Do Rankings Still Matter with AI Search?

Every week, I speak with marketing leaders who are asking a version of the same question: “If everyone’s using ChatGPT and AI Overviews now, does it still matter where I rank on Google?” It’s a fair question — and if you’re wondering the same thing, you’re not alone.

The honest answer is that rankings still matter enormously. But how they matter is shifting, and if you’re still measuring success the same way you were two years ago, you’re probably drawing the wrong conclusions from your data.

In a recent episode of The Dojo podcast, I sat down with Exposure Ninja’s CEO, Charlie Marchant, to unpack exactly what’s happening to organic search, what the data actually says about rankings and AI, and how marketing leaders should be rethinking their metrics. This isn’t a “don’t worry, nothing has changed” piece. Things are genuinely changing. But the businesses that panic and abandon Google rankings entirely in favour of chasing AI visibility are making a costly strategic mistake — and here’s why.

Executive Summary

• Google is still dominant by an enormous margin. With approximately 14 billion daily searches compared to ChatGPT’s 66 million search-like prompts, Google is around 210 times bigger. You cannot afford to deprioritise it.
• Rankings still drive AI Overview appearances. There is a clear correlation between your Google position and your likelihood of appearing in AI Overviews. Position one carries roughly a 50% chance of citation — as shown by Ahrefs research.
• Zero-click is real, but rankings still create value. A study of 20,000 websites found a 53% drop in click-through rates linked to AI Overviews — but brand visibility and bottom-of-funnel rankings remain high-value.
• ChatGPT pulls from Google results. Research from Chatoptic found a 62% overlap between Google page one results and ChatGPT answers — meaning strong Google rankings still influence AI recommendations directly.
• Your metrics must evolve. SEO is shifting from a traffic volume game to an answer ownership game. Conversion quality, bottom-of-funnel visibility, and AI answer inclusion are the new north stars.
• Attribution is getting harder. Dark traffic from AI touchpoints will grow. Self-reported attribution is becoming a critical — if imperfect — data source alongside your analytics.

Why Is Google Still the Only Game in Town?

There’s a lot of noise right now about AI chatbots taking over search. And whilst the shift is real, the actual scale gap between Google and its AI competitors is staggering — and it matters for how you allocate your marketing budget.

As Charlie explained: “Google search is still by far the most dominant search engine. Around 210 times bigger than ChatGPT. Some of the recent stats are around 14 billion Google searches versus ChatGPT processing around 66 million prompts that are search-like — and that’s daily.”

When you look at your Google Analytics and ask where your organic traffic, leads, and conversions are actually coming from, the answer is still overwhelmingly Google. That hasn’t meaningfully changed. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot — all are growing, and for certain audiences (particularly high-value B2B decision-makers) their influence is disproportionate to their raw user numbers. But these platforms are competing in millions, whilst Google operates in billions.

Anyone telling you to abandon Google SEO and go all-in on LLM optimisation is getting ahead of the evidence. The smarter move is to treat Google as your foundation and build AI visibility on top of it — not instead of it.

What Is Happening to Your Traffic Because of AI Overviews?

If your organic traffic has dropped over the past year, AI Overviews are likely part of the explanation. Research covering around 20,000 websites found a 53% drop in click-through rates, driven by AI Overviews answering questions directly on the results page without the user needing to click anywhere.

This hits hardest on top-of-funnel, informational content — the blog posts that used to attract readers searching for things like “causes of dry skin” or “what is a heat pump.” Those searches increasingly get answered by the AI Overview without a single click. That’s traffic you’ve lost, and it’s probably not coming back.

So does that make ranking for those terms pointless? Not entirely — and Charlie made a case I found genuinely persuasive. Even when someone doesn’t click through, appearing consistently in AI Overviews builds brand awareness in a way that compounds over time.

“If your brand is referenced, they’re immediately noticing it,” Charlie told me, “even if they’re only subconsciously taking it in.”

