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Your website still matters. In fact, it may matter more than ever.
What has changed is how people find and evaluate information about your business. They might discover your brand through Google, see your expertise referenced by an industry publication, encounter your product in an AI-generated answer, read a discussion on Reddit or see your research quoted by a journalist.
The information may originate on your website, but the interaction can happen somewhere else.
Your website remains the foundation. It’s where you control the information you publish, demonstrate your expertise, explain your products and services, and give customers somewhere to take action.
But your search presence now extends well beyond your own domain.
It would be easy to look at the growth of AI search and assume people are abandoning Google.
The data doesn’t support that.
Research from Wix, using Similarweb data, found that AI search platforms received 27.4 billion visits globally in Q1 2026, compared with 250.8 billion visits to Google. AI search visits increased 42.8% year on year, compared with 2.4% growth for Google.
AI search accounted for 9.2% of search traffic compared with Google in Q1 2026, up from 7.8% in Q1 2025. Average monthly AI search users also increased from 851 million in Q4 2025 to 904 million in Q1 2026.
The more useful conclusion isn’t that AI is replacing Google.
It’s that search is expanding.
People can use Google for one task, ChatGPT for another, and a specialist publication, social platform or community for something else. They don’t need to choose one search behaviour and abandon the others.
There is an important limitation to the Wix research. Its definition of AI search covers dedicated platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Grok. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode aren’t separated from Google’s traditional search data in the analysis.
So these figures shouldn’t be treated as a complete measurement of every form of AI-powered search.
They do show that AI search is now large enough and growing quickly enough to deserve attention.
Traditional search has generally worked like this:
Query – search results – website – action
AI search can introduce another route:
Question – AI-generated answer – sources – website or action
A search engine can return several documents and leave the user to assess them.
An AI system can synthesise information from multiple sources before presenting an answer.
The user may still visit the underlying websites. They may also get enough information from the answer itself to continue their research elsewhere.
That creates a gap between visibility and traffic.
A brand can be visible without receiving a click. If someone sees your business while researching a service, discovers your expertise through a cited source or encounters your research while comparing options, you’ve entered the consideration process.
The challenge is understanding which of those interactions actually matter commercially.
The rise of AI search doesn’t change the fundamental role of your website.
If you want your business to be associated with a particular subject, product, service or area of expertise, your website is one of the places where you control that information.
You can publish:
That content gives search engines something to discover. It also gives other people something to reference.
Google’s guidance on AI features and your website continues to point back to established Search fundamentals. Pages need to be crawlable, indexable and eligible to appear in Search, while content should be useful and created for people. Google also states that there are no additional technical requirements specifically for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
So while the search experience is changing, the foundations haven’t disappeared.
Technical SEO still matters. Useful content still matters. Clear information about your business still matters.
The bigger change is what happens after you publish that information. Imagine a business publishes original research on its website. A journalist uses the findings in an article. An industry publication quotes one of the company’s experts. Someone discusses the research on Reddit. Another website references the data.
An AI platform encounters those sources when answering a related question.
The original information still lives on the website, but its reach isn’t confined to the website.
Your search presence now extends across the wider web.
Wix’s research into on-page factors for AI visibility supports this broader view. Its analysis found correlations between AI visibility and factors beyond a website itself, including digital PR, social media, Wikipedia and forums such as Reddit.
That doesn’t prove that a mention on one of these platforms causes a site to appear in AI results. It does show why AI visibility shouldn’t be treated as purely an on-page SEO problem.
This is where digital PR becomes particularly important.
Digital PR is often measured through coverage and links, but its role can be broader.
If your business publishes original research and a respected industry publication references it, someone else has independently chosen to talk about your expertise. That creates another source of information about your brand.
Your website can say:
A third-party article can provide another piece of evidence:
Those are different signals.
That doesn’t mean every mention is valuable. Relevance and credibility matter. A meaningful reference in a publication your target audience trusts is very different from a brand name appearing on an unrelated website.
It also doesn’t mean digital PR replaces SEO.
The two activities can support each other.
A strong piece of original research can:
The strongest campaigns don’t create content simply to fill a blog.
They create something other people have a reason to reference.
Your business also needs to be clear and consistent about who you are, what you do and the subjects you have genuine expertise in.
