The Hidden Costs of Relying on ChatGPT for SEO: How AI is Reshaping Search Behaviour

With the 2025 holiday season right around the corner, one major factor that is shaping consumer behaviour is the rise of AI and large language models (LLMs). You’ve likely heard of ChatGPT, and if you haven’t, it might be time to come out from your cave. LLMs like ChatGPT are AI systems trained on large amounts of text data, and are typically designed to answer questions, summarize documents, write articles, and much more. 

These days, it’s critical to understand how these tools are also redefining the search, research, and discovery process, creating both opportunities and significant challenges for marketers, especially those focused on SEO.

How is AI Changing Consumer Search Behaviour?

Traditionally, the holiday shopping journey is described in three distinct phases:

1. Ideation: Consumers begin thinking about what to buy or gift.
2. Consideration: They compare brands, read reviews, and narrow down options.
3. Purchase: Deals (Black Friday/Cyber Monday, etc.) typically prompt the transaction.

We are seeing AI’s greatest impact on the first two stages: ideation and consideration, as shoppers are increasingly relying on tools like ChatGPT for help generating gift ideas, creating shopping lists, and running quick brand or product comparisons. These AI interactions are appealing to consumers because they tend to feel quicker and easier than clicking through multiple websites or filtering traditional search engine results.

To put this shift into context, approximately 58% of consumers have already replaced traditional search engines with generative AI tools for product or service recommendations. Sure, Google remains the reigning champ, with over 16 billion searches daily (versus AI bots’ ~200 million daily users), but the balance is shifting quickly.

What Does This Mean for Your SEO?

Initially, AI might seem like a marketer’s dream, because who doesn’t love automated content creation, effortless product summaries, and instant answers? But when SEO strategies hinge too heavily on ChatGPT or similar LLMs, there are several consequences to be aware of:

1. Diminishing Organic Traffic and Zero-Click Searches

To combat the largest growing search engine (ChatGPT), Google introduced their own AI model, Gemini, along with the use of AI overview panels, but all of these AI-driven changes have led to websites seeing 34.5% fewer clicks from search results. Increasingly, users are getting their answers from the AI summary boxes, never actually clicking through to brand pages. This is known as zero-click search, and is resulting in 20-40% fewer sessions year-over-year for organic sites.

This translates to brands losing valuable web traffic, advertising revenue opportunities, and a chance to strengthen customer relationships through their own content.

2. Content Redundancy and Brand Dilution

Surprising news to some, but ChatGPT doesn’t simply regurgitate existing content—it actually generates new text based on patterns from vast internet data. While an innovative approach, it can ultimately lead to a lack of originality. As people are increasingly relying on AI-generated content for "optimized" SEO copy, the web is flooded with similar-sounding pages, diluting brand differentiation and making it increasingly difficult to stand out.

3. Lack of Control Over the Customer Journey

Unlike traditional search, where a click takes a user to a controlled environment such as a website or landing page, AI-driven results tend to keep the user within the chatbot ecosystem or AI interface. This limits a brand’s ability to upsell, cross-sell, collect emails, or nurture leads—which as we know are core components of long-term marketing success.

4. Increasing Complexity of Query Matching

AI queries tend to be longer and more conversational. (e.g. “What are the best Christmas gifts for a tech-savvy teenager who loves gaming and music on a $100 budget?”), which helps capture search intent, but also complicates keyword targeting. If your brand doesn’t adapt by creating diverse content—detailed FAQs, comprehensive reviews, and conversational copy—your website may be excluded from AI summaries and overviews.

Is SEO Still Relevant Today?

Despite these challenges, AI’s evolution still presents opportunities for forward-thinking brands that are willing to evolve and invest strategically. We’ve compiled our key insights to help you stay ahead:

• Prioritize Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust (E-E-A-T): AI favours credible, high-quality content. Ensure you have authoritative product descriptions, in-depth guides, and user reviews that speak to your brand’s unique expertise.
• Optimize for Conversational Search: Conduct keyword research that taps into how customers phrase questions naturally .The content you develop should answer these searches in a clear and conversational manner.
• Make Your Website Accessible for AI: Use schema markup, prioritize site speed, and ensure your site’s settings aren’t blocking AI bots. Consider new files like LLMs.txt to direct AI crawlers more effectively.
• Monitor AI’s Impact Regularly: Don’t forget the AI search landscape shifts rapidly. Incorporate regular audits of your organic performance, adapt to changes in AI overview displays, and update content as needed to remain visible.
• Prepare for Paid AI Placements: Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode now include paid placements. Primarily for companies in the U.S., brands need to target broad match keywords, maintain clean product feeds, and leverage smart bidding to capture these upper/mid-funnel opportunities. While ChatGPT itself doesn’t currently offer paid ads, rumour has it these could be rolled out in early 2026.
• Don’t Let AI Disrupt Your SEO Foundation: AI-generated content puts your brand’s visibility, traffic, and engagement at risk. While tools like ChatGPT can be useful for ideation and brainstorming, they shouldn't be relied on for content creation.

To Wrap It All Up With a Bow…

As AI continues to advance, your success and keeping your brand top of mind depends on finding the balance between human expertise and AI capabilities, investing in strategic SEO, and creating substantive, high-quality content that aligns with evolving search behaviours.

The key takeaway? By all means, embrace AI, but don’t neglect your SEO foundation in the process—it’s more critical than ever.

Not sure where to start? Connect with us to explore campaign strategy, AI-driven personalization, analytics, or SEO support for the season. Let’s chat!