Why 60% of Marketers Are About to Have a Hard Year

Okay, so 60% of marketers are saying their top goal for the next 12 months is to increase traffic. And honestly, if you are one of those people, you are about to have an absolutely terrible year. I’ve just read an article here where there’s some data showing that AI search visitors are going to overtake traditional search visitors by 2028. And those visitors are potentially going to convert 4.4 times the rate than what we’re seeing right now of someone finds you on Google right this second. So essentially, if you’re chasing traffic numbers, you are in for a world of pain.

We’re going to discuss that in a slightly different episode today, because we’ll also have a look at some of the other big changes that we’ve seen in the world of AI and marketing over the past few weeks, and delve into some of those today as well. If we haven’t met before, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to For The Daring Growth Seekers podcast. It’s a podcast designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing in the AI era.

And as I said in the intro, over the past few weeks, there has been some game changers that have been released. I’m recording this episode slightly differently today as well, currently in Melbourne, in a makeshift podcast studio, also known as my hotel room. And this morning had a great morning. Actually, we ran our first Melbourne-based AI marketing workshop. So if you’ve been following our journey for a little bit, you’ll know that we’ve been running these workshops across New Zealand for the past month, or two months actually.

So we thought we’d take the same workshop over to Australia, because obviously we have a client base over here in Melbourne as well. And we just wanted to learn how businesses over here in Australia are combating and working with these AI enhancements that we’re seeing, and just seeing whether the challenges are similar to what we’re seeing in New Zealand as well. We’ll probably do a whole nother podcast episode about some of the learnings that we had from that workshop that we did this morning.

But today what I wanted to do as well is, one of the slides that we had as part of the workshop was really starting to have a look at how fast AI is actually changing, for business owners and for marketers to even get a grasp on. And we put together a bit of a slide of some of the changes that we’ve even seen literally just over the past 10 to 14 days, because there’s a heap of data to try to think about. There’s a heap of changes in the tools that we already use, and some of the big things that you need to be thinking about as a business owner, or as a marketing leader within your organisation, and how AI is really changing a lot of what we do.

And as I said in the intro, over the past few weeks there have been some really interesting studies that have also been released. A lot talking around, as I said, that traditional search potentially is going to be bypassed by 2028. And this was a big topic of conversation in our workshops today as well. Traditional search being, you go to Google, you see the 10 blue links, and you click a link and you decide if that’s going to be the right website for you, and you kind of move through there. And that’s how we kind of search and discover new products.

But obviously the way we search is changing. Google’s released AI Mode over in the States. We’re using ChatGPT, we’re using Claude, we’re using all these different methods of searching and trying to find different businesses and products and services to help with fulfilling our pain points, or our desires as well. So that’s a massive shift. And also we’re seeing Google launching Search Live this week as well, allowing people to have full conversations with search rather than sitting there typing.

And we spoke a lot about that today as well, around the rise of people actually talking into their phones a lot. And this is something I do a lot, talking to ChatGPT and Claude, and Google is obviously seeing that as well. If we can start to understand these shifts, we’re going to get a better understanding about how that’s actually going to affect our marketing over the coming months and years as well.

So that first thing I want to have a look at, firstly, that 2028 tipping point. So this was a piece of research done by Semrush, and it had a look at AI search visitors and how they are predicted to surpass traditional search visitors by early 2028. Remembering we’re in 2025 now, that is literally just around the corner. I kind of think that even potentially it could happen before that as well.

The traffic opportunity has been dropping for a few months anyway. So if you’ve been having a look at traffic as one of your big KPIs that you and your business are looking at, you’re going to be disappointed. One of the people we had in the workshop today mentioned that they had even seen that their traffic to their website was down 30%. And so one of those things that I was kind of discussing there is the conversation there becomes those conversations that we have in boardrooms, and with senior teams and boards and people within business, who see some of those metrics, like visitors to a website, as some of the core marketing metrics.

We need to start shifting that conversation quite quickly, because that is fast becoming like a vanity metric. There are a lot of searches taking place on tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and Claude. And I guess this data is showing that as well, that by 2028, traditional search will be surpassed by this more conversational search. And what we don’t know is how these platforms are even going to adjust over that time as well. So it is going to be a massive change for us to have a bit of a look at.

But the other critical part of that as well is that they’re saying that potentially visitors are going to convert 4.4 times the rate of a traditional Google search, because they’re saying that LLMs like ChatGPT are equipping users with more of the information that they actually need to make a decision before they actually visit your site and actually buy. So they’re actually saying that ChatGPT and Google AI Mode is actually doing a lot of that sales for you, if you’ve got your marketing strategy right.

Because remember, let’s just go back to AI Mode with Google. They use a term which we call a query fan-out method. So you start with that initial query, and then obviously, if you’re using ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, it’s going to give you an answer, a pretty robust answer usually, and then it’s going to always ask you some follow-up questions to try and help narrow down your search, and help get you questioning whether it’s the right decision and the right information for you.

So essentially it’s doing a bit of that sales process for you. And so what we’re starting to see is that people, after they have done that research, are 4.4 times more likely to then actually buy from you if you’re showing up in those searches. And that is the crucial piece as well. For that to even happen, we still need to actually be seen on those searches. So then that opens a whole other kettle of fish, which we’ll delve into in another episode. So essentially, if you’re not starting to optimise for LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Google’s AI Mode, competitors could soon establish themselves in AI results and actually capture the majority of the exposure on these platforms.

