Ask Google about the impact of AI on click through rate (CTR) on business websites and you get a surprisingly candid response: ‘AI's primary impact on business website CTRs has been a significant, widespread decline’. This is presenting a completely new challenge to marketing teams tasked with driving traffic to websites.
► AI-driven responses are rewriting the rule-book for content-based websites
► While the quantity of visitors may decline, the quality should be better
The new AI-driven responses you now get from Google mean that fewer people are moving on from their initial request. Consequently, the CTR from organic (non-paid-for) searches on the web is falling and marketing teams are having to think differently about how they can maximise hit rates.
The figures available are startling. According to one estimate, around 60% of searches now produce zero click-throughs, and around 80% of search users rely on AI summaries at least 40% of the time. Another predicts that organic traffic could fall by anything from 15 to 64%.
But the changes could also be positive in some ways. For a proportion of users, the AI responses won’t give them what they were looking for, as the content of the answer will be drawn from a few top-ranked websites. This is going to make users more specific with their searches and more likely to page through results as they try to dig deeper on a subject.
Also, instead of attracting a good number of visitors who are only looking for broad-based information on a subject, the people most likely to click through to a website now will be those looking to do real business. While the number of visits to a site may fall, the quality of those visitors should improve and they will be further along in their ‘buying journey’.
Consequently, the content that they see on a website will be even more important, as they will be looking for richer, more authoritative data and depth than they can glean from the AI-driven search alone. The site content will need to answer real questions. If it’s really good, it might even get included in the original AI response to the Google search.
At the end of the day, what will matter is how many enquiries, leads, and orders are generated by a website. While the AI responses provided to searchers on Google may result in fewer clicks through, those who are genuinely interested will still need to contact the business or place their order online.
Inspired by articles from Bain and Co, Search Engine Land, and Forbes.
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