Winning in the age of AI Search: How to stay visible and ahead of your competitors

Change in search isn’t coming, it’s already here. Since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022 the way people search, evaluate, and act on information has transformed. Within months, a wave of AI-driven search experiences joined the scene: Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google’s own AI Overviews.

Traditional search once rewarded predictability: rank well, bid smartly, optimize landing pages, and ROI followed. But AI Search has broken that model. Algorithms no longer rank results; they assemble answers. Visibility has become algorithmic, dynamic, and at times invisible.

So what does this mean for you? The old paid-search playbook can’t explain sudden CTR drops or traffic volatility. AI elements like Overviews now sit between you and the click: changing not just where your ads appear, but how they perform. Most analytics tools can tell you that an AI element appeared; few can show you what it did to your results. This guide is designed to bridge that gap, helping you understand, measure, and act on the real performance impact of AI Search on your campaigns.

Every marketer now faces a simple but critical question: How do we stay visible when visibility itself has been redefined? In this Guide, we’ll share the research, insights, and tools that you need to make the right decisions in this new era of AI search. 

Before diving into this Guide, take a moment to reflect:

• Do you know where and how often AI Overviews appear in your category and industry?
• Are you tracking your brand’s visibility inside ChatGPT, or Perplexity?
• Can you quantify the impact of AI Search on your paid performance?

If any of these make you pause, that’s what this Guide is for. At the end, you’ll find our AI Search Success Scorecard: a five-minute tool to help you measure your readiness and prioritize your next steps.

To understand the real impact of Google’s AI Overviews, Adthena’s data science team analyzed over 21 million indexes across two four-week periods (April – May and August – September) spanning five key industries: Retail, Travel, Finance, Healthcare, and Automotive.

Our findings revealed a decisive pattern:

• • AIO frequency rises with query length. The more conversational the search, the more likely Google generates an AI Overview.
  • Finance leads the trend: AIOs appear on 36% of finance queries.
  • Retail remains lower at 13%, but the gap is closing as product-based AIOs expand.
  • Healthcare brands are seeing AI-generated answers more often and earlier than others, reflecting higher informational intent in those queries. 
  • When AIOs appear, paid CTR falls 20–40 % on average.

Why? Users now get their answers in the Overview. Ads pushed below generative summaries lose scroll depth and attention share.

Adthena 2025: % of indexes with AI Overview by number of words in search term

Adthena Smart Category Insights Dashboard

If one-third of your core queries now contain AIOs, as in Finance, you’re competing for a smaller pool of clicks. Understanding where these Overviews appear and how they affect performance isn’t optional, it’s survival data.

AIOs currently dominate informational and advisory searches, but Google has begun embedding ads within AI Mode. Paid visibility will soon depend on how well your content and brand signals align with the context those AIOs generate.

Meanwhile, outside of Google, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini have created a parallel discovery economy. Perplexity tends to link directly to brands; ChatGPT cites publishers and forums more often.The critical shift: LLMs don’t rank pages; they curate credibility.

Source: Goodie AI — AEO Periodic Table V3 (2025), cross-model averages across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini and AI Mode.

Goodie AI’s cross model analysis identified four universal visibility levers:

• Relevance: Content must match intent, not just keywords.
• Depth:  AI rewards rich, explanatory material it can summarise.
• Trust: Verified, authoritative, and up-to-date sources are prioritized.
• Citations: The most referenced entities shape final answers.

Source: Goodie AI — AEO Periodic Table V3 (2025), cross-model averages across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini and AI Mode.

Our mission is to help paid-search teams build visibility, trust and insight now, so when ads launch inside LLMs, they’re already positioned to win.

Winning in AI Search means making sure AI experiences present your brand in a way that doesn’t depress your paid performance.

Pro Tip: Leverage Adthena’s sentiment analysis to protect your brand. When the analysis trends are neutral or negative, review the sources being cited – negative framing in AIOs often correlates with lower CTR on the same terms.

