Traffic is falling. But your customers are not gone.
Click-through rates are down across nearly every website. Zero-click searches have taken over. The old playbook (rank high, get traffic, win) no longer holds.
But people are still buying what you sell. The demand did not disappear. The path changed.
Here is how to measure success when the clicks stop coming.
"There's a lot of people that are positioning it as an entirely new thing," says Blake Nielson, Head of Accounts at 97th Floor. "But when you start to look at the ingredients of AI search versus traditional SEO, it's a lot of things that we've always been seeing."
Content still matters. Technical SEO still matters. Site structure still matters. Offsite signals still matter.
What changed is the outcome you are chasing.
Traditional SEO chased traffic. AI search chases recommendations. "We're not necessarily trying to get a ton of traffic to a site," Mike Witham, Head of Search at 97th Floor explains. "We're trying to get recommended by the LLM and be mentioned in the right way."
Blake puts it plainly: about 80% of AI search is the same as SEO. The other 20% is where things get different. Things that mattered before now matter more. That shift changes how you measure success.
Organic traffic used to be easy to hide behind. If it looked good, everything seemed fine. Not anymore.
"Organic traffic now looks different," Blake says. "Click-through rates have gone down for virtually every website because zero-click searches are everywhere now."
The answer is not to drop traffic metrics. It is to expand what you track.
The core metrics for AI search success:
AI search changed the customer journey. People use LLMs for top-of-funnel research, then run branded searches to go deeper.
Mike walks through a clear example. Someone searches "best gray sweatsuit." Nike shows up in the AI response. The user likes what they see. Their next search is "Nike gray sweatsuit," which takes them to Nike's site and drives the conversion.
"What Nike would do is say, have the searches for Nike gray sweatsuit increased since I started showing up in the LLM for gray sweatsuit?" Mike explains.
You track this in Google Search Console, not Ahrefs or SEMrush. Those tools will not capture new branded queries with low search volume. Search Console is your source of truth.
The big insight: if you search "gray sweatsuit" today versus last year, that number is down. But Nike's branded sweatsuit searches are up. They are not losing customers. The customers are just entering the funnel a different way.
"The people who want shoes are still buying shoes," Paxton says. "AI hasn't changed market demand for shoes. They're just coming through in a different way."
Traditional SEO taught hub and spoke. One pillar page. Supporting blog posts. Internal links. Done.
AI search asks you to zoom out further.
"We need to pull it out a little bit further," Mike says. "It encompasses so much more than just your blog and the internal links that go to a hub page."
Start with the customer journey. If you sell baseball bats and you write "best baseball bat for 12-year-olds," the message needs to hold across all of these:
"Everything, all of the messaging across all the different types of pages about that subject, should match and be cohesive," Mike explains. "The LLM can see your authority and see that it's backed up in multiple places."
LLMs want to validate what they find. The more sources that confirm your expertise, the more likely they cite you.
The fastest wins come from what you already control.
Owned citations are links from the LLM back to your website. These are the best kind. They drive real referral traffic.
Third-party citations are links to Reddit threads, blogs, listicles, and affiliate sites. Useful for authority, but harder to control.
Start with what you own:
Your website. Make sure you have enough indexed pages covering your topic with real depth. There is a correlation between indexed pages and brand mentions. More quality content means more chances to get cited.
Social platforms. YouTube, LinkedIn, and Reddit are three of the most cited domains across all LLMs. "Two of those, your brand could have almost complete control over," Blake points out. YouTube and LinkedIn are yours to own.
Make your social content match your website messaging. Google indexes social content now. ChatGPT and other LLMs cite it heavily.
Listings and directories. Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry directories. Update every one. Match your messaging. This is low-hanging fruit.
Only after you have locked down what you own should you move to third-party plays, like PR outreach, affiliate partnerships, or Reddit engagement.
Should your brand be on Reddit?
"In some industries it's everything. In other industries it doesn't matter," Blake says.
LLMs like Reddit because it is user-generated content that is harder to game. Moderators keep spam out. It reads as authentic.
If your users ask questions about your product on Reddit, be there. Create a brand account. Engage in the right subreddits. Answer questions. Be useful.
"You can't just go and post promotional stuff on most subreddits," Blake warns. "It's about community. If it makes sense for your brand to answer those types of questions, if you're an espresso machine where people are asking a lot of questions and need help, that's a good opportunity."
But if your audience is not on Reddit, do not force it.
