Organic growth in the AI era: why AI visibility matters

For the past 20 years, growing a product without paying for clicks meant SEO (search engine optimisation). You published pages, earned backlinks, kept your site fast and crawlable, and Google would rank you in its search results. Do it well and you might end up on the 1st page.

Since late 2022, a growing share of those questions is being answered differently, by an AI assistant that reads the web and replies with a generated recommendation instead of a list of webpages. So organic growth now runs on two channels at once. The classic one still works, and it still carries most of the traffic. But the behaviour is moving to the new one, which has picked up a name along the way: AI visibility. It has grown to being a hot topic, driven mostly by speculation, and also because its growth, like AI's adoption curve, could end up rewriting the most important bits to do with organic user acquisition, which is the most important long tail growth channel for software companies.

How AI search came into the picture

ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Perplexity a month later¹², Google switched on AI Overviews for every US user in May 2024¹⁰, and ChatGPT added web search that October¹¹. Under 4 years from first launch, the answers reach billions of people: 700 million weekly ChatGPT users by July 2025¹, and over 2.5 billion people a month seeing AI Overviews by mid 2026⁵.

The 700 million is about 10% of all adults on Earth (per OpenAI's disclosed figures)¹. About half of American adults tell Pew they use AI chatbots². By March 2025, 18% of all Google searches came back with an AI summary at the top³.

What high-intent buyers do with AI assistants

Someone discovering software products from asking an AI assistant doesn't type keywords and scan a page of links like traditional keyword based search. Instead, they describe their situation and get back a generated summary, which may name a short list of products, with reasons, and sometimes links back to them. Multiply out OpenAI's usage figures and product questions alone come to an estimated ~55 million messages a day, in one assistant¹.

How many customers now discover products and services this way depends on who you ask and how. Credible surveys land anywhere between 45% and 94%, and the wording of the question explains most of the spread; the chart below puts each number next to its question⁶⁷⁸. In G2's study, 33% of buyers bought from a vendor they hadn't heard of until a chatbot suggested it⁶. Developers are further along than everyone else⁹.

What it does to clicks

Where an AI answer appears, people tend to click less. In Pew's browsing panel, a Google search with an AI summary ended in a click on a result 8% of the time, against 15% without one, and the summary's own sources were clicked on 1% of visits³.

Vendor panels agree on the direction and add the trend. Ahrefs measured the top result's click-through penalty deepening from 34.5% to 58% in ten months⁴, and Seer found the sites the answer doesn't cite losing the most¹³.

Google searches in Safari fell in April 2025 for the first time in 22 years, according to sworn testimony in the antitrust trial¹⁴. Google, for its part, keeps reporting record query volumes and growing search revenue⁵¹⁵. Both can be right: total search keeps growing while behaviour changes inside particular kinds of queries, and the queries with the most AI answers are still informational rather than commercial ones¹⁶. For now the assistants sit on top of search rather than replacing it. 95% of ChatGPT users still use Google¹⁷.

Why should you care? Because fewer clicks raises the stakes on each one. When an answer sits above the results, the sites it cites keep far more of the surviving clicks than the sites it ignores¹³, and the citation itself puts you in front of the reader whether they click or not. So the odds tilt hard to one side. If AI answers cite you, you're often the last click before a high-intent buyer decides. If they don't, there's no lower rank to fall back to for that question. You're absent from it. That's the reason to care.

How big it actually is

AI referral traffic is still small. Across 81,947 sites in mid 2025 it was 0.25% of the average site's traffic¹⁸, and a large publisher panel still had it under 1% of page-view referrals in early 2026¹⁹. However, the trends tell a different story.

It's growing at a rate the classic channel has never shown: AI-sourced visits to US retail sites grew 1,200% in seven months, and were still growing 62% a year on a much larger base by July 2026²⁰. And the visitors seem to convert unusually well, although nobody agrees on how well; vendors report 4 to 23 times their averages, and an independent 78-site panel found a median of 1.26 times²¹²².

The hard part about this is there are no analytics at all, unlike Google who publish keyword search volumes and other analytics. When an AI assistant answers a high-intent buyer's question, the products named in the answer gain consideration whether or not anyone clicks, and the products left out of it lose consideration without anyone knowing and you are left guessing what worked. For a growing user acquisition channel, running blind is very dangerous, and this problem has spawned a number of companies that are building tools and services to try and demystify how AI visibility works, for good reason.

What AI visibility is

AI visibility is whether the answer engines name your product, get it right, and point people to it when someone describes the problem you solve. The contested resource in the classic channel was a ranking; here it's what the answer says about you.

You'll see the work behind this sold under two acronyms, AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation). In practice they're one family of work. We say AI visibility because it's describing the full scope of the challenge, but if you're interested, the full jargon table is on the explainer page, and AEO and GEO each have a deeper page of their own.

