SEO is important because organic search is still the channel that brings websites the most visits: in 2025 it generated 16.04% of all web traffic, against 0.14% from ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other AI assistants, according to Semrush's study of more than 50,000 sites. And because AI answers are also built from pages a search engine can find and read: a site that can't be indexed doesn't appear on Google or in ChatGPT.
Put like that, it sounds like the usual answer.
The pages that answer this question on Google UK, as of 10 October 2026, nearly all handle it the same way: a list of reasons (visibility, traffic, authority) with hardly a number next to them. Of the seven we could read on page one, four don't cite a single market figure with its source. Two quote click-through rates that are either undated or from 2016. Only Semrush's, updated on 31 August 2026, works from 2025 data.
And only that one touches on the question business owners actually ask us today: if customers are starting to ask ChatGPT, does SEO still matter? Even there, the answer is a statement (the work that earns rankings also earns AI citations) rather than a measurement.
We've asked ourselves the same thing on real projects. Macropix, a Milan-based manufacturer of custom LED screens, went from position 88 to 2 on the Italian query "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising screen), and in July 2026 held 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, ahead of Amazon (the Macropix project). Sunscape, which develops solar farms in Italy, went from 46 to 195 organic clicks a month in six months (the Sunscape project).
So where does AI come into these numbers?
We measured it with a test: ten questions in Italian put to ChatGPT, comparing the sites it cites with Google's first page. Only 8 of the 47 domains cited were among Google's organic results. That's the figure that changes how this page's question should be answered.
Here you'll find:
- how much organic search really weighs compared with traffic from AI;
- why a specialist can rank ahead of a giant, with the Macropix numbers;
- our test on ChatGPT and Google, question by question;
- what it costs not to be there, in clicks you have to buy;
- who SEO isn't important for, put plainly;
- three one-hour checks to see how much it matters for your business.
Let's start.
How much organic search weighs (16.04% of visits against 0.14% from AI)
In 2025 organic search brought 16.04% of visits to websites worldwide; traffic from AI assistants brought 0.14%. Those are the figures from the Semrush study published in April 2026, based on billions of visits to more than 50,000 sites in 17 industries, on desktop and mobile, between January and December 2025. The sample is global: the study doesn't split the results by country.
In other words: for every visit that comes from ChatGPT and the like, more than a hundred come from organic search.
The same study, though, also says two things that people selling SEO tend to skip:
- AI traffic grew by 66% in a year, from 462 to 767 million visits a month;
- organic search fell in 13 of 17 industries, even though it grew by 2.38% overall.
So SEO matters less than it used to?
It matters in a pie that's changing shape. The channel is still the biggest, but every year a share of the answers moves inside the results page or inside a chat.
In the UK the game is still played almost entirely on one search engine: in September 2026 Google had 91.39% of searches and Bing 6.08%, according to StatCounter. The split between desktop and mobile and the figure for zero-click searches are on our page of search engine statistics.
What does that mean on a real site? On Sunscape, with an architecture of pages by region launched in March 2026, in six months organic impressions went from 329 to 5,809 a month and keywords on page one from 1 to 38 out of 143. Not one of those visitors was paid for by the click.
People who search already have the problem (and almost never type your name)
SEO is important because it reaches people who are looking for what you sell before they know who sells it. A social media ad interrupts someone who was doing something else; search answers someone who has just typed out their need.
The clearest evidence we have comes from Macropix. Of the nine keywords that bring it the most qualified enquiries, none contains the company's name. The biggest is "ledwall" (LED wall), with 4,400 searches a month in Italy; the others include "maxischermi led" (large LED screens), "totem led" (LED totems) and "schermo pubblicitario" (advertising screen).
The people typing them didn't know the brand.
That's the difference between a site that "exists" and a site that ranks: the first is found by people who already have your name, the second by people who have your problem. If your site only shows up today when someone searches for the company, the most common causes are those in our guide to a website not showing on Google.
(Ofcom's figures on how many UK adults use Google Search are on our page about the benefits of SEO: we won't repeat them here.)
A specialist can rank ahead of a giant (25.55% against Amazon's 18.08%)
In organic search the size of the company matters less than how relevant its pages are. On a group of category keywords, an Italian manufacturer can take more visibility than Amazon.
In 2020 Macropix didn't appear for any category keyword in its sector. Five years later it's first for "ledwall" and second for "monitor pubblicitario", where it started from position 88. In July 2026, on the LED wall cluster, it holds 25.55% share of voice against 18.08% for amazon.it (Semrush data; the method is in our guide to SEO for manufacturing).
