Don’t Tie All Your KPIs to a Sinking Organic Traffic Ship
Google announced at its annual I/O conference that “AI Mode” will be available to all U.S. users. This is a major announcement for not only Google to maintain its dominance in the search market, but a direct response to how AI has changed the way humans search online.
What is AI Mode?
AI Mode is a new search experience within Google, designed to deliver deeper, more intelligent results by combining multimodal capabilities, advanced reasoning and real-time web links. It accomplishes this by using a technique called query fan-out, which breaks down your question into subtopics and runs multiple searches in parallel to uncover richer, more relevant content from across the web.
Powered by a custom version of Gemini 2.5, AI Mode enables follow-up questions and serves as a testbed for cutting-edge features.
It’s essentially a superpowered AI chatbot within Google Search.
This is how the desktop version looks:
This is how the mobile version looks:
What This Means for Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Last year, Google rolled out AI Overviews on the traditional SERP (search engine results page). These AI generated recaps have already started to lower average clickthrough rate for top-ranking pages.
Long-tail, informational keywords tend to trigger an AI Overview in the SERP, causing searchers to get their answer directly in the SERP without clicking through to a website. You may have already decreased traffic to blogs thanks to this.
If a key tactic of your organic search strategy is to create informational content and rally more organic traffic from Google, the results could be increasingly underwhelming. They will continue to sink as Google rolls out more AI overviews and tools like AI Mode.
Your New KPIs
SEO performance has been traditionally tied to organic traffic. Rocket55 clients know we’ve been shifting this mindset to traffic quality as measured by engagement rate and key events from organic visitors. This will continue as search experiences change.
You can take this a step further by considering the ultimate goal for your digital marketing. If building brand awareness is your focus, measuring search impressions from tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools could provide insightful key performance indicators.
In the future, you’ll need to look beyond the traditional search engines to measure your reach or increase engagement with your brand. Weekly active users of ChatGPT just surpassed 400 million earlier this year.
As more people lean on AI for research, it’s vital brands understand their visibility on these platforms. Are you “ranking” for the same keywords and questions in ChatGPT that you are in Google and Bing?
Rocket55 has partnered with Profound to understand our clients’ visibility within platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot. This has provided invaluable insights into where our brands stand among competitors for topics related to their business.
The New Era of AI Search Optimization
Whether you call it AISO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or AI SEO, your organic search strategy needs to adapt to the new way people are seeking information online. So do your KPIs.
Start by asking yourself these two questions:
- Are AI user agents finding my content?
- Do we appear in AI search experiences for our core service offerings?
If you don’t know the answer to either of these questions, Rocket55’s SXO services are here to help.