The AI Search Showdown - Zach Chahalis - Digital Summit Tampa 2026

When clicks disappear, what becomes of your SEO strategy? Join the debate that every marketing leader must hear.

The search landscape is shifting beneath our feet. The latest data shows that a rising share of queries end without a click. Users are finding answers directly on search result pages or in AI-powered summaries, bypassing your website altogether.

What does this mean for your brand, your visibility, and your ability to measure impact? Is this the end of traditional SEO or the birth of a new frontier?

Why it matters?

In the U.S. alone, results show that fewer than half of all Google searches now lead to an organic website click.
As zero-click searches rise, brands that rely on traffic as a success metric face an existential threat, yet smart marketers are finding new ways to win visibility.
Whether you see AI-driven search as a threat to your traffic or an opportunity to claim first-mover advantage, the time to act is now.

Transcript

1. THE AI SEARCH SHOWDOWN: FRIEND OR FOE? Zach Chahalis Sr. Director of SEO and Data Analytics iPullRank @ZachChahalis
2. I’M ZACH CHAHALIS SR. DIRECTOR OF SEO AND DATA ANALYTICS iPullRank My context: 5+ Months at iPR (But 2.5 yrs in total) 15 Years in SEO, Marketing Analytics, and CRO 26 Days from Getting Married (Almost) 11 Yr Old Goldendoodle
3. ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ 3 ❏ AGENDA Measurement in the Age of AI: What Actually Matters Dealing with AI as the Hot Topic within Management Value of Rankings and Rank/Prompt Tracking Has AI Made SEO Better or Just Louder? Is it Wise to Opt Out of AI Crawling and Learning Models? THE AI SEARCH SHOWDOWN: FRIEND OR FOE?
4. MEASUREMENT IN THE AGE OF AI 4 WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS FOR MEASUREMENT?
5. THREE BUCKETS FOR MEASUREMENT MEASUREMENT MUST EVOLVE BEYOND PERFORMANCE METRICS Passage Relevance Entity Salience Bot Activity Synthetic Query Rankings Share of Voice Citation Rate Citation Quality Citation Sentiment Traffic Events Conversions Engagement Depth Measures how visible, cited, and represented your brand is across search and AI surfaces. Outcomes that prove whether visibility and citations translate into business impact. Signals that show whether your content and site are aligned with how AI and search engines understand and retrieve information.
6. DEALING WITH AI 6 THE NEW HOT TOPIC IN YOUR LEADERSHIP
7. Do not abandon your classic search efforts to focus solely on AI Search visibility - you can optimize for both simultaneously by engineering relevance. — Me, Sr. Director of SEO, iPullRank
8. HIGHER QUALITY CLICKS Adobe has indicated that the gap in the conversion rates between AI and non-AI channels has closed significantly in a very short time frame.
9. 50-300% WHAT ARE WE SEEING NOW? Better Conversion Rate For AI Search Referrers Compared to Classic Search and Direct Traffic
10. WHAT ARE WE SEEING NOW? AI Search Referral Traffic Continues to be <1% of total traffic on most websites. BUT THE TRAFFIC IS MINIMAL
11. WHAT ARE WE SEEING NOW? GOOOGLE IS STILL DOMINANT
12. THE SHIFT FROM SEARCH ENGINE TO SEARCH ECOSYSTEM Google still matters. It still dominates 90% of the market. But search behavior has fragmented across AI platforms, assistants, and vertical ecosystems. It shapes how people find and trust information. Brands must be present wherever discovery happens. Classic search feeds modern discovery. Intent determines platform. Relevance determines visibility.
13. AI ASSEMBLES ANSWERS - VISIBILITY IS A NUMBERS GAME AI Search expands one query into many, pulls passages from multiple sources, and builds a single response. Your brand wins by increasing retrieval presence across the knowledge graph. Each passage is like a raffle ticket. The more high-quality entries you have, the more often your brand appears in the final answer. Relevance and coverage drive inclusion.
14. SEARCH IS BIGGER THAN YOUR WEBSITE Search is no longer just web results. People find answers through video, images, social platforms, marketplaces, and AI responses. Your brand must be present across the full content ecosystem. Be present everywhere discovery happens.
15. RELEVANCE CONNECTS CLASSIC AND CONVERSATIONAL SEARCH RELEVANCE AUTHORITY Trusted signals across your digital presence KNOWLEDGE QUALITY Accurate, complete, and reliable information CONTEXTUAL Content aligned to real user intent and situation USER EXPERIENCE Good UX removes friction, drives engagement, and builds brands
16. SEO IS DEPRECATED. RELEVANCE ENGINEERING IS THE FUTURE. Relevance Engineering (r19g) is our framework for helping brands surface across modern discovery. It combines content, authority, experience, technical hygiene, and strategy to increase how often your brand is retrieved, trusted, and included in answers. PILLARS OF RELEVANCE ENGINEERING INFORMATION RETRIEVAL: Structure content for semantic search, embeddings, and vector space scoring. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Optimize for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that fuel AI answers. USER EXPERIENCE: Design clarity and structure so systems and people can both interpret content. CONTENT STRATEGY: Build topical clusters and semantic depth to match intent across surfaces and channels with Content Resonance. DIGITAL PR: Strengthen authority signals that models and users recognize as trustworthy.