She used The Ordinary as an example — their striking black-and-white product branding becomes recognisable and sticky through repeated AI Overview appearances, even when no click happens. For brands with strong visual identity, that visibility has real value beyond the click.

There’s also a strategic, forward-looking reason to care about AI Overview visibility. Google is deliberately using AI Overviews to funnel users into AI Mode — its conversational, back-and-forth search experience. And this is where things get genuinely consequential for marketing leaders. AI Mode is compressing the buyer journey in ways that will reshape how the whole funnel works.

Consider this: a user starts with a vague problem — say, persistent dry skin that moisturiser isn’t fixing. Historically, they’d spend days visiting multiple websites before narrowing to a shortlist of brands. In AI Mode, that entire journey — from awareness to brand comparison — can happen in a single five-minute conversation. The direction of travel from Google is unmistakable, and it has serious implications for which parts of your content strategy matter most.

How Do ChatGPT and Gemini Actually Use Your Google Rankings?

Here’s something that surprises many of the marketing leaders I speak with: the AI chatbots they’re worried about are, in many cases, using Google’s search index underneath their responses.

ChatGPT, which previously used Bing, now predominantly uses Google when it performs live searches. Gemini and AI Mode are Google products — Google search is their natural backbone. Even Perplexity, which has its own proprietary index, sometimes draws on Bing results alongside it.

This means your Google rankings have a more direct connection to AI chatbot recommendations than most people assume. Charlie pointed me to research from ChatOptic which found that 62% of ChatGPT answers referenced websites ranked on Google’s first page. “I think 62% is quite a lot personally,” she said. “Actually 60% of the page one answers showing in the ChatGPT answer — I think is a fair overlap.”

Now, this doesn’t mean a position-one Google ranking guarantees you a position-one mention in ChatGPT. The correlation isn’t that clean. LLMs can pull from anywhere, and they often favour short-form, list-style content over the long, comprehensive articles that Google has traditionally rewarded. But nearly two-thirds overlap is significant. If you’re well-ranked and genuinely authoritative on Google, you have a meaningful head start in AI search too.

The practical implication: a strong Google SEO foundation is not separate from your AI search strategy. For the vast majority of businesses, it is the foundation of it.

When Does the AI Buyer Journey Compress Your Sales Funnel?

One of the most practically important shifts we discussed was what AI Mode and conversational AI are doing to the customer journey — and what it means for where you invest your SEO resource.

The old model assumed users would take dozens of touchpoints to move from awareness to purchase. Each touchpoint was a chance for your content to appear, build trust, and nudge them forward. That model is being compressed — not eliminated, but genuinely shortened.

As Google nudges more users from traditional search results into AI Mode, someone can move from a broad awareness question all the way through to brand comparisons in a single conversation. This has two significant implications for how you build your strategy.

First, your presence at the decision and comparison stage becomes even more valuable. When an AI is synthesising a recommendation — “which brand should I choose for this?” — you need to be part of that answer. That requires authority on commercial, intent-driven keywords, not just informational ones.

Second, direct checkout is on the horizon. ChatGPT is already testing the ability to complete purchases within its AI environment in the US. Google, which relies on advertising revenue, will build this out further. When purchases happen inside the AI, traffic to your website matters even less — but being the recommended brand matters enormously.

It’s also worth noting that agentic AI search — AI agents that browse the web on your behalf — will work very differently from human search. As Charlie explained: “When AI is searching, it’s able to search much more broadly over a significant number of pages. It doesn’t have to read the whole page in order — it’s able to go to a specific paragraph, even a specific couple of sentences, to pick out what it needs.”

For agents, positional ranking matters far less. They’ll prioritise authority, contextual relevance, and intent-matching — which is a strong argument for building genuinely expert, comprehensive content rather than chasing positional wins.

How Should You Measure and Report AI Search Performance?

This is the question I hear most from marketing managers trying to justify their work to senior stakeholders — and honestly, it’s the area where there’s still no perfect answer. But imperfect doesn’t mean helpless.

