This will mean devoting more resources to a website’s mobile-friendliness and technical SEO. The people who land on your website will expect a fast and responsive website that is easy to navigate and find useful information and marketers will cater to this expectation.

A recent analysis of 3000 websites shows 63 percent received at least one visit via AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Jasper or Mistraldiscover. 

Does SEO still matter?

Clearly, ‘zero-click’ search results, typical of those delivered by AI chatbots, are still delivering traffic to websites, albeit indirectly through brand awareness and visibility.

Search engines are evolving, but websites have an important role to play even as the rate of click-throughs slows down and new opportunities for marketers to adapt as AI citation becomes front of mind in SEO strategies.

Matthew Forzan is the founder and managing director of Yoghurt Digital