Traffic Is Down—Now What? Marketing Success In the Age of AI
Author: Tushar Pol | 10 min read | Nov 28, 2025
Contributor: Christine Skopec
We’re at a turning point in SEO.
For decades, the playbook was simple: create great content, optimize for search, and watch the traffic roll in. A lot of successful businesses were built on that playbook. Semrush is a living example of this.
But generative AI has changed SEO forever. Here’s what we’re noticing across the industry:
- Google is sending less traffic to websites as more queries are answered directly in AI Overviews
- You might think AI chatbots like ChatGPT & Claude would make up that lost traffic, but they largely cite big brands, making it harder for smaller sites to gain visibility
- With fewer clicks, SEO doesn’t deliver the same predictable ROI it once did
So, how do you build a successful online business when traffic sources are drying up?
Before we share our advice, let’s revisit the pre-AI world of SEO for a bit. And explore why we should do marketing with more intention.
SEO Was a Surefire Marketing Activity
For nearly two decades, you could build a thriving online business by making Google’s algorithm happy. If you did technical optimizations, targeted the right keywords, and built backlinks, traffic would flow to your site.
Classic marketing skills like brand building, promotion, and creativity weren’t necessary for success in practice.
But now that AI is changing things for SEO, success requires exactly those skills:
- Brand building: Your brand needs to be popular enough that it naturally gets mentioned across the web when conversations about your industry are happening
- Promotion: You need to actively distribute and amplify your content through email, social media, and influencer partnerships (rather than just relying on Google traffic)
- Creativity: You need to create content and campaigns that stand out and get people talking—the kind of work that’s genuinely interesting or valuable. Not just optimized.
- Willingness to try new ideas: You need to be open to testing new strategies (even if they’re not yet proven). For example, we recently tested query fan-out optimization to see if it helps improve our AI visibility.
If you embrace these foundational marketing skills, your business can thrive in the post-AI era of SEO.
LLMs Are the New Marketing Opportunity
AI platforms represent the next frontier for content discovery and traffic generation—ChatGPT alone has 800 million weekly active users. But you need to have a strong brand to succeed.
The reality is that AI platforms systematically favor established brands and well-known sources, making it difficult for smaller sites to be cited in AI answers.
Here are the most cited domains in Google’s AI Overviews, according to our AI traffic research from July 2025.
You’ll see that these are mostly big brands. And they tend to dominate in other LLMs as well. For smaller businesses, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem. You need authority to get cited in AI answers. But you need to be more visible and recognized in general to convince AI you’re an authority.
That means building a brand has become even more important. It not only helps increase your AI visibility, but also helps generate more traffic to your website overall.
When you have a strong brand, people search for you by name. They bookmark your site. They share your content without being asked. They open your emails. This creates a sustainable stream of traffic.
If you want a baseline idea of how visible your brand is in AI platforms, use the AI SEO Toolkit from Semrush. It allows you to track your brand mentions and citations in AI platforms.
You’ll see that these are mostly big brands. And they tend to dominate in other LLMs as well. For smaller businesses, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem. You need authority to get cited in AI answers. But you need to be more visible and recognized in general to convince AI you’re an authority.
That means building a brand has become even more important. It not only helps increase your AI visibility, but also helps generate more traffic to your website overall.
When you have a strong brand, people search for you by name. They bookmark your site. They share your content without being asked. They open your emails. This creates a sustainable stream of traffic.
If you want a baseline idea of how visible your brand is in AI platforms, use the AI SEO Toolkit from Semrush. It allows you to track your brand mentions and citations in AI platforms.
Tushar is an SEO expert with over six years of experience in content strategy and technical SEO. Having worked with various ecommerce and B2B clients at agencies, he now writes for the Semrush blog, sharing practical and effective SEO strategies.