Five years, though.
Yes. And that's why SEO matters most for those who start before their competitors: positions won on category keywords last, and whoever arrives later has to push someone out. Realistic timescales, phase by phase, are in our guide to how long SEO takes to deliver results.
With Google Ads you rent the same visibility. It works, and in many sectors it's the right choice to get started, but the day the budget stops, so does the traffic. The full comparison is in SEO or PPC.
Our test: ChatGPT cites 8 sites out of 47 from Google's first page
Across ten commercial questions in Italian, ChatGPT cited 47 different sites: only 8 were among the organic results on Google's first page for the same search. The other 39, 83%, didn't appear on mobile Google at all.
The method, so it can be repeated. On 9 October 2026 we put the ten questions to ChatGPT with web search switched on and the location set to Italy, through the DataForSEO APIs, and collected the domains of the sources it cited. For the same queries we downloaded the first page of Google Italy on mobile, which returned between 7 and 10 organic results, and compared the domains. The test was run on the Italian market, where most of our clients work; the method is the same for UK queries.
| Question | Domains cited by ChatGPT | Of which on Google's first page | AI Overview on Google |
|---|---|---|---|
| migliore assicurazione auto online (best online car insurance) | 10 | 2 | yes |
| quanto costa un impianto fotovoltaico da 6 kw (how much does a 6 kW solar system cost) | 4 | 0 | no |
| ledwall per eventi prezzo (LED wall for events price) | 3 | 1 | no |
| migliori scarpe da trail running (best trail running shoes) | 4 | 0 | no |
| come scegliere un commercialista per partita iva (how to choose an accountant as a sole trader) | 3 | 1 | yes |
| noleggio furgone milano (van hire Milan) | 2 | 0 | no |
| migliori aspirapolvere senza fili (best cordless vacuum cleaners) | 11 | 1 | no |
| impermeabilizzazione terrazzo costo (roof terrace waterproofing cost) | 4 | 1 | no |
| stampa 3d conto terzi (3D printing service) | 3 | 0 | yes |
| corso inglese online per adulti (online English course for adults) | 3 | 2 | yes |
| Total | 47 | 8 (17%) | 4 out of 10 |
So SEO is no use for AI?
The opposite. Just look at who ChatGPT cited:
- comparison and review sites: Segugio, Facile.it, Altroconsumo, Tom's Hardware, qualescegliere.it (cited for two different questions);
- tradesperson and professional directories: ProntoPro, Instapro and Cronoshare for the terrace waterproofing, Fiscozen for the accountant;
- official sources: IVASS (Italy's insurance regulator) and the Ministry of Enterprises for car insurance;
- manufacturers' sites, when the question is about a product: Dyson, Rowenta, Samsung and Dreame for vacuum cleaners, British Council and Preply for English courses.
These are all pages a search engine can find, read and cite. SEO still matters for AI, but the field gets wider: as well as your own page, other people's pages that answer the same question count too, and so does whether they mention you.
One detail backs this reading up. On the insurance question, Google's AI Overview cited Segugio, Facile.it, Prima, Allianz Direct, ConTe and Altroconsumo Connect: almost the same names as ChatGPT, including some that weren't in the organic list. AI answers draw from a wider pool than the ten blue links.
And the precondition is still technical. OpenAI says that sites that block its OAI-SearchBot crawler won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI crawler documentation). For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google requires the page to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, and adds that SEO fundamentals still apply (Google Search Central).
The limits of the test, stated plainly. One answer per question, and ChatGPT's answers change from one run to the next: the same insurance question, asked a few hours earlier, had cited 7 domains instead of 10. Ten queries are a small sample. We tried to run the same comparison with Bing, but for six queries out of ten the data returned wasn't usable and we left it out.
How we work on this side of things is explained on our page about generative engine optimisation.
Who does ChatGPT cite when a customer asks about your sector?
You've just seen that 39 of the 47 sites cited weren't on Google's first page. We run the same test on your customers' questions and tell you who gets named instead of you and which pages you need to be on.
Book a strategy consultationWhat it costs not to be there (you pay for it in clicks, every month)
Not doing SEO doesn't come at no cost: the traffic that doesn't come from organic search, if you need it, you buy by the click. And the gap between being first and being second is bigger than it looks.
