Customers are starting to make decisions without even visiting your website. They're asking ChatGPT which CRM to buy, which beauty brand to trust, which consultant to hire, and if your brand isn't part of that conversation, you're losing deals you weren’t even aware of.
This isn't speculative. By 2028, $750 billion in US revenue will funnel through AI-powered search, according to McKinsey's latest research. The question isn't whether AI will reshape brand discovery; it's where your brand will stand in terms of AI visibility when it does.
Traditional search had issues. In 2024, 59.7% of European Union Google searches and 58.5% of American Google searches resulted in zero clicks, according to SparkToro's clickstream analysis. That means most users found what they needed without ever leaving Google's results page.
Now AI has taken this further. About 80% of consumers now rely on "zero-click" results in at least 40% of their searches, Bain & Company reports. In traditional searches, you could at least see the traffic you were losing. With AI conversations happening inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, you have no visibility into who asked about your category, or which competitor got recommended instead.
Your website isn't just losing traffic. It's losing relevance in the entire discovery process.
Let's talk about real, tangible numbers. Unprepared brands may experience a decline in traffic from traditional search channels anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, according to McKinsey. But traffic loss is only part of the story.
Revenue-at-Risk (RAR) has emerged as the new metric C-suites should track. Four sectors show $1.16B in monthly Revenue-at-Risk due to visibility shifts across AI assistants. In automotive, assistants increasingly recommend Tesla over BMW in high-intent EV prompts, even though Google rankings remain stable. In financial services, Citibank loses 40+ points in mortgage prompts while peers hold steady in a silent substitution in traffic dashboards.
This isn't a time-distant threat either. Between 40 to 55 percent of consumers in top sectors (electronics, groceries, travel, wellness, apparel, beauty, and financial services) are using AI-based search to make purchasing decisions. And most concerning? Just 16 percent of brands today systematically track AI search performance.
AI systems don't care about your ad budget. They don't rank as much based on keyword density or backlink profiles. AI systems pull signals from everywhere, not just your website. Many brands on top of this game share four key characteristics:
Third-Party Validation Over Self-Promotion: AI systems heavily weigh review platforms when comparing products, particularly detailed reviews that explain specific features and use cases.
Community Presence That Feels Authentic: Treat forums like customer support, not marketing channels.
Clear, Quotable Positioning: Specific claims "2% salicylic acid for acne prone skin" or "15-hour battery life certified by EPEAT" become reference points AI can cite with confidence.
Cross-Channel Consistency: Your community and customer success teams should be active on platforms like Reddit, Overflow, Quora, and even LinkedIn
Roughly 50% of shoppers in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia use generative AI for e-commerce tasks, as of 2025, and over 60% of U.S. Gen Z and millennials use it to help manage their finances. This isn't coming, it's already here.
By June 2024, AI Overviews appeared in about 12.7% of US Google results. That number is accelerating. About 50% of Google searches already have AI summaries, a figure expected to rise to more than 75 percent by 2028.
The brands that win won't be those with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones who recognize that AI visibility is built on authenticity, driven by community and consistency. This approach can beat paid reach when AI systems are deciding which brands to trust.
Your competitors are already asking themselves, "How do we get ChatGPT to recommend us?". But maybe the better question is: "What would make ChatGPT recommend us authentically?" Because in six months or a year, every brand will have a much better understanding of this game. The window to build an advantage before the playbook becomes common knowledge is measured in quarters, not years.
Are you visible inside the conversation, or only on the surface web?