37% of Marketers Lose Search Traffic to AI-Generated Results

More than one-third of brand and agency professionals have already lost upper-funnel search traffic to AI-generated results, according to new Digiday research, accelerating demand for generative engine optimization capabilities that most marketing teams are still learning to build.

Survey Reveals Scale of Traffic Losses Across the Funnel

Digiday's survey of 142 brand and agency professionals found that 37% reported decreases in upper-funnel search traffic as a result of AI, while 21% said their companies experienced lower-funnel traffic losses. The research forms part of Digiday's broader report, "The marketer's guide to AI applications, agentic AI, AI search and GEO/AEO in 2026."

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The data reflects the spread of zero-click search behavior, a pattern in which consumers receive answers directly from AI-generated summaries and do not click through to brand or publisher websites. Google's AI Overviews, introduced in 2024, and its AI Mode, launched in 2025, have both contributed to this shift, alongside ChatGPT's conversational search feature and Perplexity's answer engine.

A December 2024 survey of 1,100 consumers by Bain and Dynata found that 80% of users relied on AI summaries at least 40% of the time, contributing to an estimated organic traffic decline of 15% to 25%. A 2025 report projected that AI search agents could reduce ad exposure by 38% during discovery, 47% during consideration and 30% at conversion.

Despite the pressure, significant portions of the market have not yet felt the impact or adapted. Digiday's survey found 32% of respondents said upper-funnel traffic remained unchanged, while 36% reported no change in lower-funnel traffic. Still, 27% of respondents said their companies had not changed their strategies, and 16% said they were not familiar with GEO or AEO at all.

Brands Begin Structural Overhauls for AI Search

Among those acting, personal care brand Suave and big-box retailer Target have emerged as early examples of brand-level GEO implementation.

Suave began revamping its entire website in September 2025 to optimize for AI search. We are [using] agentic AI, when it comes to SEO and copywriting, to make sure that everything we have related to product benefits and ingredient lists and how we talk about our products is AI-friendly, said Rafael Lopes, Suave's VP of innovation and brand equity.

Target took a data architecture approach, identifying five priority categories (price, product, promotions, availability and policies) and updated its website to make that information machine-readable for AI engines, whether internal agents or external platforms. The approach was confirmed by Ranjeet Bhosale, Target's VP of digital product management.

Marc Maleh, global CTO at a design and technology agency, said many brands are still at the awareness stage. A lot of them ask, 'Are people actually doing this?' Maleh said, noting that GEO does not require starting from scratch. It's really about leveraging existing content to start, as opposed to thinking that you need new content to appear in these places.

Attribution Gap Complicates Measurement

A recurring challenge cited across Digiday's interviews is the absence of direct measurement data from AI search platforms, which makes it difficult for marketers to know how often their brands appear in AI-generated results.

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Because we don't get data outputs from the [AI search] platforms themselves, it's been really difficult, said Jen Cornwell, senior director of AI, SEO and innovation at Tinuiti. We've moved into zero-click, where there is minimal attribution for visibility inside of one of the AI search platforms.

Cornwell also pointed to earned media and Reddit as high-leverage channels. All of the LLMs eat this diet of earned media and I predict a larger investment in earned media, she said. M7 Innovations' Maher agreed, noting Reddit's 22 billion human-created posts and its consistent ranking as a top source cited by large language models. I can take my ad spend on Reddit and build authority with large language models, and that is the alchemy that brands want, he said.

New monitoring startups including Profound, Evertune, Bluefish and Scrunch were cited as tools helping marketers track and optimize AI search performance, though Adam Simon, former managing director at IPG Media Lab, noted that "better tools and communication from the platforms" would take another two to three years to mature.