How Your SEO Investment Impacts Your AI Traffic

It’s no secret that AI is growing and becoming a tool used across industries, but with its rapid growth, it can be hard to parse out what is real and what’s just fluff. When it comes to your business, it is important to be informed so that you can make the best decisions. That’s why we created this report: to give you the data you need to implement the strongest integrated marketing strategy possible.

Between Q4 of 2024 and Q1 of 2025, referral traffic from generative AI (Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing etc.) rose by 123% with all signs pointing to continued growth.¹ Further, AI’s skillset is just getting stronger, with AI overviews appearing in 90% of broad searches², 5.2% of commercial searches, and 2.6% of transactional searches³. A quote from Google’s VP of search, Elizabeth Reid, illustrates this point best:

“With our custom Gemini model’s multi-step reasoning capabilities, AI Overviews will help with increasingly complex questions. Rather than breaking your question into multiple searches, you can ask your most complex questions, with all the nuances and caveats you have in mind, all in one go.”⁴

With all that being said, it doesn’t come as a surprise that many marketing companies are now advertising “AI-specific SEO services”. Touting their ability to work the algorithm to have your business appear in AI search results across platforms. But the fact is, the best AI search strategy remains a solid, proactive SEO strategy grounded in strong foundations. Things like keyword research, expertly written content, and on-page optimizations are absolutely essential and provide the best bang for your buck. As stated in our previous article on the AIO & Organic overlap: 

“AI systems don’t create knowledge; they summarize what already exists online. They depend on well-structured, crawlable, and contextually rich content to fuel their responses.”⁵

To truly delve into the partnership between traditional SEO and AI traffic, we conducted a study over 5 months comparing the AI traffic levels of similar clients at varying levels of monthly SEO.

Methodology

The validity of our data was extremely important for this study. For this reason, we set out to minimize any variables that may have influenced our findings. We used the following criteria to select our client profiles:

• Clients must have the same:
• Industry
• City/Area of operation
• General target market
• Thematic content
• The primary differentiating factor must be SEO level - quantified here as Low/No, Medium, or High
• Low/No - defined as not regularly adding website content or making on-page changes and optimizations.
• Medium - defined as routinely making on-page optimizations such as adding meta details, and adding new pages or articles each month.
• High - defined as adding 3+ pages and/or articles per month and reviewing performance for optimization opportunities, as well as addressing errors in a timely manner
  

Client Backgrounds

Based on the outlined selection criteria, we selected 7 clients in 3 distinct industry groups.

For privacy, we have labelled them as Client A - G