As AI Eats Web Traffic, Don’t Panic—Evolve
An SEO expert offers three tips for adapting to “zero click” searches and chatbots.
Based on insights from Kelly Cutler, an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism and lecturer in the Kellogg Executive Education program, December 1, 2025
For many websites, 2025 has been a rude awakening to the AI era. Retailers, news publications, and marketing agencies saw drops in traffic of 20–40 percent, with much of that decline coming from a loss of organic search traffic. The likely culprit: the new AI-generated summaries appearing at the top of search results, providing many users with the answer they sought without any additional clicks.
But Kelly Cutler, an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism and lecturer in the Kellogg Executive Education program, says that the search reset is merely the latest seismic shock in an always-changing internet ecosystem.
“This industry has seen these shifts many, many times throughout the last 20–25 years,” Cutler says. “So this is not something where I would be panicking or assuming that SEO is dead or search engines are over. The sky is not falling. It’s okay, but marketers need to evolve.”
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