This analysis is essential for maintaining brand integrity. Without this visibility, teams risk losing traffic and allowing negative or neutral framing to erode customer trust before they even click.

With the rapid rise of AI Overviews and other evolving search features, advertisers need visibility into how Google’s results pages are actually changing in their category. While the search landscape grows more opaque, we’ll help make it measurable, with our latest AI search innovations; AIO Premium and LLM Performance.

AI Overview Premium: See the full picture

AIO Premium shows you not just where AI Overviews appear, but what they do to your paid search results: clicks, CTR, CPC and ROAS.

The feature pinpoints where your ads appear in relation to an Overview (above, below, or within), and highlights whether your brand is cited in the summary, and how it’s described. You can instantly see if competitors are earning visibility you’re missing, and which categories are most exposed.

AIO Premium also tracks AIO frequency and trends by geography and query type, helping you focus analysis where AI disruption is most pronounced. This insight transforms theoretical “AI Search impact” into practical levers you can optimize right now.

Source: Adthena’s AIO Premium

Pro Tip: In the Adthena platform, you can use AI Overview Premium to review “AIO Placement vs CTR” weekly. If you see CTR declining while CPCs remain steady, consider adjusting bids or creatives on those high-AIO queries and shifting focus toward higher-intent variants.”

This data provides a crucial strategic edge. Without Adthena’s detailed view of AIO Placement vs. CTR, teams can make bid and budget decisions blindly, leading to wasted spend on low-performing generative placements.

LLM Performance: Visibility beyond Google

LLMs are where early research and recommendations now happen. If you’re not present there, you’re absent from the conversation that precedes search. Complementing AIO Premium, LLM Performance helps you to track your brand’s visibility within ChatGPT and Perplexity, showing how often and in what context you are mentioned. Over time, these LLM visibility patterns can be correlated with paid-search efficiency, especially as AI placements are monetized. Being able to measure that link will matter more than simply knowing you appeared.

You’ll see share of voice, citation frequency, and sentiment across models, and you can benchmark competitors to understand who’s winning early in this new search economy. The feature updates daily and can be customized with prompt packages aligned to your key categories.

Source: Adthena’s LLM Performance

Pro Tip: Using Adthena’s LLM Performance, your performance team can regularly review key brand citations and flag shifts in tone or sentiment. It’s a fast way to monitor how your brand is represented across AI ecosystems.

Without dedicated LLM Performance monitoring, brands risk losing oversight of their narrative across AI ecosystems, ceding control of their reputation to large language models and competitors.

AI Search innovation is accelerating faster than any previous evolution in paid advertising. Ads within AIOs and AI Mode are already live in the U.S., and LLM-based ad formats are in active development for ChatGPT and Gemini. Meanwhile, generative search now influences every industry, from automotive to healthcare, finance to travel.

The challenge for marketers is clear: to stay agile as visibility becomes contextual, fluid, and driven by AI systems that behave more like advisors than indexes.

Adthena’s roadmap is built to keep you ahead, not reacting, but leading.

The AI Search Success Scorecard

This scorecard helps you evaluate not just your visibility in AI Search, but your overall readiness to compete in a generative landscape. It will help you to consider how visible, trusted, and adaptable your brand is across evolving AI and search environments, and highlight where you can make the biggest gains.

Score each area from 1 to 5 (1 = no visibility, 5 = best-in-class), then follow our guidance to identify where to focus next.

Interpreting your results

AI Search disruption is not a threat, it’s a turning point. The marketers who act now – measuring, testing, and adapting – will lead in visibility, efficiency, and customer reach. Those that don’t will lose visibility to algorithms they can’t see.

With AIO Premium and LLM Performance, you can:

• Own your visibility across AI ecosystems.
• Protect your performance as algorithms evolve.
• Lead with insight in a world where answers replace ads.

Own your visibility. Protect your performance. Speak to your Account Manager today or book a demo to get started with AI Search.