Since Google rolled out AI Overviews at the top of its search results page, many organisations have reported steep drops in search engine-generated traffic to their websites. What’s more, growing numbers of users are skipping Google entirely and instead searching the internet using ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, the AI search engine Perplexity.ai and other AI tools.

This fast-evolving search environment is leading businesses to rethink their approach to search engine optimisation (SEO) in favour of generative engine optimisation (GEO).

Here’s what we know about the state of search in 2025:

• AI chatbots drive 95.7 per cent less referral traffic to websites than do traditional Google searches. (TollBit Q4 2024 AI User Agent Index)
• 76 per cent of US adults say that more than 1 out of 4 Google shopping searches appear to “be sponsored or promoted” and only 14% describe these sponsored or promoted results as “very helpful” (December 2024 survey of 2,000 US adults, commissioned by The Verge)

• 66 per cent find that “the quality of information is deteriorating, making it difficult to find reliable sources” (December 2024 survey of 2,000 US adults, commissioned by The Verge)

• 26 per cent of Google users who see AI Overviews stop any further searching (Pew Research Center survey of 900 US adults in March 2025)

• 18 per cent of all Google searches provide AI Overviews as of March 2025 (Pew Research Center survey of 900 US adults in March 2025)

• Google users who don’t see AI Overviews click a search result link during 15 per cent of all visits; those who see AI Overviews click traditional search result links 8 per cent of the time (Pew Research Center survey of 900 US adults in March 2025)

• As of July 2025, Google reports more than 2 billion monthly users of AI Overviews across more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages (Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, speaking during the Google Q2 earnings call)

• As of May 2025, 69 per cent of news searches on Google result in no user clicks, compared to 56 per cent in May 2024 (Similarweb)

• News-related prompts in ChatGPT rose by 212 per cent between January 2024 and May 2025. By comparison, news-related searches on Google declined by 5 per cent during that same time period. (Similarweb)