AI Search Currently Drives Less Than 1% of Traffic To Sites, Google Is Still Dominant, and Watch The Long-term Risk of Ignoring Google Search

Has AI Search taken over in July 2025? Is Google still important or should you just focus on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search platforms? In this video, I explain how to set up AI Search tracking in Google Analytics 4 to view the difference between AI Search traffic compared to Google Search and organic search overall. After setting this up across many accounts, AI search accounts for under 1% of traffic, and under .5% for most sites I checked.I’ll also explain how ignoring Google Search could lead to a drop in quality, which could cause problems with Google’s broad core updates (as core updates can impact all areas of Google including AI Overviews and AI Mode).Blog post covering the topic: https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/ai-search-traffic-compared-to-google/

Chapters:

00:00 AI Search versus Google Search in 2025

00:46 A conversation with an IT executive about AI Search and the demise of Google.

02:20 How to set up AI search tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

03:45 What I found when analyzing AI Search traffic compared to Google.

05:15 AI Search example: B2C

06:16 AI Search example: Niche news publisher

06:42 AI Search example: Health and medical

07:18 AI Search example: Smaller publisher

07:41 Google organic drives the most traffic (by a mile).

08:33 AEO, GEO versus SEO - Be careful.

09:40 Google broad core updates and the danger of ignoring Google search.

10:12 A strong SEO strategy covers most of what you need for AI Search.

11:10 All Google surfaces that can be impacted by broad core udpates.

12:18 AIOs and AI Mode can be impacted by Google's broad core updates.

12:50 Wrapping up - AI Search is important, but don't ignore Google.

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