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Why Google Continues to Lead in Search Despite AI Advancements

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Why Google Continues to Lead in Search Despite AI Advancements

Google Search Isn’t Going Anywhere — and Here’s Why That Matters

Published: April 9, 2025

Automotive Internet Media | Digital Marketing Agency

Google Search vs. AI Tools

In the era of rapid AI innovation and the growing popularity of tools like ChatGPT, one might expect Google’s dominance in search to be challenged. But the data tells a different story — one that highlights Google search for lasting consumer trust, reliable performance, and ongoing value for marketers.

% of US consumers who use AI chatbots or AI search tools to find out information, by generation, Dec 2024

EMarketer Graph

According to a December 2024 survey from Pearl, conducted by Censuswide and reported by eMarketer, 57.8% of US consumers still prefer to use Google search over AI platforms like ChatGPT when they need a factual answer. That’s more than half of the population choosing Google — not out of habit, but because they trust it for real, reliable information.

Consumers Still Trust Google for Facts

The key takeaway from the survey? When accuracy matters, users turn to Google. Despite the conversational aspect and accessibility of AI platforms, people still see Google as the definitive source for factual information. This trust has been built over decades of delivering relevant, credible results — reinforced by Google’s sophisticated algorithms and its vast indexing of the web.

The fact that people still trust Google says a lot and it’s something marketers should pay attention to.

Google Search Ads Are Not Dead — They’re Essential

With so much buzz around AI, it’s easy to assume traditional digital marketing tactics like search ads are losing relevance. However, it is evident that Google search ads remain highly effective, especially because the platform is still where the majority of users go when they’re actively looking for information.

If your audience is still using Google for answers — especially fact-based or purchase-intent queries — then showing up there through paid ads and organic SEO remains a smart investment. Marketers can use this data to validate an ongoing (or even increased) focus on Google-centric strategies and campaigns.

But Don’t Ignore the Rise of AI Search

While Google continues to lead, the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other answer engines shouldn’t be ignored. The survey chart highlights two key points: Google is still the top choice, but new search habits are forming. As AI tools grow, people are starting to mix traditional search with conversational AI — especially for things like product discovery and more detailed questions. Marketers should take note and start thinking about how to show up on these AI platforms, too.

What This Means for Your Strategy

  1. Keep prioritizing Google SEO – It’s still the most trusted search engine for factual content.
  2. Don’t sleep on search ads – They’re still a crucial and relevant tool for promoting your products and services.
  3. Start integrating AI-aware strategies – Position your brand for visibility not just in Google, but in the growing number of AI-driven platforms.

Final Thoughts

The future of search is evolving, but that doesn’t mean one platform has to replace another. Google isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the search behaviors it’s shaped over the years. Marketers who recognize both the staying power of Google and the rise of AI will be best positioned to thrive in this shifting landscape.

Google’s AI Overviews & AI Mode: How They Affect Your SEO

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Google’s AI Overviews & AI Mode: How They Affect Your Dealership’s SEO

Google’s AI Overviews, formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), launched on May 14, 2024, reshaping search results and negatively impacting organic traffic, conversions, and revenue for businesses, including dealerships.

Now, Google has introduced AI Mode, a new experimental AI-driven search feature. While access is currently limited to U.S. users over 18 who opt in via Labs, it has the potential to impact search rankings and visibility.

Published: Mar. 19, 2025

Automotive Internet Media | Digital Marketing Agency

AI Overviews

About AI Overviews

AI Overviews leverage generative artificial intelligence to deliver quick, interactive responses, improving user experience but diminishing the visibility of traditional organic search results. Here’s how AI Overviews might be impacting your dealership’s SEO:

  • Declining Organic Traffic: AI-generated summaries appear above organic search results, potentially reducing the number of visitors to your website.
  • Lower Search Rankings: Even top-ranked dealership pages are pushed further down as Google prioritizes AI Overviews and paid ads.
  • Rising Advertising Costs: With Google monetizing AI Overviews through new paid ad placements, competition for visibility increases, making it more challenging—and costly—to outrank competitors.
AI Overviews

Adweek.com states “Google launched its artificial intelligence-powered search engine, Search Generative Experience, in beta last May, sending publishers scrambling to prepare for a significant disruption in organic search traffic, with potential declines ranging from 20% to 60%, according to media executives and search engine optimization experts interviewed for this story.” This highlights the significant potential decline in organic traffic that websites may experience due to AI Overviews.

About Google’s New AI Mode

AI Mode

Unlike AI Overviews, AI Mode applies to all search queries, offering broader AI-powered insights. With an interactive chat interface, users can refine their searches and ask follow-up questions—similar to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. AI Mode is powered by a custom version of Gemini 2.0, Google’s latest AI model.

How We Stay Ahead of the Trends

As AI Overviews and AI Mode change the search landscape and reduce organic visibility, our team at Automotive Internet Media is committed to helping dealerships navigate these shifts. We focus on optimizing for long-tail queries by crafting detailed, authoritative content to improve visibility, enhancing local SEO by strengthening your Google Business Profile, and diversifying traffic sources by expanding your reach through social media and email marketing.

