RIP Keywords? What AI Search Means for Your Content Strategy

Back to Blog 07/15/2025 - by Sierra Ducey

Once upon a time, a person with a question typed it into a box, hit “Enter,” and received a list of 10 blue links. Welcome to the old world of search. Now, users ask full-blown questions like they’re talking to a colleague, because, in many cases, they are. That colleague just happens to be AI.

AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are fundamentally changing how people look for information and how brands need to show up when they do.

What Are We Calling This, Anyway?

As AI transforms search, so does the vocabulary. Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

AI Search Optimization (AISO): Creating content optimized for how AI tools discover, interpret, and summarize information.
SGE (Search Generative Experience): Google’s experimental AI-powered search interface, which uses generative AI to synthesize results at the top of the SERP.
AI Overviews: Google’s term for its new AI-generated summaries.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): The technique many AI tools use to fetch and synthesize external content in real time.

Whatever you call it, the shift is clear: content needs to work for both humans and machines.

From Keywords to Conversations

We’re seeing a behavioral shift in how users interact with search tools. Instead of typing short queries like “best running shoes,” people now ask, “What are the best running shoes for marathon training if I overpronate?” These are longer, more specific, and more human.

The change isn’t just anecdotal. According to Gartner, traditional search volume is expected to drop 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents. Meanwhile, AI-native platforms like Perplexity have gained major traction—its traffic hit 50 million monthly visits in May 2024.

Google isn’t far behind. The company’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) began rolling out to millions of users in the U.S., layering AI-generated Overviews at the top of traditional results. These summaries often push organic links further down, sometimes below the fold.

For brands that have spent years fine-tuning SEO strategies, this isn’t just a new challenge. It’s a new playing field.

How AI Finds (and Synthesizes) Your Content

When users interact with AI tools, they’re not just getting a list, they’re getting an answer. AI models like Gemini or ChatGPT use methods like RAG to pull relevant information from indexed sources, combine it, and serve up a synthesized response.

Sometimes that means quoting your blog. Sometimes it means paraphrasing your blog. Sometimes it means skipping you entirely because your blog is buried beneath five others that said it better, or at least faster.

And while traditional search gives users options, AI responses tend to reduce choice. The content is distilled into a single response, with only a few citations (if any), making it harder for individual sites to stand out unless they’re already seen as authoritative sources.

For years, we’ve written with crawlers in mind: meta tags, keyword density, headers, alt text, schema. Now, we have to think about how our content is interpreted by a model.

SEO content is designed to rank. AI-generated blurbs are designed to answer. They don’t care about your H1 tag or clever CTA. They care about clarity, completeness, and credibility. If your content is too salesy or too vague, it probably won’t make the cut.

So what should brands do? Consider how your content sounds when lifted out of context. Can it stand alone? Does it offer clear value? Would a machine see it as an answer or just marketing fluff?

Can You Pay to Show Up? Not Yet… But Soon

Here’s the current state of affairs: AI-generated search experiences don’t have traditional ad slots. There’s no sponsored blurb in Gemini or promoted result in ChatGPT.

But that’s changing. In May 2024, Google began testing Search and Shopping ads within its AI Overviews, blending paid results into AI-generated responses. While it’s still early, it’s a clear signal that monetization is coming and that competition will follow.

For now, it’s a content game. But smart advertisers know what happens when eyeballs shift, money follows.

Who’s Leading the AI Search Pack?

A few major players are shaping this new landscape:

Google Gemini (formerly Bard): Integrated into Google Search with AI Overviews.
ChatGPT (OpenAI): Primarily standalone, but increasingly plugged into browsers and apps.
Perplexity AI: A fast-growing, citation-heavy AI search engine.
Microsoft Copilot (Bing): Offers conversational answers within Bing’s search results.

Each has a slightly different method of sourcing, citing, and presenting results, but all are redefining how users access and trust information.

What This Means for Advertisers

AI-powered search is altering the entire content lifecycle—from how users discover information to how they decide what’s worth clicking. That means advertisers need to:

Rethink what it means to be “findable”
Craft content that answers, not just sells
Stay ahead of how AI platforms evolve, especially as paid opportunities enter the space

We’re entering a new era where the query is no longer a keyword. It’s a conversation. And your content has to be smart enough to join it.

Stay tuned for part two in this series, where we’ll break down how to create AI-optimized content that actually gets picked up (and cited) by these tools.