AI Overviews and LLM Search Are Not a Crisis: Agents Are a New Channel

Today’s guest marketer post is by Axel Rosar, Director of Commerce and Search at Haworth Media. Haworth is an independent, full-service media agency based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that delivers data-driven, omnichannel media planning and activation, offering strategic growth planning, customer data strategies, creative services, analytics and reporting, and strategic services tailored to drive measurable brand results. 

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AI is changing Search quickly. While there are many LinkedIn posts out there about how the sky is falling right now, the truth is this: if you just keep doing the right things, you should be fine. 

Yes, Google’s AI Overviews and assistant-style answers from tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are significantly pushing down organic search results. But that is only half the story. At Haworth Media, we are already seeing a growing stream of referral traffic from these assistants, especially on long-tail and comparison queries that sound like how real people shop. Below, we lay out the data, what we are observing across clients, and how to win in this new era.

Fight feelings with data

Pew Research analyzed 68,879 Google searches from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found:

• An AI summary appeared on 18% of searches. 88% of summaries cited three or more sources.
• When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time versus 15% without a summary. Links inside the AI summary were clicked in ~1% of visits.
• Sessions ended more often when a summary appeared, 26% vs 16%.
• The most frequently cited sources were Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit. Longer, question-style queries triggered summaries far more often.

Google has publicly pushed back on broad interpretations of the study, stating that overall “quality clicks” have remained stable, which is worth noting as the ecosystem shifts.

Our take: Some blue-link clicks are compressing, but intent is not disappearing. Instead, it is redistributing, often into assistant-provided answers that cite and link to PDPs, buying guides, and honest comparison content.

Bottom line, assistant-provided answers are redistributing intent-driven traffic from blue links into referrals from LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity driving qualified visits to PDPs, guides, and comparisons that still convert into sales and leads.

Across ecommerce, we are now seeing more source / medium traffic like:
perplexity.ai / referral, claude.ai / referral, and chatgpt.com / referral, among others.

The patterns are consistent:

• Queries look like real questions and comparisons. For example: Product A vs Product B for a small patio and Service 1 or Service 2 for regulated industry use.
• Results skew towards PDPs, comparison tables, FAQs, and buying guides.
• We are seeing sales and qualified leads from these sessions.

For example, here’s the response from ChatGTP-5  to What are the best modern smokeless fire pits? Solo Stove is listed as the “Best Overall,” but in the highlighted portion, we see that Breeo and Tiki Brands have links to their respective PDPs.

search traffic isn’t going away in the AI era, just shifting

How to position your brand for LLM-driven demand

You do not “optimize for AI” with a secret tag. You optimize for clarity, truth, and utility. Here’s  how:

Technical SEO Foundations

Keep the basics tight: clean crawl paths, canonicalization, and strong internal linking. Maintain structured data across PDPs and help pages (Product, Review, FAQ, HowTo), since assistants and new search features rely heavily on clear, schema-backed entities.

Content Is Still King

Focus on authoritative PDPs with full specs, clear “best for” use cases, FAQs, and calls-to-action. Build honest comparison tables (size, materials, warranty, use-cases) or broader buyer’s guides if direct head-to-head feels risky. Cite credible sources; assistants often surface content from Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, so aligning with these signals boosts trust.

Beyond Owned Properties

Reddit deserves a strategy: engage in relevant subreddits with authentic answers and helpful comparisons. Keep marketplace PDPs polished; titles, bullets, A+ content, reviews all influence what assistants surface. Finally, track impact by setting up a GA4 custom channel for AI Assistant Referral, trending conversions over time, and filling measurement gaps with surveys.

Be cautious with Google’s AI Max for Search

Google’s AI Max for Search is rolling out as a powerful automation suite, but advertisers should approach with caution. While framed as a one-click layer for reach expansion, its behavior mirrors Broad Match combined with Dynamic Search Ads, often prioritizing scale over precision. This means search-term expansion, dynamic copy adjustments, and URL routing can unintentionally dilute strategy, introducing cannibalization of existing campaigns rather than driving true incremental lift.

For Haworth Media and similar advertisers, the risk lies in overextension without guardrails: ad spend being siphoned into queries or landing pages that don’t align with intent, reducing efficiency. Despite Google’s claims of “similar CPA with more conversions,” early patterns suggest the gains are often reallocated rather than net-new. To optimize, treat AI Max less like a growth lever and more like a test: confine it to isolated budgets, layer on URL exclusions, and monitor search term reports with discipline. 

The core principle remains the same as ranking for organic or LLMs clarity, truth, and utility but with AI Max, protecting relevance is the difference between smart discovery and runaway inefficiency.

It’s a mindset shift

If you open LinkedIn right now, It would seem as if the sky is falling related to AI content stealing traffic. But of course, hot takes posted on LinkedIn tend to be reactive. The practical view is calmer. Information retrieval is fragmenting. Some answers stop at the AI layer; others click through. A meaningful slice now arrives as LLM referrals. Brands that invested early in durable SEO fundamentals and credible, comparison-friendly content are already benefiting as assistants cite them.

If you keep your house in order with technical SEO, product truth, useful comparisons, credible third-party signals, and clean measurement, then AI search will not “kill” your traffic. 

It will reroute it.