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For years, marketers have lived and died by the same toolkit: SEO, social launches, email campaigns, paid media, influencers, referral loops. Rinse, optimize, repeat. But 2025 is starting to feel like the year the wheels fall off. Every traditional marketing channel is buckling under the weight of saturation, rising costs, and platforms turning hostile.
And just as that decay becomes impossible to ignore, a new channel is quietly gaining ground: generative AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot aren’t just changing how people search; they’re starting to replace search altogether.
End of the line: Traditional channels can’t keep up
There was a time when organic reach and a bit of cleverness could take you far. That time is over.
Let’s start with SEO. Once the cornerstone of long-term marketing strategy, it now feels like a rigged game. You spend months optimizing content, only to be outranked by Reddit threads or slapped down by Google’s algorithm tweaks. And if you’re publishing anything even remotely outside your “core expertise,” you’re toast.
To make matters worse, SEO is a long game. According to a poll by Ahrefs with 3,680 responses on LinkedIn and X, it typically takes three to six months to see results. So not only is it increasingly unstable, it’s also painfully slow, leaving brands vulnerable to algorithm swings in the meantime.
Just ask News Corp: in late 2024, their flagship UK brand The Sun lost 50% of its organic traffic, as revealed in their Q4 earnings report. Analysts linked the drop to multiple Google algorithm changes that punished broad, listicle-style publishing and gave preference to Reddit discussions. Another News Corp publication, the New York Post, saw a 27% traffic decline during the same period. These were not isolated blips; they reflected a structural change in how Google was interpreting authority, with a shift away from high-volume generalist publishers.
HubSpot didn’t fare any better. Often seen as the blueprint for B2B content marketing, the company suffered a dramatic decline in visibility across thousands of high-intent queries. According to search consultants, HubSpot’s downfall was tied to its vast archive of SEO-first content, material optimized to attract traffic but thin on topical authority. The Helpful Content Update appeared to deprioritize such strategies, favoring brands with deeper, narrower expertise instead. HubSpot’s own traffic metrics suggest a decline of up to 40% in organic leads from Google since December 2024.
Independent publishers got it worse. DMARGE, an Australian men’s lifestyle publication operating since 2009, spent $200,000 trying to recover from algorithm changes, experiencing a drop from 8 million to 300,000 monthly visitors. The collapse was tied to Google’s November 2021 Core Update and intensified with the rollout of the Helpful Content Update. Despite employing a 10-person editorial team covering topics like watches, cars, food, and travel, the site saw no manual actions or direct warnings from Google.
The cost of recovery was staggering. DMARGE paid $25,000 for SEO consultants, $120,000 for web development, and $75,000 for content creation and editing. Factoring in the owner’s own time, calculated at $100/hour over three years, the total investment approached $295,000. Technical changes included extensive testing of permalink structures, server configurations, and Core Web Vitals optimization, with $60,000 to $70,000 invested annually in development alone.
The fallout wasn’t just technical; it was financial. Programmatic ad revenue fell to just 3–5% of prior levels, forcing editorial cuts and compromising content quality. The publisher ultimately concluded that maintaining a traditional website became commercially unviable. They now see better content reach through Instagram and newsletters than via their own domain.
The DMARGE case laid bare a deeper truth: Google’s ecosystem no longer rewards independent publishers. It punishes them.
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You can blame the Helpful Content Update, but the trend started earlier. The law of diminishing returns is now the law of the land. Every scalable channel has been overfished:
- Influencer marketing: big spend, tiny ROI. Once the traffic spike fades, nothing sticks.
- Email: ends up in spam, low open rates, and even lower CTRs.
- Paid media: brutal CPM inflation, rampant fraud, investor backlash.
- Affiliate/referral: ripe with fraud, heavy admin load, surprisingly poor results.
- PR: good for buzz, terrible for performance. Your competitors get the same mention next month.
Everything that used to work is now just noise. And users? They’re burned out. They scroll past polished ads and bounce off landing pages.
From queries to conversations: AI becomes the interface
While traditional marketing channels buckle, AI-driven interfaces are quickly becoming the new front door to the internet. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot aren’t just rewriting how users search, they’re reinventing the entire discovery journey. Instead of typing fragmented keywords into Google, people now initiate nuanced, context-rich conversations. A query like “best credit cards for travel” becomes a dialogue with an assistant that remembers what was asked five minutes ago, and tailors its answer accordingly.
What’s more striking is how users behave once they click through from AI responses. According to Adobe Analytics, traffic from AI sources consistently outperforms traditional traffic on all engagement fronts. Users spend more time on the site, navigate more pages, and bounce far less frequently. In concrete terms, visits from AI platforms show an 8% lift in time on site, a 12% boost in pages viewed per session, and a 23% drop in bounce rate compared to non-AI traffic.
That deeper engagement correlates with a dramatic rise in traffic volume. Adobe observed the first major inflection point during the 2024 holiday season. Between November and December, generative AI-driven traffic to retail sites spiked 1,300% year-over-year, with Cyber Monday alone jumping 1,950%. And the surge didn’t fade in January. As of February 2025, AI referral traffic was up 1,200% compared to just seven months prior, growing at a pace that’s doubling every two months.
This shift isn’t confined to retail. Banking and travel have seen parallel trajectories, with AI-driven visits growing 1,200% and 1,700% respectively in the same timeframe. Adobe’s data suggests that while AI referrals still make up a smaller slice of total traffic compared to channels like paid search or email, the growth curve is exponential and sustained.
The underlying reason lies in search intent. Semrush’s comparative analysis between ChatGPT and Google reveals a decisive tilt toward deeper, more exploratory user behavior in AI environments. On ChatGPT, over half of all queries,52.2%, are informational, far outpacing the 36.4% observed on Google. Navigational intent, which dominates Google at nearly 50%, drops to just over 34% on ChatGPT.
This means that users aren’t just looking for links, they’re trying to solve problems, understand concepts, and make informed decisions. AI isn’t replacing search in the way voice assistants tried to. It’s replacing the idea that search has to start with a link list.
And as this shift deepens, platforms are already moving to capitalize. ChatGPT now routes traffic with homepage-weighted links. Microsoft’s Copilot generates custom session journeys. Even analytics tools like Similarweb are building infrastructure to monitor AI-originated traffic.
The takeaway? AI isn’t just eating search, it’s reshaping how people discover, evaluate, and act. The brands that show up contextually inside these conversations, whether organically or through native AI ad formats, stand to win the next phase of digital discovery.
What happens next: From discovery to monetization
Discovery has shifted. The old paths, SEO, email, influencer boosts, have lost their edge. Generative AI isn’t just a new traffic source; it’s an entirely different interface with different rules. And those who understand how it thinks, ranks, and routes will have a massive advantage.
But discovery is just the beginning. The next frontier is monetization inside the interface itself.
Platforms are already laying the groundwork. AI-native ad formats are emerging, embedded directly within conversations, APIs, and assistant workflows. The interface is becoming the inventory. In this world, attention doesn’t come in impressions; it comes in interaction windows, follow-up prompts, API calls, and co-piloted journeys.
In the next article, we’ll explore “The new advertising layer: Chatbots, APIs, and embedded ads” What’s replacing the display banner isn’t another creative unit. It’s the conversation itself.
And after that: “Surveillance 2.0: Personalized ads at an intimate scale” With generative AI acting as a personal assistant and context engine, the level of data available for targeting, emotional, behavioral, and even existential, makes cookie tracking look quaint. We’ll unpack the tradeoffs and power dynamics of this next era.
We’re not just witnessing the collapse of traditional marketing. We’re watching something smarter, quieter, and more personalized take its place.