September 18, 2025//Generative AI, Insights//Scott Leff

AIO and Google Zero

Stylized graphic of a search bar and search results overlaid on an open laptop on an orange background

When Google launched its AI Overview (AIO) feature in May 2024, companies began bracing for its impact on organic search. These fears have been well-founded. As we noted in our 2025 trends report, traffic from organic search for some of our clients is down by up to 25 percent. It’s not only due to AIOs on the Google search results page—with platforms such as ChatGPT being used as search engines, there are simply fewer people clicking through to links when they get a conversational answer pulled together from multiple sources.

But on Google, many users encountering AIO have opted for “Google Zero”: They review the AI-generated summary and never click through to any of the links. This behavior upends years of carefully curated search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and strategies, which were aimed at ensuring company websites and content ranked highly in search results.

This could be just the beginning. Gartner projects organic search could drop 50 percent by 2028. B2C companies that live and die on that traffic are scrambling. For example, the Financial Times noted how AIO has kneecapped many publishers, effectively choking the flow of potential readers—and with it ad revenue and subscriptions.

Google downplays AIO’s impact on organic traffic. In a blog, the company contends that “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites had been relatively stable year-over-year.” It also notes that the average quality of those clicking through has increased, meaning even if traffic has declined, companies are getting higher-value visitors.

So how should content strategists at B2B companies respond to these trends to reach their intended audiences?

Prioritize quality content

It’s no secret that the internet and social channels are drowning in endless waves of mediocre content: fluffy listicles, clickbait, AI-generated content repurposed from other sources. The quest to rise above the noise has become more challenging but not impossible. Just as in previous years, a reliance on fundamentals is often the best strategy. Sharing distinctive insights in a compelling way will still establish your company’s credibility and authority, ensuring that once readers find your insights, they will proceed to your website and have a clear reason to return.

Even in the era of AIO and gen AI tools such as ChatGPT, distinctive insights that demonstrate subject matter expertise and provide a good user experience will rank higher. The same SEO best practices—such as keywords and clear narrative structure delineated by subheads—will give your content better odds of being featured.

Track gen AI search queries and tailor content accordingly

The enhanced gen AI search capabilities in Gemini, ChatGPT, and others enable searchers to ask more-nuanced, conversational questions, which make the results more comprehensive. Tracking audience search trends and queries will help companies refine their content to edge out the competition, even on gen AI tools that answer queries with multiple sources.

For instance, I asked ChatGPT for the top queries in 2025 regarding quantum computing and pharma. It returned seven topic areas:

  1. hybrid quantum–classical AI systems for drug discovery
  2. quantum machine learning and quantum‑assisted modeling
  3. precision modeling of molecular interactions
  4. infrastructure, ecosystem, and hardware developments
  5. healthcare and clinical integration
  6. strategic ecosystem partnerships and road maps
  7. outlook and inflection in 2025

Companies that want to ensure their content on quantum computing ranks well could develop high-quality content that provides detailed answers to questions directly related to one or several of these topics. Utility for the reader will always be paramount—not only for search but also for cutting through the noise, demonstrating expertise, and connecting with the audience.

Invest in community building

Once visitors have made it to your website and sampled your thought leadership, a top priority should be to cement this connection. In the same way that it’s much harder to bring in new clients than it is to expand work for existing clients, companies should seek to nurture an active community of return visitors. Regular newsletters highlighting new content and offerings is the baseline. One of the key benefits of this approach is the ability to track and measure engagement.

Community-building efforts can involve integrated campaigns that use thought leadership and other content to serve as an anchor for live engagement such as webinars. Increasingly, we have seen clients embrace high-touch, in-person events where articles and reports are used as conversation pieces. Providing senior leaders with such forums to share their ideas is also an opportunity to reinforce their depth of experience and knowledge of the business landscape. This approach has the added benefit of extending the life—and the ROI—of thought leadership.

Pursue more-surgical outreach and deeper engagement

B2B companies should resist the temptation to chase volume and instead remain focused on reaching the right people. A global consulting firm that publishes an article on CFOs is really seeking to get it in front of Fortune 2000 companies, which are more likely to have the resources to hire that firm. So success is not about a million impressions; it’s about ensuring your ideas and insights find your specific target audience. While it may be difficult to ignore the pull of total page views or other broader engagement metrics, B2B companies should prioritize the audience segments that truly matter. Using the data sets you already have or can develop—identifying other traffic sources, potentially surveying your current audience to understand their content habits or interests—is a helpful starting point to create a thoughtful experience that truly engages people.

If organizations have yet to establish themselves as a credible resource or build sufficient awareness for their brand and offerings, they might consider partnering with other publications or platforms. In the example above, CFO.com and the CFO THOUGHT LEADER podcast would be promising channels. The goal should be to identify the media properties that your audience frequents and to put timely, interesting content in front of those people.

There’s no need to press the panic button, even if most of your website visits come from organic search. The key is adaptability and strategic problem-solving. If you’re developing good content, it deserves an audience, and there are more than a few ways to find one. 

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