Blake uses a sharp example: "If I'm a lip balm company, users aren't hanging out on LinkedIn talking about chapstick. They're in the ski subreddit asking questions."
Do the research first. Search your product category across different LLMs. See what gets cited. Let that drive your strategy.
For years, SEO held that affiliate and sponsored links do not pass value. They are nofollow. They do not help rankings.
AI search flipped that.
"When Google really went all the way in on AIO, that was one of the most shocking things to me," Blake says. "We were seeing all these citations for affiliate and sponsored posts."
If content lives on a high-authority site, LLMs will cite it. Sponsored or not.
This opens a real tactic: paid placement on authoritative sites that LLMs already trust. You can even build backlinks to those sponsored posts to push up their rankings, which raises the chance of citation.
"That's kind of the intersection of ad spend and AI search," Blake notes.
The 97th Floor AI task force ran a test with a client that had an eight-month-old website. Low page count. Not getting crawled much. Not getting noticed.
They did two things:
"LLMs are just lazy robots," Mike explains. "They just want to find the easiest answer as fast as possible. Schema markup gives them helpful hints."
Within one week, the site went from zero citations and zero brand mentions to four dozen. All from the pages that had the new schema.
The catch: you need to know what schema to use and why.
"What type of schema am I implementing? What do I want the LLM to parse out?" Mike asks. Do not add article schema or product schema because an influencer said so. Identify what data matters most, whether that is review schema, FAQ schema, or something else, then implement with a purpose.
"My hot take is to ignore hot takes," Mike says.
Every day someone claims they found the secret: schema is everything, you have to be on Reddit, Google reviews are all that matter. "Marketers will just pick up on that and go full blast without actually verifying it's going to do something for them," he explains.
The right move is to start with your audience.
Does your audience even use LLMs for this type of purchase? In travel, LLMs matter enormously. In industrial manufacturing, less so. Still worth optimizing for, but the urgency is not the same.
Before chasing any tactic, ask: Is this relevant to my industry? Will the LLM care about this for the topics I want to own? What outcome am I after?
Start with research. See what gets cited in your space. Then build your plan.
97th Floor runs AI search audits that reveal three things:
Where you show up. Which topics get you mentioned across major LLMs.
How you show up. What is the sentiment? Are they recommending you or pointing out flaws? Are they describing you the way you want?
Where competitors are winning. What topics do they own that you could contest?
One audit for a major tractor company found a competitor closing fast through comparison content. "They're doing a ton of competitive comparisons and that type of content is really being picked up by the LLMs," Paxton and Mike found together. "That's a huge opportunity the company didn't take advantage of yet."
Zero-click searches are not killing your business. They are changing how customers find you.
The demand still exists. The purchases still happen. You need different metrics to track the journey.
Stop watching only traffic. Start tracking brand mentions, citations, impressions, and branded follow-up searches. Expand your content clusters beyond your website. Own your citations before chasing third-party placements. Use schema with intent. Ignore blanket advice.
AI has not changed what people want. It has only changed how they search for it.
Your job is to show up in that search, even when the click never comes.
Request a free AI Search Audit: https://97thfloor.com/ai-audit/
Connect with Mike Witham on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-o-witham
Connect with Blake Nielson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakejnielson/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
Looking for an agency that'll be worth the investment? 97th Floor creates custom, audience-first campaigns that drive pipeline and conversions. Get started here: https://97thfloor.com/lets-talk/.
1:13 - AI search vs. SEO
5:22 - Measuring impact in the AI age
10:47 - Follow-up searches & Search Console
16:05 - Rethinking topic clusters
23:31 - Offsite strategy: Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn
30:18 - Hot takes & schema markup experiment
Mike Witham is the Head of Search at 97th Floor, where he has spent the past seven years leading SEO strategy and performance for enterprise and high-growth brands. Based in Lehi, UT, he specializes in building data-driven search campaigns that achieve bottom-line results for clients. With his ability to create holistic, full-funnel marketing campaigns, Mike helps teams turn organic search into a highly profitable, revenue-driving channel.
Blake Nielson is the Head of Accounts at 97th Floor, where he partners with enterprise and high-growth brands to turn organic search into a measurable revenue channel. With deep expertise in SEO and AI search, he helps clients translate complex shifts in the search landscape into clear business strategy. Blake specializes in building strong client relationships, aligning teams around growth goals, and making sure every campaign ties back to bottom-line results.