That information can come from your website, but it can be reinforced through credible third-party coverage.
For example, if your website demonstrates expertise in technical SEO, your experts contribute commentary to relevant publications, and your original research is referenced by industry sources, those different pieces of information reinforce the same association.
Search engines and AI systems aren’t only matching individual keywords. They’re also trying to understand businesses, people, topics and the relationships between them.
That doesn’t mean publishing the same information everywhere or trying to manufacture mentions.
It means making sure the information that exists about your business is accurate, consistent and supported by evidence.
Your website establishes that information. Digital PR and other third-party activity can help reinforce it.
There is another reason the website isn’t going away.
The more complex the decision, the more information a customer needs before taking action.
Someone searching:
“What is technical SEO?” may not need to visit your website.
Someone asking:
“Which technical SEO agency should we appoint?” needs considerably more information.
They may want to see:
An AI-generated answer can help someone discover and shortlist a business.
It can’t replace every reason someone needs to visit that business’s website.
The website remains the place where a customer can validate the decision and take action.
Traditional SEO has made us comfortable with a fairly simple model:
Impressions – clicks – website sessions – conversions
Those metrics still matter.
But AI search can create another path.
Someone might ask an AI platform for recommendations and see your brand mentioned. They might never click the citation, then search for your brand separately or return later through direct traffic.
That interaction may be valuable, but it won’t necessarily appear as an AI referral session in your analytics.
There’s also a difference between a mention and a citation.
A brand can be mentioned in an AI response without receiving a link. A citation provides a source that the user can follow.
Both contribute to visibility, but they shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable measures.
There isn’t yet a single standard metric for AI visibility, either. Different tools can measure mentions, citations, prompts, sources or share of answers in different ways.
For now, AI visibility is better treated as a collection of signals rather than a single definitive KPI.
The growth of AI search creates two tempting reactions.
The first is to assume traditional SEO no longer matters.
The second is to start producing content specifically for AI platforms without considering whether that content is useful to customers.
Neither is particularly helpful.
Wix’s research found that traditional organic search traffic was the strongest predictor of AI visibility within its dataset. Sites with at least 50 organic search visits per month were 8.2 times more likely to be discovered than sites with minimal or no organic search traffic.
That isn’t evidence that organic traffic directly causes AI visibility, but it does reinforce an important point:
Strong SEO foundations and AI visibility aren’t opposing strategies.
The same work also found correlations between AI visibility and factors such as internal linking, structured formatting, metadata and consistent publishing.
So don’t throw away the foundations while chasing the latest AI tactic.
Don’t focus solely on producing more content.
Create information that adds something.
Original data, expert analysis, useful research and genuine first-hand experience give people a reason to reference your website.
If the content could have been produced by any business in your sector, ask whether it does enough to establish why your business should be the source.
Make sure important content can be crawled, indexed and understood.
Review:
If you want coverage, create something worth covering.
That could be:
A press release about how brilliant your business is isn’t likely to create the same value as information a journalist actually wants to use.
When evaluating digital PR, ask more than:
How many links did we get?
Consider:
Links remain useful, but they’re only one outcome.
If you want to be associated with a particular topic, your website, PR activity and wider presence should support that association.
That means being consistent about:
You don’t need to be everywhere.
You need to be credible in the places that matter.
Google is already expanding how it reports search performance.
In September 2026, Google announced Search Console reporting for web multimodal search, including searches involving Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads and “Search this image”.
That’s another indication that search behaviour is becoming harder to capture through one traditional traffic metric.
Your reporting doesn’t need to become enormous.
Instead, think about three areas.
Owned visibility
Earned visibility
AI visibility
Then connect those measures to commercial outcomes.
If you’re tracking AI mentions but can’t explain why they matter to the business, you’ve probably got a measurement problem rather than an AI search problem.
No.
Search is becoming bigger than your website.
Your website remains the foundation because it’s where you can publish and control the information you want associated with your brand.
SEO helps make that information discoverable.
Digital PR helps get your expertise referenced elsewhere.
Search engines and AI platforms can then surface information from across that wider ecosystem.
The job for marketers is therefore broader than getting someone from Google to your website. You need to build a search presence that supports discovery, consideration and conversion wherever those interactions happen.
Your website still matters.
The opportunity is to stop treating it as the entire search strategy.