17. RANK TRACKING 17 WHAT ITS VALUE IN THE MODERN AGE
18. RANK TRACKING HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR A LONG TIME The num=100 parameter yielded different results than what you see as a user clicking through the pagination. Personalization and dropping organic further down the page means #1 isn’t what it was
19. We need to care about visibility but we cannot be obsessed with daily rank tracking. We also need to pivot how we measure visibility. — Me, Sr. Director of SEO, iPullRank
20. BUT WHAT ABOUT PROMPT TRACKING? 20
21. PROMPTS ARE GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT Search engines have trained users to write in newspeak, but Conversational AI thrives on detail and specificity. Users are quickly evolving as they better recognize Google can handle more from the input.
22. ANATOMY OF A STRONG PROMPT Conversational search performs best when you give it the subject, context, intent, and constraints. Even with the right prompt, AI responses are probabilistic and personalized
23. BUT WE ARE STARTING TO GET MORE DATA Maybe this is a catalyst?
24. AND WE CAN START TO ISOLATE DATA IN GSC/GA GSC Regex: ^(?:\S+\s+){9,}\S+$ GA Custom Channel Grouping: ^(?:chatgpt\.com|chat-gpt\.org|claude\.ai|quillbot\.com|openai\.com|blac kbox\.ai|perplexity(?:\.ai)?|copy\.ai|jasper\.ai|copilot\.microsoft\.com |gemini\.google\.com|(?:\w+\.)?mistral\.ai|deepseek\.com|edgepilot|edges ervices|nimble\.ai|iask\.ai|aitastic\.app|bnngpt\.com|writesonic\.com|ex a\.ai|waldo|cohere\.ai|huggingface\.co|anthropic\.com|chatglm\.cn|baichu an-ai\.com|zhipu\.ai|palm-ai\.google\.com|gemini-api\.google\.com|xiaoic e\.com|quora\.com/poe|my-ai\.snapchat\.com|deepl\.com|you\.com|yiyan\.ba idu\.com|ai\.baidu\.com|anthropic-api\.com|open-assistant\.io|huggingcha t\.com|forefront\.ai|character\.ai|chat\.suno\.com|deepmind\.com|phind\. com|pi\.ai|komo\.ai|vicuna\.ai|firefly\.adobe\.com|grok\.x\.com|coze\.co m|x\.ai|bard\.google\.com|lighton\.ai|spellbook\.rossintelligence\.com|n otion\.so/ai|wordtune\.com|syntesia\.io|hyperwriteai\.com|sap\.ai|reka\. ai|app\.loora\.ai|uminal\.org|alphacode\.google\.com|ai21\.com|openroute r\.ai|magical\.team|useblackbox\.io|ai-coustics\.com|chinchilla\.ai|d-id \.com|wav\.ai|openchat\.so|floydhub\.com|bing\.com/chat|copilot\.azure\. com|turing\.microsoft\.com|cosmos\.microsoft\.com|orca\.microsoft\.com|p hi\.microsoft\.com|megatron\.microsoft\.com|jarvis\.microsoft\.com|maia\ .microsoft\.com|palm\.google\.com|deeplearning\.google\.com|vertexai\.go ogle\.com|ai\.google\.com|deepmind\.google\.com|cloud\.google\.com/ai|cl oud\.google\.com/vertex-ai|research\.google\.com/ai|ml\.googleapis\.com| tensor\.google\.com|t5\.google\.com)$
25. HAS AI MADE SEARCH BETTER? 25 OR IS IT JUST LOUDER?
26. It entirely depends on your perspective! — Me, Sr. Director of SEO, iPullRank
27. AI SLOP IS GROWING FAST A Stanford University study analyzing over 300 million documents (from corporate press releases and job postings to UN press releases) showed a sharp surge in LLM-generated content following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Source: The Widespread Adoption of Large Language Model-Assisted Writing Across Society
28. AI USAGE DOES NOT IMPACT RANKINGS According to data from Ahrefs, 86.5% of top-ranking pages now include some form of AI assistance. Only 13.5% are fully human-written. Google appears largely indifferent to this shift. That is, it neither significantly rewards nor penalizes AI-generated pages. You can create valuable AI content
29. 90% of online content may be AI-generated by 2026 Digital Ouroboros is on the way with experts estimating that as much as 90% of online content may be AI-generated by 2026. For creators, marketers, and businesses, this raises urgent new questions. How do you compete, rank, or even stay visible in an ecosystem buried under an avalanche of low-quality synthetic content?
30. BUT AI HAS ALSO IMPROVED EFFICIENCY AND UP-LEVELED SOME MARKETERS Use AI to help automate repetitive tasks and processes. Refocus your time on what matters - defining your strategy. Don’t be afraid to try using AI to build tools and create things that don’t exist.
31. OPTING OUT OF AI SEARCH 31 IS THIS WISE OR NOT?
32. Again, it depends on your perspective! — Me, Sr. Director of SEO, iPullRank
33. THERE ARE USE CASES WHERE YOU MAY NOT WANT TO BE IN THE LLMS This is for your business to decide A publication website on a paywall model may want to limit its inclusion in LLMs Companies with proprietary data may not want to give that away AI will replace some business models. Some businesses could be accelerating their eventual demise if they make the wrong move. At the same time, I care about the bottom line. Does being visible in AI search help your brand and help your bottom-line metrics? Your company needs to weigh all risks and rewards
34. BUT IF YOU PARTICIPATE MAKE SURE YOU’RE NOT BLOCKING CRAWLERS
35. Zach Chahalis Senior Director of SEO and Data Analytics iPullRank X: @ZachChahalis LI: /zacharychahalis Tap in with us: ipullrank.com THANK YOU Get the Slides
36. SCREAMING FROG + OLLAMA I generate embeddings as I crawl, asset content, take screenshots and analyze as I crawl. All on my own local GPU.
37. ipullrank.com/ai-search-manual AI Search to Sale: What the Data Reveals About AI Search eCommerce Behavior