LN & Co. Insights · May 2026
What ChatGPT Did to Your Traffic in 2025... and how it's affecting you now
Something quiet has shifted in how people find brands online, and most marketing teams are still planning around the old rules.
By LN & Co. · May 2026 · 6 min read
Pew Research Center tracked the browsing behavior of 900 U.S. adults across nearly 69,000 Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared at the top of the page, only 8 percent of users clicked through to a website. Without the summary, that number nearly doubles to 15 percent. Inside the AI summary itself, the click-through rate dropped to 1 percent. Sessions ended more often. Searches got longer and more specific.
The traffic did not disappear. It just changed shape.
Eighteen percent of all searches in that study produced an AI summary. Sixty percent of question-style searches did. By December 2025, separate research from Ahrefs showed AI Overviews correlating with a 58 percent reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages. Nearly 800 million people now use ChatGPT each week to ask questions, compare options, and make decisions before they ever type a brand name into a browser.
If you have noticed your traffic numbers softening even when your content is performing, this is why.
What this means for the brands we serve
The visibility game has moved upstream. Search engines used to rank pages. AI engines cite sources. The brands that get cited are the ones with clear identity, structured authority, and content rooted in something specific enough that an AI model can recognize it as a trustworthy answer.
That last part matters more than the technology coverage suggests. Generic content is exactly what large language models can already produce on their own. They have no reason to cite it. What models cite is content that says something a generic source cannot, written from a position of earned authority on a defined topic.
“Cultural specificity is no longer a creative preference. It is a search advantage.”
Where the Culture + Technology Framework comes in
The Culture + Technology Framework was built on a simple sequence. Culture leads. Technology follows. That order was always how good multicultural marketing worked. The shift in 2026 is that the same order now produces the structural conditions AI engines reward.
Step 1 of the framework asks brands to define their audience with intersectional depth, not surface demographics. That depth becomes the identity signal AI models use to determine who you are talking to and whether your content is relevant.
Step 2 maps the cultural landscape: moments, values, language, and voices specific to that audience. That specificity becomes the contextual signal AI models use to surface your brand inside answers about those moments and that audience.
Step 4 builds messaging in the language of the community you serve. That voice becomes the authenticity signal AI models use to distinguish a brand that earned the right to speak from a brand that scraped a trend report.
Brands that center women and multicultural audiences from the start of strategy already produce the kind of content the new search environment is built to reward. The work has not changed. The way it gets discovered has.
Three things to do this quarter
01
Audit the first 150 to 200 words of every page on your site.
AI engines weight that opening more heavily than the rest of the page when deciding who you are and what you offer. Make sure those opening words name the audience, the offer, and the cultural specificity that sets the brand apart.
02
Add brand impressions and AI citations to your reporting alongside traffic and click data.
Brand visibility inside AI answers is a leading indicator that traditional analytics tools were not built to measure. Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker already track citation share.
03
Stop optimizing for clicks alone. Start building authority on a focused set of topics where the brand can be cited, not just ranked.
For multicultural brands, that means doubling down on the cultural depth that already differentiates the work.
The takeaway
The fragmentation of search is uncomfortable for brands that built their playbook around one search engine and one funnel. It is a structural opening for brands that have always centered specific audiences and specific cultural intelligence. AI engines reward what those brands already do.
The traffic is not gone. The brands that earn citations are the ones the next decade of search will be built around.
Sources
- Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” July 2025.
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews click-through analysis, December 2025.
- Marketing Dive, “9 marketing predictions for 2026 as AI fuels polarity,” January 2026.
- Adweek, “10 AI Marketing Trends for 2026,” February 2026.
- Gartner, “The Future of Marketing: 5 Trends and Predictions for 2026.”
- Kantar, “Marketing Trends 2026.”
Want to talk through what this looks like for your brand?
We offer a free 30-minute discovery call. No pitch. We listen first, ask sharp questions, and tell you honestly whether the C+T Framework is the right fit for what you are trying to build.
