• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 8, 2025

Brands are competing for attention across fragmented landscapes, and those focused on traditional search strategies are losing attention and relevance.  

AI, algorithms, and platform changes are being blamed for declining visibility, but the real issue is something bigger, according to the SOCi 2025 Consumer Behavior Index, which shows that traffic and visibility continues to vanish as traditional search strategies breakdown.

While 83% of consumers still use traditional engines to search, 73% turn to social media and 58% use navigation apps, 19% use review sites, and 19% use AI tools.

The data shows that search impressions fell 10% year-over-year, and multi-location brands are feeling the impact.

SOCi’s data suggests discovery is shaped by mood, moment and whatever platform is in their reach. Some 76% use Google, Bing and Yahoo, whereas 20% reach for Yelp, Trip Advisor, and OpenTable. Twenty three percent use Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.

Despite the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) imposing a fine on TikTok of €530 for mishandling user data protected under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Gen Z continues to choose TikTok and Instagram over Google when doing local searches.

Younger consumers are over-indexing in terms of their searches for “real” articles, experiences, and validation from people. They no longer rely on one platform to find it. The 2025 CBI shows that Gen Z uses an average of 3.6 platforms before deciding on the simplest of purchases. 

Shifts happen and are part of digital life, but brands need to know how to optimize for a variety of platforms, such as ChatGPT, which published a guide on how it ranks queries.

The guide explains how products appear in the visual carousel when ChatGPT perceives it’s relevant to the user’s intent. “ChatGPT assesses intent based on the user’s query and other available context, such as memories or custom instructions,” and provided an example of what happens when a user asks ChatGPT to find something.

For example: ask ChatGPT to help find a costume for “two large dogs, ChatGPT will consider general factors, such as price, customer ratings, and ease of use, as well as specific criteria provided by the user, like sizing and the desired costume vibe. If the user had previously indicated a dislike for clowns, the model might also consider that and leave out clown costumes.”

When determining the products to surface, ChatGPT considers structured metadata from third-party providers. That data could include price, product description, as well as other third-party content like reviews.

Model responses generated by ChatGPT before it considers any new search results, as well as OpenAI safety standards. The entire blog post can be found here.

Not all companies see Google search traffic slowing enough to make a difference. Duda, a platform company used to create sites, monitors LLMs traffic vs. traditional search. This company's data shows an increase in Google search traffic during the past two years, but slightly slowing growth since the end of 2023.

Referrals from ChatGPT began to "skyrocket" at the beginning of July 2024. ChatGPT dominance referral traffic is nearly 9x that of Perplexity and traffic from every other competitor barely registers, according tot he data.

Traditional Google searches are still hundreds of times greater as a traffic source than ChatGPT, even accounting for hockey stick growth of ChatGPT.