Traffic Is Down—Now What? Marketing Success In the Age of AI

We’re at a turning point in SEO.

For decades, the playbook was simple: create great content, optimize for search, and watch the traffic roll in. A lot of successful businesses were built on that playbook. Semrush is a living example of this.

But generative AI has changed SEO forever. Here's what we’re noticing across the industry:

• Google is sending less traffic to websites as more queries are answered directly in AI Overviews
• You might think AI chatbots like ChatGPT & Claude would make up that lost traffic, but they largely cite big brands, making it harder for smaller sites to gain visibility
• With fewer clicks, SEO doesn’t deliver the same predictable ROI it once did

So, how do you build a successful online business when traffic sources are drying up?

Before we share our advice, let's revisit the pre-AI world of SEO for a bit. And explore why we should do marketing with more intention.

SEO Was a Surefire Marketing Activity

For nearly two decades, you could build a thriving online business by making Google's algorithm happy. If you did technical optimizations, targeted the right keywords, and built backlinks, traffic would flow to your site.

Classic marketing skills like brand building, promotion, and creativity weren't necessary for success in practice.

But now that AI is changing things for SEO, success requires exactly those skills:

• Brand building: Your brand needs to be popular enough that it naturally gets mentioned across the web when conversations about your industry are happening
• Promotion: You need to actively distribute and amplify your content through email, social media, and influencer partnerships (rather than just relying on Google traffic)
• Creativity: You need to create content and campaigns that stand out and get people talking—the kind of work that's genuinely interesting or valuable. Not just optimized.
• Willingness to try new ideas: You need to be open to testing new strategies (even if they’re not yet proven). For example, we recently tested query fan-out optimization to see if it helps improve our AI visibility.

If you embrace these foundational marketing skills, your business can thrive in the post-AI era of SEO.

LLMs Are the New Marketing Opportunity

AI platforms represent the next frontier for content discovery and traffic generation—ChatGPT alone has 800 million weekly active users. But you need to have a strong brand to succeed. 

The reality is that AI platforms systematically favor established brands and well-known sources, making it difficult for smaller sites to be cited in AI answers. 

Here are the most cited domains in Google’s AI Overviews, according to our AI traffic research from July 2025.

You’ll see that these are mostly big brands. And they tend to dominate in other LLMs as well. For smaller businesses, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem. You need authority to get cited in AI answers. But you need to be more visible and recognized in general to convince AI you’re an authority.

That means building a brand has become even more important. It not only helps increase your AI visibility, but also helps generate more traffic to your website overall.

When you have a strong brand, people search for you by name. They bookmark your site. They share your content without being asked. They open your emails. This creates a sustainable stream of traffic.

If you want a baseline idea of how visible your brand is in AI platforms, use the AI SEO Toolkit from Semrush. It allows you to track your brand mentions and citations in AI platforms.

How to Build a Brand & Grow Your Business

To build a successful brand, you need to show up where your audience already spends their time and add value to their lives. Here are seven tactics that you can use to start brand building:

1. Create Sticky Content

Publishing content that keeps visitors engaged and coming back (i.e., sticky content) builds a strong brand.

Your content should:

• Make a lasting impression, so readers remember your company
• Encourage people to come back to your site
• Be so memorable that it makes readers feel connected to the people behind your brand
• Get shared organically because people want others to experience it

Take Growth.Design’s content as an example. They create interactive stories that teach design and growth principles through engaging visual narratives.

Their content combines beautiful illustrations, storytelling, and practical lessons in a format you won't find anywhere else. Here's one of their interactive case studies you can check out. 

Growth.Design gets a lot of praise for their unique approach. Here's what Peep Laja, founder of CXL, says:

“Many sites are in a sea of sameness. But Growth.Design’s content is just so different. Serious effort goes in there. It’s clearly hard to produce. Most people aren’t ready to put in that kind of work and resources.”

This approach has helped Growth.Design establish their brand presence in the design education space.

2. Launch PR Campaigns

Regularly launching PR campaigns is one of the most powerful ways to build a brand because PR gets your brand in front of a large audience.

A good PR campaign does three things:

1. Positions your brand as credible and worth paying attention to
2. Creates word-of-mouth momentum
3. Tells your brand's story in a way that resonates with your audience

A while ago, Duolingo announced on social media that their mascot Duo had died. While obviously a stunt, the announcement went viral on TikTok and generated millions of views across social platforms.

Following the viral social media buzz, media outlets like CBS News, NPR, and USA Today also started covering the news.

This campaign reinforced Duolingo's playful brand personality and kept them top of mind for language learners. It worked because it was unexpected yet perfectly aligned with their brand voice.

But you don't need elaborate stunts to make PR work. You can also get press coverage through brand collaborations.

Recently, Perplexity partnered with Airtel to provide a free one-year subscription to Airtel users in India. This single move generated coverage across media publications like The Economic Times.

Lots of people would've likely learned about Perplexity for the first time after hearing this news.

3. Invest in Digital Ads

Digital advertising involves paying to run ads on platforms like Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. And these ads are great for reaching more people.

Here's what makes digital advertising so effective:

• Instant exposure: Digital ads appear prominently across advertising platforms
• Laser-focused targeting: Digital allows precise audience targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors
• Real-time insights: You can see exactly how your campaigns are doing and tweak them to boost performance

Many successful companies find their best-performing content and promote it through paid ads.

For example, Grammarly recently promoted its workplace productivity guide through LinkedIn ads. This positions them as experts in the business productivity tools space, while also putting their brand in front of a highly relevant audience.