So my advice: stop measuring success by traffic. Start having those conversations within your leadership team, that we are going to see traffic drop off, and traffic value is going to drop off, and we need to start tracking different sources. So tracking conversion rates by source, for example, having a look to see: is ChatGPT, is Google AI Mode, are they actually driving better quality source traffic through to you? Because the other big thing is we’re not going to be able to see a lot of different traffic in terms of what was the actual search term that people used, because obviously it’s conversational search, it’s completely different. So we’re not going to see these keyword reports that we currently use in our marketing metrics and our KPIs. So just another thing to kind of think about.

Plus, the last big change I wanted to discuss today, which I think is really important for us to understand, is conversational search. Conversational search is here. And this week Google announced a new Search Live feature. So again, this is just on iOS and Android in the States just now, so we can’t access this in New Zealand or Australia just yet. But essentially, in a nutshell, this offers that free-flowing, back-and-forth voice conversations with your mobile, with Google search. And it’s working in the background while users are in other apps. A little bit scary.

And it’ll be interesting to see how this goes. It hasn’t fully rolled out. It’s still in Labs mode at the moment. But this is another big thing, and a big fundamental shift that we are seeing, and a big conversation starter today in our workshop as well. And it’s a big shift from that keyword-based strategies that we’ve been using for years and years and years and years, and it’s moving more to that conversation-based discovery as well.

And this comes back to how are people using tools like ChatGPT? Even if you think about your own usage, when you go to ChatGPT or Claude, or even Google Gemini right now, and Google AI Mode if you’ve been testing that. What type of questions are you kind of asking in there? It’s probably much more what we’d typically call a long-tail search, conversational-type search. And that’s going to get even more prevalent when we actually start to include voice search, people actually talking more into their phone.

And I don’t know about you, but I actually do it quite a bit. And we talk about this a lot in our workshops as well, is that actually talking to your phone can be a great way for content creation, to get a lot of information out of your brain, or interviewing another staff member, or being able to piece together notes of a meeting and things like that. It can be a great way to capture a lot of information really fast instead of typing, and then getting it to essentially bullet point and transcribe that, and put it into a format that then you can actually use.

So I’ve been using my phone a lot as a tool to really talk to. Not really in the discovery phase. And I think the whole idea about it working in the background while you’re working on other apps, I think that’s a little bit creepy. It’ll be interesting to see how they kind of roll that one out. But essentially, I think the big thing we need to think about there is having that true understanding about the intent of why someone reaches for their phone, or reaches for their computer, and starts to research for your product and service.

And the thing I’d be considering as well is that the reading I’m doing is ElevenLabs and ChatGPT. Obviously, if you have conversations with those now, you will also start to notice that they can start to sense your emotion behind your conversation that you’re having with it. So they start to understand your intent behind that conversation: whether you’re stressed and needing a quick answer, whether you’re just in that research phase, that emotion behind your conversation, as well as what you’re actually saying.

And that’s where I think things are getting really wild. Because with conversational search, it’s not just about what you’re saying, it’s potentially even about how you’re saying it, and how you’re asking for that information. And what these models will get back to you with will be based on not only the information that you’re looking for, but also the way that you’re actually asking for it as well.

So this goes back to the main fundamental. We talk about it every time on the podcast, which is understanding your core customer, understanding their main pain points, understanding the different phases and how they discover your product, from an informational type search to a direct, urgent, “I need a product and service to help me now with this.” And thinking about: do we have the content? Do we have the product and service? Can we service that particular person, and make sure that we can show up in LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude when someone asks us those questions as well?

So conversational search is here, and they’re testing it. So my big piece of advice from that is: optimise your content now. Thinking about natural language queries, conversational intent. We’re going past traditional keywords. And I think that if you can nail that, you can start to think about how can you create content that’s in chunks, that is conversational, that is answering a lot of the questions that your potential customers actually have. You’re going to be in a great position from there.

So the key takeaways from today’s quickfire podcast: traffic growth is both more challenging than ever, and it is most likely going to produce bottom line results. So it’s probably not worth you tracking. It’s a vanity metric. And we’re seeing from 2028 that LLM search, ChatGPT search, is actually going to overtake traditional Google search anyway. And then preparing for conversational search as well. Voice and conversational search becoming the absolute norm, and we need to start optimising for natural language queries.

We might delve into this topic a little bit more in a future podcast as well, because it is a bit of a beast to cover. And obviously, we’re still navigating it. But these two pieces of research from the week, I think, have been pivotal in the way that I’m even starting to approach and think about our marketing strategy as well.

So essentially, stop chasing these vanity metrics. We need to stop with clicks to your website and increasing traffic to your website. Start building the AI-driven future, because it is already here. Audit your current marketing content strategy. Chat to your leadership teams around: we should be having a look at different KPIs and different ways to measure how effective our marketing actually is right now. And try and focus on these conversational queries as much as possible, that have already been proven to drive high-converting AI traffic.

If you need help navigating this shift, that is what we are here for. There are two ways we can help. You can either work with us one-on-one as part of our agency, donebynine.com. Or, of course, you can join our community called For The Daring Growth Seekers, same name as the podcast, of course, where we’ve got a bunch of business owners in there right now. You can find all the details on that on our website as well, donebynine.com. And again, thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you on another episode very soon on For The Daring Growth Seekers.