Despite fears of disruption, data indicates the era of AI discovery continues to propel growth across traditional and AI search engines
SAN MATEO, Calif., May 14, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — BrightEdge, the global leader in AI-driven organic search, content, and digital marketing automation, released new research on the anniversary of Google AI Overviews (AIOs) showing the advent of AI-powered search engines isn’t diminishing Google’s dominance, but rather fueling an unprecedented expansion of overall search activity. BrightEdge found total search impressions increased by over 49%, with Google experiencing substantial growth alongside the emergence of AI-driven discovery platforms, underscoring a powerful shift in how people are seeking and finding information in the AI era.
The findings arrive ahead of the one-year anniversary of Google’s AIOs on May 14, 2024, marking a pivotal milestone in the evolution of search. BrightEdge’s report offers one of the first comprehensive views into how generative AI is impacting real-world search behavior—and reveals a counterintuitive insight: rather than cannibalizing Google, the AI era is expanding it.
Key Insights from the Report
- In the last month, ChatGPT grew 21%, with Perplexity and Gemini remaining about 1/10 of its size, and other AI search engines like Claude, Meta, and Grok another 1/10 smaller. Meanwhile, Google still maintains over 90% of market share.
- AIOs now appear in over 11% of Google queries, a 22% increase since debuting last year.
- Longer, complex queries have grown 49% in AIOs since May 2024, while ranking-style content and comparison queries have decreased, down 60% and 14% respectively.
- Impressions on all content have skyrocketed by over 49% since the launch of AIOs while click-throughs have steadily declined, with a nearly 30% reduction since May 2024.
- BrightEdge data shows the industries with the strongest AIO presence are Healthcare, Education, B2B Tech and Insurance. Travel and Entertainment are on the rise while Ecommerce has not seen rapid growth in the past year.
“The assumption was that AI would kill traditional search,” said Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of BrightEdge. “But our data tells a different story: search is not disappearing, it’s expanding. Google is not being replaced; it’s being reimagined. The rise of AI agents has created a new battleground where visibility is no longer about rankings or clicks, it’s about presence across a new class of interfaces. Brands need to understand how and where they’re being interpreted by AI. The rules of engagement are changing, and this data is an early signal of where things are headed.”
From Clicks to Impressions, From Discovery to Decision-Making
The rise of AI search engines and autonomous agents is fundamentally reshaping how discovery works and how brands and publishers measure success. Traditional metrics like click throughs have steadily decreased since the launch of AIOs, while AI-driven impressions—surfaced via tools like AIOs—are surging. As generative engines guide users through personalized conversations, visibility in the AI layer becomes the new imperative. BrightEdge data confirms that while Google remains the main battleground for search performance, there is a growing need to rethink performance not in terms of click-throughs, but influence, appearing in the right context, at the right moment, in the AI experience.
The shift does not stop at discovery. As AI agents increasingly connect to payment platforms, the line between recommendation and transaction is dissolving. This shift demands businesses rethink marketing to consider AI as direct consumers. The future of commerce will hinge on understanding and influencing AI agents.
The Path For Future-Proofed Brand Strategies
Brands must urgently adapt SEO for an era of buying within AI search. Future-proofing means optimizing not just for clicks but for AI agent visibility and preference, and shifting focus to new KPIs. To find success in AI search, brands need to attend to their mentions within AI outputs, sentiment behind those mentions, and the likelihood of AI systems prioritizing their content in the buyer journey.
Not all AI platforms treat content the same, and different attributes matter for different AI search engines, and differ in how they cite their sources. In ChatGPT, it’s easy to get mentioned—but citation links are rare (every 2 in 10 mentions are cited). Perplexity leans heavily on citations, averaging over 5 citations per answer, but mentions brands less frequently—only 1 in 5 answers include any brand reference at all. Google AIOs exist in the middle of this spectrum, blending brand recall with source attribution. This fragmentation is a complex, new frontier: brands only have one website, yet must optimize for many AI engines with different rules.
BrightEdge’s AI Catalyst solves this problem, delivering unified visibility, sentiment intelligence and actionable insights across platforms in real-time, so marketers can adapt quickly and keep pace with the evolving search landscape. Since its release, over 750 organizations including many Fortune 500 brands rely on AI Catalyst daily to monitor their brand presence across AI search engines.
For further analysis on the year-long impact of AI search, BrightEdge’s full report is available here: One Year of Google AIO and Eight Key Insights on its Evolution. BrightEdge’s AI Catalyst is available for all customers at: https://www.brightedge.com/ai-catalyst.
About BrightEdge
BrightEdge, the global leader in Enterprise SEO and content performance, empowers digital marketers to transform online opportunities into tangible business results. It’s all-in-one platform provides organizations with crucial market insights and intelligent AI-driven solutions. The BrightEdge platform contains the industry’s most unique and extensive data set that connects key search, social, content, and digital media data points. Its deep-learning engine, DataMind, has been powering SEO AI-driven solutions since 2015, allowing marketers to benefit from high-fidelity data-led insights and automated action. Over 57% of Fortune 100 companies and nine of the top ten international agencies trust BrightEdge to help them provide the best performance by becoming an integral part of the digital experience.
Contact: press@brightedge.com
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