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AIM One-Stop Shop

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A Look Under the Hood
We are better than your average digital marketing company.  We know how to market your dealership with some of the best, fresh digital content and social presence while keeping your overall goals in mind: more traffic, engaged users and increased sales.
The Best Mix of Marketing Services
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Conquest Email Marketing:  You might want to make a U-turn if your dealership isn’t currently utilizing email marketing.  But AIM’s email marketing is not something you’ll find using standard email marketing services.  Our Supercharged email marketing services offer data to dominate your market and increase sales.
Email Newsletters: Living in a digital age, it is important to make sure you are in your customer’s eyes consistently.  AIM’s email marketing allows you to send all your specials and information without having to do the work—we take care of it all!  You’ll expect to have a quick turnaround, a flexible design and high ROI.
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Retargeting: Leverage your traffic coming to your website and capture those visitors who have expressed an interest in your inventory but didn’t make it to check out.  The consumer will then receive online ads for your dealership with our placement of code.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is an investment and it’s an investment a dealership should highly consider.  It will increase your customer base, your sales, your dealership’s reviews and your visibility on the web.
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SEO for Beginners: Understanding the Jargon

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Whether you are a new restaurant, photographer, or a car dealership, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the helping hand that you have been searching for (pun intended). However, it can be hard for someone to understand exactly how much of an impact SEO can have in driving traffic to your website if you don’t understand the basic jargon first. Here is roundup of the top ten most common terms used when talking SEO. But first things first, what the heck is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the strategic method of increasing visibility and traffic in a non-paid manner to your website to help you climb the search engine ranks. This can be done through a variety of methods. The most common of methods include on-site SEO, which includes various techniques that can be implemented directly on your physical website, as well as off-site SEO which focuses primarily on techniques that take place in locations online other than your actual website.

1. Keywords

Keywords are critical when it comes to SEO. A solid round of keyword research should never be overlooked, as keywords are the foundation for a majority of SEO strategies. What exactly are keywords? Keywords are the words that you want your company to rank for in search engines, as well as the ones you want to optimize your website for. To determine these terms, tools such as SEM Rush or Google AdWords Keyword Planner are there to help.

2. Title Tags

Title tags help search engines define what the pages on your website are about. The titles are the ones that appear on search engine result pages, and are also the ones that can be seen in the tabs in your website browser, as can be seen in the examples below. It is important for each page on a website to have a unique title tag so when search engines crawl the website they can differentiate the purpose of one page from another.

Ex.1 Title Tag in Search Resultstitle tag search result

Ex. 2 Title Tag in Web Browser Tab
title tag web browser

3. Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions can be seen as the overall summary of a page on a website. Meta descriptions are the ones that show up under the title tags on search engine result pages, as highlighted in the example below. Meta descriptions should be added to every page, and should be optimized with your focus keywords.
meta description

4. Alt Text

Alt text is text that can be added to images on your website through the backend or content management platform. Alt text helps search engines determine what the pictures on your website are about, and will also help images on your website populate in image search results. If you do not have alt text on your images it may not hurt you, but it certainly isn’t helping you from an SEO standpoint. The most common way to tell if an image has alt text is by hovering over it, as it can be seen below.

Ex.3 Hovering over an Image to see Alt Text
alt text

5. H1, H2, H3 Tags

The use of H1, H2 and H3 tags/headings are important because it helps search engines crawl your webpages in order of importance. The use of h1, h2 and h3 tags make for the pages to be more visibly appealing, as well as more readable for your website visitors. You can utilize these tags on your webpages, blogs or any other content pages on your website. The h1 tag is the most important tag, generally a title. H2 tags would be the second most important, next to the title, and an H3 tag would be something such as subheadings under the H2 tags.
Take this blog post for example, the title “SEO for Beginners: Understanding the Jargon” is the H1 heading. The H2 headings would be “1. Keywords” “2. Title Tags” “3. Meta Description,” etc.

6. Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is hyperlinked on a webpage, so that when clicked on it brings you to a different website, or another internal related page. The anchor text should be relevant to the page it is directing you to. Generally, the anchor text is a keyword or is some form of the brand name.
Let’s take the link below for example; the anchor text would be “CarClicks”, which is the keyword that is linked. When you click on this keyword it will bring you to a landing page that will provide you with more information on CarClicks.

Ex. 4 Anchor Text
CarClicks

7. Google Analytics

As described by SearchBusiness Analytics, “Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes.” It is a platform that allows you to see SEO data and analyze it. Some of the things it will allow you to see include: keywords and terms visitors are searching that bring them to your site, how many times your website URL appeared in search result pages, number of clicks, top locations that are driving traffic to your website and much more.

8. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is non-paid “free” traffic, meaning that the people who visited your website did not arrive there due to paid advertising. Most sites that receive a high amount of organic (natural) traffic are very well optimized for the keywords that they want to rank for by utilizing them in their title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, alt tags etc. These sites also have a quality backlink profile. Companies that utilize these practices put themselves in the best position to be seen in search engine results organically.

9. Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is the opposite of organic traffic, as it is traffic that you have to pay for. Examples of this include Pay-Per-Click, Retargeting and Display Ads. For example, as seen in the picture below, when you search for the keyword phrase, ‘Chicago car detailer’ at the very top of the search results page you will see a paid ad. The paid ad in this example is coming from Groupon. You can tell that it is a paid ad as it says “Ad” in a yellow box right next to the URL. For people who search that term, and click on that Groupon link, Groupon will be charged a certain amount of money for that link, which is the paid traffic.

Ex.5 Paid Traffic in Google
paid traffic

10. Backlinks

Backlinks are links on other websites that drive visitors back to your own site. The most common of backlinks can be found in news articles, company reviews, news releases, business profiles etc. Basically, when someone links to your website from another site other than your own, that is called a backlink.
The amount of SEO jargon that is out there is endless, but hopefully this article was able to help simplify some of the main terms used in SEO. To learn more about Search Engine Optimization and how it can help your business contact Automotive Internet Media today!
 
Author Bio:
Kayla Pernai is the Digital Marketing Manager at Automotive Internet Media (AIM), the leading automotive internet marketing agency providing website, SEO, social and many other services.