Our experiments on AI visibility so far

We ran an internal comparison where we compared 'high-intent buyer questions' for 152 companies to the four leading AI engines and analysed what the answers were built from. The biggest finding: almost all of it was other people's pages; the companies' own websites were under 1% of everything cited²³. It used to be, in classic SEO world, that consistently publishing SEO aimed pages on your blog would be sufficient to grow your domain authority over time. This seems to be shifting.

However, based on what we're seeing, the classic SEO channel still brings most of the visitors, and the pages, links and site health that earn rankings are a large part of what an answer engine reads before it writes. That may be due to how AI engines indexed the internet and created training data at least over the past few years. But as more content on the internet is authored with LLMs we can expect this gap to grow.

What this means for companies in the AI era

For one, you need to have an AI visibility strategy. Since there are no public sources of information of which keywords are ranking and citing which companies, each company is going to have to figure that out for themselves. At a minimum, it means tracking a long list of potential 'search prompts' that you think your customers are typing into search engines, which are now predominantly AI driven. And since AI is non-deterministic (which means, the same exact prompt may yield slightly different results) you have to track this list constantly, over time, and on a recurring loop, so that you can create some kind of data envelope over time of which queries you're named or cited in, and which ones your competitors are winning at. Once you have this map, the goal is to try and close the gap through content strategy. It does in a way resemble the SEO playbook, because under the hood, the strategy is almost entirely the same - monitor, measure, develop a content strategy, and execute that strategy.

This sounds simple, but it is very nuanced. Each AI engine is trained differently. So the way they deliver results, the websites they tend to weigh more, are all different. And you have to optimise for all of them. And once you do all this, you've merely solved for AI visibility, which is a growing discovery channel, but still not the biggest one. A true organic growth strategy has to cover all bases. AfterLaunch was built to be the Organic Growth Engine and covers everything from AI visibility, to SEO, to content and marketing strategy.

Sources

1. 1Chatterji, Cunningham, Deming, Hitzig, Ong, Shan, Wadman (OpenAI, Duke, Harvard), NBER Working Paper 34255, September 2025.
2. 2Pew Research Center, "Americans and AI 2026", 17 June 2026.
3. 3Pew Research Center, measured browsing panel, 22 July 2025.
4. 4Ahrefs, AI Overviews CTR studies, April 2025 and February 2026.https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/
5. 5Alphabet, Q2 2026 CEO remarks and June 2026 investor presentation.https://blog.google/alphabet/investor-presentation-june-2026/
6. 6G2, "The Answer Economy", n=1,076, released 15 April 2026.
7. 7G2, "2026 Buyer Behavior Report", n=1,038, released 22 July 2026.
8. 8Gartner buyer survey (n=645, fielded Aug-Sep 2025), released 20 May 2026; Forrester blog, 22 January 2026; 6sense Buyer Experience Report, November 2025.
9. 9Stack Overflow, 2025 Developer Survey, 29 July 2025.
10. 10Google, AI Overviews US launch, 14 May 2024.
11. 11OpenAI, "Introducing ChatGPT search", 31 October 2024.
12. 12Perplexity company blog, March 2023 (recording the December 2022 launch).
13. 13Seer Interactive, AI Overview CTR panel, November 2025.
14. 14US District Court (D.C.), Memorandum Opinion, US v. Google remedies, September 2025 (Cue testimony in findings of fact).
15. 15Google, statement on search traffic, 7 May 2025.
16. 16Amsive, branded-query AI Overview study, April 2025.
17. 17Similarweb, "Is AI replacing search?", 4 August 2026; Bain snap chart, 20 March 2026.https://www.bain.com/insights/why-consumers-choose-an-ai-chatbot-over-a-search-engine-snap-chart/
18. 18Ahrefs, 81,947-site AI traffic study, June 2025.
19. 19Chartbeat publisher panel, as reported by Search Engine Journal, March 2026.
20. 20Adobe Analytics, March 2025; July 2026 update as reported by Digital Commerce 360, 19 August 2026.
21. 21Ahrefs, June 2025; Vercel engineering blog, 10 June 2025; Semrush, July 2025. Each is a vendor reporting its own data.https://vercel.com/blog/how-were-adapting-seo-for-llms-and-ai-searchhttps://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/
22. 22Siege Media, 78-site conversion panel, June 2026.
23. 23AfterLaunch, the 152-company corpus, August 2026.

Figures we deliberately did not use

• Gartner's "search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026" is a February 2024 prediction, not a measurement, and is routinely quoted as if it were one.
• Every "Safari searches fell X%" figure: no percentage exists on the court record.
• Perplexity query volumes dated after May 2025: the company has published none, and circulating figures are estimates without method.
• "AI referral traffic is about 1% of all web visits" and its vertical breakdowns: no identifiable primary publisher.
• "AI chatbots drive 54% of shortlist formation" attributed to G2: actively contradicted by G2's own July 2026 release.