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Feel like the ground is slipping away from under your feet in the world of digital marketing? You betcha. It seems like just yesterday we were arguing about keyword effectiveness, whether to invest more in Performance Max or focus on classic Search Ads. We were all sure that we knew the rules of the game. Today, the main question is whether AI chats, such as ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews, will kill our usual search along with SEO and advertising?
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Everyone is talking about a tectonic shift, about the “great extinction” of clicks. And to be honest, they’re right. But let’s get one thing straight: it’s not the end of the world, it’s not even a recession. It’s just a change in the rules of the game, and the one who masters them first will get the lion’s share of the market.
Search is not “dying”. It’s just changing the way it works. It’s like when phones stopped being just phones and became smartphones, or when you realized that your Excel spreadsheets can now analyze data for you. It turns from a “reference machine” to an “answer machine”. And that changes absolutely everything for those who pay for clicks and those who live off of content.
You’ve seen it yourself. Instead of typing in a query and getting ten blue links (you know, like a digital shopping list), you ask a complex, contextual question and get a ready-made, synthesized paragraph that often eliminates the need for a further click. This is conversational search in action.
This is not just an update. This is a worldview shift, where the search engine’s goal is to remove the friction between the question and the answer as much as possible.
Here are the main players in this field that are worth keeping a close eye on:
The main consequence is simple and frightening: the user gets the summary right away, which means… less clicks on the link. And this, of course, makes all of us who have built a business on organic and paid traffic a little nervous.
No, but both of them are definitely undergoing intensive therapy. Part of the traffic that used to go to websites is now “settling” in unclicked responses. It’s like your perfect content becomes a free knowledge donor for a big machine. Publishers are already sounding the alarm. According to various estimates, some of them have lost from 10% to 48% of organic traffic from Google, and these numbers are growing.
The short answer is no again. But the formats and places for displaying ads are changing dramatically. Money always follows user attention, and advertising giants are well aware of this.
This is what is happening right now:
The AI search advertising market in the US alone is expected to grow from about $1 billion in 2025 to almost $26 billion in 2029. This is not the death of search ads, but the migration of budgets to new, conversational formats.
Do you know what the biggest problem with AI is? It’s a great answer machine, but it needs clear instructions. It can’t read your mind or guess which element of your page is a price and which is a step-by-step plan.
This is where our data-centric audience comes in. For you, Schema and structured data are not just an SEO trick. It’s a direct instruction for AI on how to quote you correctly.
Schema.org is essentially a universal vocabulary that you add to your website’s code. You don’t just write it: “Price: 500 UAH”. You mark it up in a way that search engines and AI bots can “read” and understand:“500 UAH is exactly the price of this product.”
Without this markup, your ideal content for AI is just a bunch of text. With it, it’s a clear database ready to be quoted.
How it works in practice:
Here’s the paradox: we’ve always been afraid that search engines would take our content and not give us a click. But now, if you don’t give AI your content in a clearly structured form, it will simply take it from your competitor. Investing in Schema is no longer just a SERP decoration, it’s a strategic step to ensure citationability.
This is ideal for our data-driven audience: you invest your time in a structure that ensures your data is read correctly. This is your “insurance against misquoting”.
If you’re managing an advertising budget, you’re probably feeling like your main weapon – keywords – is getting a little dull right now. It’s time to think in terms of ” answers” rather than just “keys”. Your ad is no longer just a link. It’s a potential part of the answer the user will receive.
Here are some practical tips on how to change your approach to search advertising today:
Forget about dry, formal headlines. Create ads that naturally fit into the conversation. They should look like a line or a useful tip, not a banner.
Money migrates, and you have to follow it.
If fewer people click on a link, does it mean that the ad is performing worse? Not necessarily. It just means that there will be fewer clicks from the SERP.
Post-click metrics come to the fore:
This is not the age of disconnect. The information that AI takes from your website for its answers should be 100% the same as what you say in your ads. Structured data, transparent pricing, clear tables – it works for both SEO (feeding AI) and chat conversions (trust). It should be a single, consistent Voice of the Brand.
This is where the fun begins, and this is a strategic issue for any business owner.
If everyone starts creating perfect, structured content for AI, who will win? The one whose content is the easiest to quote. But what happens when everyone is easily cited?
The winner is the one with the voice, style, and position that AI cannot copy.
Imagine a chatbot generating an answer to a complex question. It quotes five sources. Four of them are perfectly structured but dry. The fifth source is you. You have a unique perspective, an author’s metaphor, and maybe even a bit of relevant humor.
This is an era when humanity is your greatest competitive advantage.
When an AI summary deprives you of a click, it doesn’t deprive you of brand awareness. If a user sees that the most useful and understandable answer is consistently provided by [your brand], they are likely to come to you when they reach the buying stage.
The paradox of the AI era: we need to become technically perfect (Schema, structure) so that AI can quote us, and at the same time emotionally unique (voice, position) so that users want to search for us after quoting us. It’s not just SEO, it’s Branding in a chatbot.
Our audience is practitioners, and you might rightly ask: “Okay, we understand what we need to do, but how?”. Fortunately, digital marketing tools are already adapting to this new reality. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you do have to know what applications to equip it with.
Here are a few types of tools that are becoming critical in the age of conversational search.
You need to see exactly where Google inserts its AI Overviews (SGE) and what types of content it uses. Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking – all of them expand the capabilities to show which of your keywords are generating AI summaries. This helps to identify “risk zones” (where you are losing clicks) and “opportunity zones” (where you can optimize for citations). You need to know the battlefield, and there are also highly specialized solutions that monitor the dynamics of the SERP structure.
We agreed that we shouldn’t think in terms of keys, but rather in terms of customer life scenarios. Tools for grouping queries (clusters) help to collect long, contextual queries based on specific customer goals. This makes it possible to see which queries are best satisfied with a clear fact (for AI) and which ones with in-depth expertise (for E-E-A-T). By the way, content briefing tools (such as SurferSEO or Frase) can analyze the existing SERPs and offer a content structure that is as “citable” as possible.
As we have already discussed, structured data is a direct speech to AI. It is your “prayer” to the algorithm. Plugins for WordPress(Schema Pro, Rank Math, Yoast SEO) make it as easy as possible to add micro-markup (FAQ, HowTo, Product) without deeply diving into the code. This is critical because the less time you spend on code, the more time you spend on strategy. Always check whether AI “sees” your markup correctly using Google’s Rich Results Test.
Let’s talk frankly, without being overly optimistic. Although adapting to AI search promises great opportunities, it also carries a number of very real, “mundane” risks that every business owner should be aware of.
To be honest, classic search with blue links will not disappear. It will remain for navigation queries, for shopping, and for local queries with mapping.
But conversational interfaces will quickly take over complex, research queries where the answer needs to be collected from several sources rather than found. Advertising will become “native” to the dialog: sponsored summaries, interactive cards, and hints for further questions.
Enough theory, here’s your concrete and more lively action plan, divided into phases.
Phase 1: assessing the battlefield and clearing the foundations
Don’t just look at the reports, do a real investigation.
Phase 2: time for bold advertising experiments
It’s time to test new formats, and don’t be afraid to allocate a test budget for this.
Phase 3: consolidating success and creating “anchors”
After analyzing the test results, proceed to scaling.
AI chats are not a search killer, but a major upgrade that, let’s be honest, makes us all better. This new stage of evolution requires us to be both more technical (Schema) and more human (Voice).
The winner will be the one who is the first to accept this challenge. In the end, it’s just business. But now it has become much more interesting.
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