AI has upended search. Marketers are scrambling to catch up.

In a matter of months, artificial intelligence has begun to change how people search for things online in ways that have alarmed some marketers.

- Patrick Coffee

Consumers who use traditional search engines like Google and Bing are now greeted atop their search results by AI-generated summaries of the topics at hand. A growing number of consumers now also turn directly to large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT to answer everyday questions or guide their purchases.

Both developments have begun to eat away at the clicks and website traffic that marketers have earned over time by spending millions of dollars on search engine optimization, or SEO. They have also created a wave of businesses claiming to specialize in new industry acronyms such as generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), and, of course, artificial intelligence optimization (AIO).

Email software platform Mailchimp has seen a steady drop in web traffic since AI-assisted search started allowing people to gather information about the company and its products without visiting its sites, according to Ellen Mamedov, global director of search engine optimization.

In order to counter the shift, Mailchimp began updating its sites to better serve the so-called crawlers, bots that visit pages across the web to collect the data that informs the answers provided by AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Mamedov said.