Charlie was direct: “I think attribution’s going to become even more difficult and murky than it currently is.”

Here’s what she recommends, and what we’ve found to be practical in the meantime:

• Set up channel groups in GA4. Google Analytics still shows referral traffic by source, so creating separate channel groups for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI platforms lets you see volume and conversions attributed to those channels on a last-click basis. It’s not the whole picture, but it’s a starting point.
• Acknowledge dark traffic. This is the traffic that has an AI touchpoint earlier in the journey but converts through a different channel — and you’ll never see it in your analytics. Knowing it exists should make you more generous in how you interpret the ROI of organic visibility, especially for top-of-funnel content.
• Add self-reported attribution. A simple “how did you hear about us?” field on your enquiry form is increasingly valuable. As more users discover businesses through ChatGPT or Gemini, they’ll say so. It’s not scientifically rigorous, but it gives you a directional signal you simply won’t get from your analytics dashboard alone.

Beyond attribution mechanics, the metrics themselves need to evolve. As Charlie framed it: “SEO’s future is owning answers, not chasing clicks. We’re going to see a huge shift in the metrics we expect from SEO — far less focus on traffic quantity and much more interest in the quality of that traffic.”

For most marketing leaders, this means starting to report on:

• AI Overview appearance rate for your most important queries
• Brand mention frequency in AI chatbot answers (Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is a practical tool for this)
• Conversion rate and lead quality from organic traffic — not just session volume
• Rankings for commercial, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel terms — with less emphasis on “what is X” informational queries that AI Overviews now dominate

The business doesn’t care whether 1,000 or 100 people visited your site, as Charlie put it — it cares whether those visitors converted. That’s the reframe you need to take into your next board presentation.

Next Steps

This week:

• Open Google Search Console and compare impressions against clicks for your top informational keywords. A large and growing gap likely indicates AI Overview cannibalisation — not a catastrophe, but it changes what “success” looks like for that content.
• Set up channel groups in GA4 to track AI platform referral traffic separately. Even a rough view is better than no view.
• Add a “how did you hear about us?” field to your lead forms if you don’t have one already.

Next 30 days:

• Audit your keyword investment. If you’re heavily weighted towards top-of-funnel informational content, consider whether that effort is better directed towards commercial, middle-of-funnel topics where AI Overviews are less likely to eat your clicks.
• Start tracking AI Overview appearance rates for your most important queries using Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit or a comparable tool.
• Update your reporting framework. Agree with your team on which metrics reflect answer ownership rather than traffic volume, and revise your stakeholder dashboards accordingly.

Next 90 days:

• Develop content that addresses the AI-compressed buyer journey. What are the comparison and decision-stage questions your ideal customers are asking an AI assistant right now? Make sure your brand is part of those answers — and that your content is structured to make it easy for LLMs to extract and cite.
• Brief your digital PR team or agency on the importance of third-party citations on high-authority sites. Appearing in “best of” roundups on authoritative publications is one of the most reliable ways to influence AI recommendations.
• Request a free marketing review at exposureninja.com/review to identify exactly where your visibility gaps are across both Google and AI search — and what to prioritise first.

In Conclusion

Rankings still matter. Not in exactly the same way they did three years ago — but they matter. The data is clear: Google remains the dominant search engine by a vast margin, most AI platforms use Google’s index underneath, and there is a meaningful correlation between page one positions and AI-generated answer citations.

What’s changing is not whether rankings matter, but what they’re worth and what you measure. The goal is shifting from chasing traffic to owning answers — being the brand that appears consistently as users move through an increasingly compressed buyer journey, from first question through to purchase decision.

The businesses that will dominate over the next three to five years are the ones making that shift now: building genuine authority, targeting commercial keywords, tracking the right metrics, and ensuring they’re visible not just on Google’s results page but in the AI answers that increasingly sit above it.

Get the foundations right, and you’ll be well-positioned — wherever the search landscape goes next.

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