Notion does something similar. When creators post videos about how they organize their work in Notion, the company amplifies those videos through paid promotion.

If you want to run successful search campaigns, check out our Advertising Toolkit. It helps you find the best keywords to target, research competitors' ad strategies, and track your campaign performance across multiple platforms.

4. Post on Social Media

Social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok give you direct access to your followers, so you can actually have conversations with potential customers.

Here's what works based on our experience:

• Support your colleagues’ posts: Like, comment on, and reshare posts from your teammates about the company and industry. It’s one of the easiest ways to increase reach.
• Post regularly: It’s easier to grow an audience with regular posting. We suggest creating a content calendar and aiming for at least a few posts per week.
• Engage in conversations: Don’t just post; interact. Leaving thoughtful comments on relevant discussions draws people back to your profile and, by extension, your brand.
• Use visual content: Text posts can work, but experiment with image and video posts. Create branded visuals, short explainer clips, or even memes (when relevant) to capture attention.
• Use hashtags strategically: Adding two to three highly relevant hashtags can help more people discover your posts, particularly on LinkedIn and Instagram.
• Collaborate with industry voices: Work with people who already have the audience you want to reach. This could be industry experts, popular influencers, or even customers who love your product.

At Semrush, our teams use social media to promote blog content, highlight product updates, announce launches, and provide broader company updates.

We also engage in comments with our audience to spark discussions, answer questions, and build stronger relationships.

From time to time, we’ll also run influencer campaigns, which help us reach new audiences. For example, here's a recent collaboration with an industry expert promoting our Enterprise AIO platform:

If you want to manage your social media presence more effectively, check out our Social Toolkit. It lets you schedule posts across platforms, track engagement metrics, and find the right influencers to collaborate with.

5. Create Merchandise

Distributing merchandise is still one of the most effective ways for getting your brand noticed. And it works especially well for growing businesses because it can help:

• Boost brand visibility: When your logo is on an item people actually use—like hoodies, water bottles, or tote bags—it turns them into brand ambassadors everywhere they go
• Build positive associations: Giving away quality merchandise feels like a gift, and customers often share that experience with friends or on social media. That extends your brand’s reach far beyond the original recipient.
• Bring your digital brand into the physical world: For SaaS companies and online-first businesses, merch makes the brand feel more real

The goal is to create something that’s useful, stylish, or fun enough that people want to keep it.

For example, if you have software engineers on your team, you've probably seen GitHub's Copilot stickers on their laptops and water bottles. Developers love these.

GitHub also creates hoodies and t-shirts that developers actually wear with pride. It helps them signal that they belong to the coding community.

If you're ready to create branded merchandise, companies like Printful and CustomInk make it easy to design and distribute quality products without managing inventory yourself. 

Both platforms handle production and shipping, letting you focus on building your brand instead of managing logistics.

6. Sponsor Events (or Organize Your Own)

Event sponsorship is one of the most effective ways to boost brand visibility and grow your business because you can:

• Borrow authority from the event: When you sponsor a well-established conference or trade show, your brand benefits from the credibility of that event. Attendees naturally associate your company with the event’s reputation.
• Reach a highly targeted audience: Conferences and niche gatherings bring together people who are already invested in your industry, making it much easier to connect with high-intent prospects 

For example, Sentry regularly sponsors major developer conferences like GitHub Universe and React Universe Conf.

Through sponsorship arrangements, companies typically secure brand placement on event materials like signage, promotional items, digital displays, or stage backdrops. Top sponsors might also receive exhibition spaces in high-traffic areas or speaking opportunities.

But you don't always have to rely on other people's events. Running your own events can be just as powerful.

For instance, we host an annual conference called Spotlight, where digital marketing professionals share insights about search, content marketing, and more. This in-person event allows us to deeply engage with our audience and reinforce our position as a leader in the digital marketing space.

7. Develop and Share Your Brand Story

Your brand story—the "why" behind what you do—helps people connect with your business on a human level. But having a compelling story isn't enough. You need to actively share it across multiple touchpoints to build brand recognition.

Here's how you can do this:

• On your website: Create an "About Us" page that explains your mission, values, the problem you’re solving, and what makes your approach different—written in a way that feels authentic rather than corporate
• Through founder visibility: Get founders to share their journeys on LinkedIn, podcasts, or at industry events
• In content marketing: Weave elements of your story into blogs, newsletters, videos, and case studies so it's reinforced over time
• Inside your product experience: Reflect your brand personality in onboarding flows, UX copy, micro-interactions, and feature announcements
• During customer interactions: Train your team to communicate your brand values in support conversations and sales calls

For example, Notion’s team consistently shares their story of building a tool that adapts to how people actually think and work—not forcing them into rigid structures. 

This narrative appears everywhere: in their marketing copy, product demos, founder interviews, and community discussions. It reinforces why Notion feels different from traditional project management tools.

The lesson isn't just to have a good story—it's to make that story a consistent part of how you communicate your brand.

Get Started with Brand Building

Today, building a brand is no longer optional—it’s the foundation for driving sustainable growth in the AI era.

This list of brand-building techniques is by no means exhaustive. There are dozens of other tactics we didn’t cover here, but we wanted to share some ideas you can get started with today.

So, pick a few tactics that best align with your resources and implement them right away. Later, scale your efforts and layer in other ideas as you gain momentum.

You’ll find that as your brand becomes stronger, traffic follows. That’s the real power of having a brand.