The Search Shakeup Nobody Has a Perfect Answer For (Yet)

Here’s the thing about writing a piece like this: I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does right now. And I’d be doing you a disservice — the kind of disservice we’ve spent 15 years trying not to do — if I pretended otherwise.

What I can do is tell you what the data is showing, what we’re watching closely at Red Branch, and what we think is worth experimenting with right now. Because here’s what I keep coming back to: Darwin didn’t say survival of the fittest means strongest, or smartest, or best-resourced. It means most adaptable. The ones who survive are the ones ready to pivot without abandoning their strategy entirely.

That’s where we are. Full stop.

So let’s talk about what’s actually happening in B2B search — because it’s changing faster than any of us can fully see, and the worst thing you can do right now is pretend the old playbook still works.

The B2B search playbook is broken — and the brands that adapt fastest are the ones who’ll come out ahead. Here’s what’s actually changing.

Organic Is Not Just “Down.” It’s Structurally Different.

I don’t want to be the person who leads with the scary number, but… B2B organic leads dropped 47% from January to October 2025, with October alone accelerating at -22%. Some projections put total decline at 60-65% by Q1 2026.

This is not a “fix your SEO” problem. Companies whose rankings didn’t collapse still saw lead volume fall off a cliff. That’s the part that should make everyone sit down for a second.

The culprit is largely AI Overviews — and Ahrefs’ December 2025 data shows the CTR hit for top-ranking results when an AI Overview is present went from 34.5% in April to 58% by December. Zero-click rates for those queries are hitting 83%. Only 1% of users click the sources cited inside AI Overviews.

Read that again: 1%.

Seer Interactive tracked 100+ clients and found organic CTR drops roughly 70% when AI Overviews appear. This isn’t a blip. This is a new baseline we’re all calibrating to.

And if you’re thinking “okay, we’ll just shift to paid” — costs are up 10-25% on average, with high-intent B2B terms running $75-$150+ per click. 87% of industries saw CPC increases in 2025. Meanwhile, 63% of CMOs have already cut paid search budgets because ROI isn’t justifying the spend.

So we’re squeezed from both directions. I want to be honest with you about that.

Where B2B Buyers Are Actually Going

Here’s the part that I find both fascinating and a little humbling: 94% of B2B buyers now use AI in their purchasing process, and generative AI is the single most cited meaningful interaction type for researching purchases — ahead of vendor websites, product experts, even sales reps.

Let that one land.

G2 surveyed 1,000+ B2B software buyers and found:

• 50% now start their buying journey in an AI chatbot instead of Google (a 71% jump in just four months)
• 87% say AI chatbots are changing how they research software
• 47% prefer ChatGPT specifically — roughly 3x any other model
• 25% say generative AI has completely overtaken traditional search for vendor research

For HR tech buyers specifically, this tracks. They’re navigating AI implementation, compliance shifts, platform consolidation — they’re overwhelmed, and they’re outsourcing the initial discovery phase to AI. Can you blame them?

The implication for us — all of us, Red Branch included — is that the question is no longer “how do we get clicks?” It’s “how do we shape the answer?”

When an HR leader asks ChatGPT “what are the best performance management platforms?” — being mentioned is more valuable than being #1 on Google. That’s a real change in how we have to think about content.

Reddit, Dark Social, and the Channels We Can’t Track

While everyone was watching Google, Reddit became one of the most cited domains in LLM searches — with LinkedIn close behind. 72% of tech decision-makers use Reddit for peer reviews, and 49% use it for product research. Google’s partnership with Reddit means those threads are surfacing above brand-controlled pages for high-intent queries.

Buyers are Googling “best CRM for manufacturing” and getting a Reddit thread, not your website.

And then there’s dark social — the stuff we really can’t see. 84% of content sharing now happens in private, untraceable channels: Slack groups, WhatsApp threads, LinkedIn DMs, email forwards. Buyers arrive at your website with opinions already formed from conversations you were never part of and can’t measure.

85% of B2B buyers purchase from their “day one” list — the vendors they had in mind before they ever searched. If your brand isn’t present in those early, invisible conversations, you may be too late by the time they hit Google.

This is why we keep telling clients: your blog post doesn’t need to rank. It needs to be shareable enough to travel through Slack. Those are different goals. Sometimes they align. Often, they don’t.

84% of B2B content sharing happens in private channels you can’t track. Is your content built to travel through Slack and DMs — or just built to rank?

What About Video? TikTok? LinkedIn Video?

More than 60% of companies already include TikTok in their social strategy, and TikTok is now integrating with Google Search — video titles and captions showing up in standard web results. For B2B, TikTok’s role is less about direct product search and more about upstream brand awareness. Brands like Notion and HubSpot are making it work for thought leadership.

But honestly? The bigger story for HR tech isn’t “get on TikTok.” It’s that video-first search behavior is changing how decision-makers discover vendors across all platforms. YouTube, LinkedIn video, even TikTok — buyers want real, creator-led content that feels authentic, not another polished brand video that looks like it cost $40K and says nothing.

LinkedIn still dominates B2B marketing — 85% of B2B marketers name it their top platform for organic results. But the format is shifting. Short video, thought leadership that sounds like a person, content that sparks conversation — that’s what’s moving.

So What Do We Actually Do?

I want to be careful here, because I think a lot of people are going to read pieces like this and either panic or freeze. Neither helps.

Here’s what we’re telling clients — and what we’re doing ourselves:

Stop treating SEO as a pipeline strategy. It’s a visibility strategy now. The goal of content marketing is increasingly to get cited, not clicked. That means structured, authoritative writing with clear definitions, comparison data, and proof points that AI systems can actually extract and recommend.

Get into the communities where your buyers already are. For HR tech, that means r/humanresources, private HR practitioner Slack groups, LinkedIn conversations — not just your blog. Your content needs to be discoverable in environments you don’t control.

Build for the dark funnel. Frameworks, benchmarks, playbooks — content designed to travel through email and DMs and Slack without anyone’s UTM parameter on it. If it’s genuinely useful, it will move. Trust that.

Rethink your metrics. AI-referred visitors convert significantly better than traditional organic visitors. Fewer leads, higher intent — your forecasting models need to catch up to that reality. If your whole dashboard is still built around traffic volume, you’re measuring the wrong thing.

Experiment. Actually experiment. Not “let’s try one LinkedIn post and see.” Real, structured testing across formats, channels, and audiences — with the humility to change course when something isn’t working.

The Honest Version

None of us — not Red Branch, not the biggest agency in the world, not Google itself — has a clean playbook for what search looks like in 18 months. The data is clear that something fundamental has shifted. The path through it is not.

What we do know is that the brands who will win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tech stack. They’re the ones willing to experiment in public, admit when things aren’t working, and rebuild their assumptions fast.

That’s what adaptability actually looks like. Not abandoning strategy — but holding it loosely enough to revise it when the ground moves.

We’re in this with you. That hasn’t changed.

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