Across 1,000 Italian queries measured in the Search Console of an online shop we work with, position one has a CTR of 19.62%, position two 2.31%. More than eight times as much, for one position's difference. The detail is in our article on whether SEO is worth it, where you'll also find the break-even sum: the monthly fee divided by the value of a click.
With a £500 margin per customer and a 2% conversion rate, a click is worth £10, and a £1,000 monthly retainer pays for itself with 100 organic clicks.
And what if the starting numbers are wrong?
It often happens with conversions. At Valore Solare, a solar installer in Italy, the Google Ads account recorded 15,267 "conversions" in a month against 5,467 clicks: they were technical events, and the real enquiries in the first full month numbered 9. With figures inflated like that, any channel looks important. To measure the return in a way that stands up in front of a sales director, see our guide on how to prove the value of SEO.
Who SEO isn't important for (three cases, put plainly)
SEO isn't important when nobody searches for what you sell, when you need results sooner than the technical lead time allows, or when your customers are few and already known to you.
- The demand doesn't exist yet. A new product that people don't know they should be searching for: SEO captures demand, it doesn't create it.
- Your horizon is shorter than the lead time. On Sunscape the first upturn came after six months; if the goal is to fill an event in two months' time, you need campaigns.
- Your customers are few and already known. A subcontractor with five long-standing clients sells through relationships, not through Google.
In every other case the right question isn't "whether" but how much to invest. UK price bands are on our page about how much SEO costs, and the problems to know about before you sign are on the one about the risks of SEO.
And if you're already doing it and wondering whether you can stop, the answer is in our article on when you can stop doing SEO.
Three one-hour checks to see how much it matters for you (Search Console, ChatGPT, robots.txt)
How important SEO is for your business comes down to three checks: how many people find you without knowing you, who gets cited instead of you, and whether search engines can read the site.
1. How many impressions come from searches without your name
In Search Console, in the Performance report, filter for queries that don't contain the company name. If non-brand impressions are a tiny fraction of the total, today you're only found by people who already know you: that's where SEO has the most room.
2. Who ChatGPT names instead of you
Put to ChatGPT, with search switched on, the five questions customers ask you at first contact, and note the sites it cites. If they're comparison sites, portals or directories, your presence depends on them too. If they're direct competitors, open their pages: they usually answer the question more fully than yours.
3. Whether search engines can read you
Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and check there are no blocks on Googlebot or OAI-SearchBot. A block here cancels out everything else, and it can come from a site rebuild or from a security plugin set up too aggressively.
Content does the rest: what makes a page citable is explained in our guide to why content is important for SEO.
Frequently asked questions about why SEO is important
Yes. In 2025 organic search brought 16.04% of visits to websites, AI assistants 0.14% (Semrush study of more than 50,000 sites). And AI answers are built from indexable pages: OpenAI doesn't show sites that block the OAI-SearchBot crawler in ChatGPT search, and Google requires a page to be indexed to appear in AI Overviews.
No. In our test of 9 October 2026 on ten questions in Italian, only 8 of the 47 domains cited by ChatGPT were on Google's first page. Third-party pages that answer the same question count too: comparison sites, review sites, industry portals.
It depends: it's important if your customers search Google for what you sell, even without knowing your name. Macropix, a specialist LED screen manufacturer, holds 25.55% share of voice on its keyword cluster, ahead of Amazon. If your customers are few and already known, relationships matter more.
It depends on the type of keyword. On Sunscape organic impressions went from 329 to 5,809 a month in six months; getting Macropix to second place on a competitive category keyword took five years.
Yes, but you pay for every click for as long as the campaigns run: when the budget stops, so does the traffic. Google Ads is for getting started or for a short-term goal; SEO builds positions that stay even in the months when you're not investing.
Summary in five lines (and what changes from here on)
Organic search brings 16.04% of visits, AI 0.14%.
People who search have your problem, not your name.
A specialist can beat Amazon, but it takes years.
ChatGPT took only 8 sources out of 47 from Google's first page.
Without indexing and crawlers allowed in, you don't exist for either.
For twenty years SEO was important because it decided who made the top ten results. Our test says it's becoming important for another reason too: it decides whether the information about you is readable, and repeated often enough, on your site and on other people's, to end up in an answer that shows no ranking at all. If you measure SEO only by positions, you're looking at half the work.
If you want to know which half your site is missing, we can start from your Search Console data in a consultation, or see how we work on our SEO service page. See you next time!
