How brands lost control of the story—and what comes after the hangover.

AI-referred traffic has become a year-round structural feature for retailers of how consumers find and buy products.

AI search is changing how B2B buyers discover and compare vendors. Visibility depends on strong SEO fundamentals, clearer differentiation, and content governance that support faster evaluation and more consistent brand information.

Creator content is shaping how AI answers questions. But content that’s good at engaging audiences isn’t always what AI surfaces. That’s forcing brands to rethink their creator strategies and content formats so they can show up in AI tools.

AI is reshaping how consumers discover and choose products, creating a fast-growing new commerce channel with its own set of unique challenges.

YouTube now outpaces Reddit in AI citations as models prioritize transcripts, metadata, and explanatory formats over engagement signals.

New data shows traditional SEO success no longer guarantees visibility inside generative AI answers. Ahrefs found that fewer than 9% of ChatGPT and Gemini citations come from URLs ranked in Google’s top 10 results—meaning more than 90% of high-ranking organic pages never appear in AI responses. Instead, LLMs lean heavily on community-driven sources like Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, dramatically reshaping early-stage discovery. With LLM usage exceeding one billion monthly users, brands that do not participate in open forums risk disappearing from AI-mediated journeys. Marketers must treat GEO as a distinct discipline, not an extension of SEO.

Consumers are increasingly turning to ChatGPT instead of Google for product discovery, shifting search from links to answers, and Peec AI is working to give marketers visibility into how their brands appear in AI-generated answers. It focuses on generative engine optimization (GEO) and search that is shaped by prompts, sentiment, and context instead of SEO-reliant keywords and links. Brands should treat AI chatbots with the same reverence as they do Google Search by identifying high-value prompts and analyzing the sources that inform AI. Improved GEO targeting gives brands better oversight over generative search discovery.

Paid search clickthrough rates for healthcare ads plummeted 51.4% year over year—the steepest drop across all industries measured, according to our Industry KPI data provided by Skai. The rise of AI-generated health info and consumer burnout from constant drug ads are likely driving down engagement. Healthcare and pharma companies need to ensure their online content is tailored for AI relevance. They must also continuously review whether their ads are being over-exposed to the same audience.

The news: New data from Digital Content Next revealed that Google AI Overviews lead to as much as a 25% decrease in publisher referral traffic, reinforcing brands’ and publishers’ ongoing concerns over the tech’s adverse impact on content effectiveness. Our take: AI Overviews will continue usurping referral traffic from publishers, meaning that the brands who last will be those who adapt to the change rather than fight it. Brands must optimize for AI visibility, not just search rankings.

As AI changes how buyers discover content, B2B brands have an opportunity to gain visibility. This report explores how SEO strategies can evolve to meet AI-powered search and why structured, trusted content wins.