Since the release of ChatGPT almost four years ago and Google’s introduction of AI-generated search results in 2024, businesses have seen their organic search traffic plummet as users turn to AI for quick answers. Organic search is no longer driving hits from searches like “jewelry store near me.” At the same time, foot traffic at brick and mortar stores is falling.

These two phenomena might not seem related at first. Surely the economy is to blame for the reduction in foot traffic, right? Consumers are spending less, so they’re visiting stores less often. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Part of the issue is that search engines are no longer connecting local businesses and local customers the same way they used to because the way search works—and the way we search for information online—has changed.

What had been a reliable marketing strategy for years now seems almost useless, but it’s not hopeless for businesses that rely on search results. It’s a matter of understanding how search has changed and how you can adapt your content marketing strategy to the way search works today.

AI Search

Early in the days of search engines, finding anything relevant was a chore. You had to stumble upon the perfect keywords, use AND and OR operators wisely, and know which keywords to exclude. Google improved over the years until it suddenly seemed like magic. Anything you typed into the search bar returned relevant results. It seemed to know what you were asking for better than you knew what you were asking for.

Today, users are more likely to enter a natural-language question, as they do when interacting with a chatbot. AI Overviews are there at the top of the Google results page to provide quick answers to those questions so that users don’t have to scroll down the page, choose a link that seems relevant, and then scan through the page for an answer. Attention remains at the top of the page, so it’s important your content appears in an AI Overview.

More users are also using voice search. Searches input by voice tend to be longer and worded as questions rather than a string of keywords. Voice searches also indicate higher intent. It’s the difference between a buyer who has just discovered their problem sitting down at the computer to do some research and another who is already standing in a shop aisle asking their phone which product they should choose.

Content Creation Principles

These changes mean that your goal is for your content to appear in the AI Overview at the top of the page. Rather than targeting keywords, your content should answer questions. The tried-and-true principle of content marketing, EEAT, still applies. We still have to produce content that demonstrates your Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. That means human-created content written in a way that appeals to your customers and answers their questions while demonstrating to them that you are a trustworthy source of information.

AI Overviews and other AI search results seem to privilege timely content from regularly updated websites, as well. That’s why so many Reddit and Facebook posts show up: they might not be the most trustworthy, but they are timely. With lower website traffic, it’s tempting to abandon that blog you’ve put so much work into, but a regularly updated website is more likely to appear in AI search results than one that hasn’t been updated in months.

Get Eyes on Your Content With Structured Data

Content creation principles remain the same. What changes is how we structure that content and present it to web crawlers. Big businesses have already realized this. We all know the importance of content pillars, blog categories, and keywords. Big businesses are going a step further to give their content a better chance of showing up in AI search results and Google’s AI Overviews by using Google structured data.

Content is for people, but structured data is for bots. The information you provide as structured data makes it easier for search engines to understand what your page is about and to serve relevant search results to users. Without it, these bots have to try to “guess” what your page is about from the content itself.

Structured data gives Google (or a user’s chatbot or AI search engine of choice) clearer information about what your page says and what user questions it answers. A structured data FAQ lets you list these questions alongside answers drawn from your content. Your CMS should have fields for different types of structured data, but you can also write it manually using JSON.

Internet Users Increasingly Turn to AI for Information

Generative AI has a lot of problems as a search tool. Its authoritative tone can lull users into believing whatever it outputs, yet research has shown that depending on the task, LLMs can hallucinate anywhere between 30% and 80% of the time. (“Hallucination” is a whimsical, anthropomorphizing name for what we should really be calling “errors.”) Google’s AI Overviews are more accurate than this, however, returning accurate results 90% of the time, as the New York Times reported earlier this year. But 10% is still an unacceptable error rate. Imagine if your financial dashboard gave you the wrong revenue numbers 10% of the time, or if 1 out of every 10 cups of coffee you bought from your local café was actually warm dishwater.

Error rates have improved over the years, but they are an inherent feature of the technology. Despite this baked-in unreliability, about half of US adults report using chatbots, according to a June 2026 Pew survey. 42% of those say they use it to search for information, and over 50% who use chatbots use them for medical advice (20%), diet and fitness information (20%), or news (13%).

AI search has eroded some of Google’s search dominance. If your marketing strategy is the same as it was five years ago and you’re still relying on organic traffic from search engines to drive sales, these numbers should make you rethink that strategy. In addition to creating content that satisfies the EEAT rule so that your pages rank in traditional search results, you also need to think about how to appear in AI search results.

Meet Your Customers Where They Are

It’s still not certain whether AI is the future of search or a short-lived experiment. Either way, this is the state of search in 2026. It’s how people are searching for information, and you have to use every tool at your disposal to meet customers where they are and make sure that when they go looking for a business, they find yours. Achieve this by continuing to create content that solves problems while delivering it in a way that web crawlers can understand.