
A billion-dollar question hangs over the new AI search marketing industry
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For marketers exploring AI search, this year’s Black Friday weekend delivered both a moment of clarity and a series of questions. The websites of 20 large retailers from Best Buy to Etsy averaged 183,000 daily visits from people sent by ChatGPT and other large language models, according to marketing software firm Semrush.
That is still tiny compared with traditional search traffic but nearly eight times last year’s daily average. In 2023, daily results ranged from zero to the low hundreds for each site. AI search is on a trajectory to drive revenue.
How companies should prepare remains up for debate. “Every chief marketing officer today is thinking about how they’re showing up in ChatGPT," Anil Chakravarthy, president of the digital experience business at Adobe said last month when the software company announced a $1.9 billion deal to buy Semrush. Benjamin Houy is firmly in the camp of “don’t touch that dial." The entrepreneur earlier this year used his own money to launch Lorelight, a tool designed to optimize the presence of brands in LLM results.
It lasted about six months. Rather than revealing new ways to influence artificial-intelligence algorithms, Lorelight’s data simply reinforced the value of time-tested practices for traditional search engine optimization, like appearing in respected publications and producing content that provides consumers with legitimate expertise. “I just stopped believing in the core premise of the product, which was that it could help companies rank higher on AI," Houy said.
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