VMPL
New Delhi [India], March 18: ReSO, a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform, released its State of Search Report, an early benchmark report on how AI-powered search is changing brand discovery online. The findings show that AI search is no longer an experimental acquisition channel. It is already influencing how buyers discover, evaluate, and trust information before they even reach a website.
According to the report, 80% of respondents say AI answers feel better than traditional Google results because they are more specific and contextual, while the remaining 20% say it depends on the query. ReSO's research also found that 100% of respondents expect AI-generated search results to have a meaningful impact on marketing campaigns, with 69% saying AI will complement existing SEO strategies and 31% expecting significant disruption.
Explaining the findings, Swati Paliwal, Co-Founder, ReSO, said, "AI search has moved from curiosity to habit much faster than most teams expected. The challenge now is not awareness. It is understanding what actually makes a brand appear, get cited, and stay memorable inside these systems. Brands that continue to optimise only for clicks will miss what is really changing: buyers are increasingly forming opinions, shortlisting vendors, and building trust before they ever visit a website."
The report also points to a deeper shift in how visibility is earned. Across thousands of AI-generated responses analyzed, blogs account for 46% of all AI citations and editorial articles and listicles contribute another 33%, meaning nearly 80% of citations come from narrative, educational content rather than transactional pages. By contrast, product pages represent just 5.4% of citations, even when prompts suggest evaluation or buying intent.
This has direct implications for how teams measure performance. ReSO found that in AI-driven search experiences, click-through rates that historically sat in the 3-4% range have dropped to well below 1% in many categories, even as impressions continue to rise. The report describes this as the "crocodile mouth" effect: visibility expands, but clicks continue to fall. Yet that does not mean influence is shrinking. ReSO's data shows that users arriving from LLM search are 3X more likely to convert than users from traditional search, suggesting that buyer intent is stronger for AI-assisted search.
The report also shows that AI search cannot be treated as one uniform system. In ReSO's platform-level analysis, ChatGPT surfaced more than 3,300 unique brands across the same prompt set, while Google AI Overviews cited about 1,912 and Perplexity cited about 1,845. Competitive density also varied sharply: ChatGPT mentioned roughly 16 brands per prompt, Google AI Overviews about 12, and Perplexity about 9. The result is a fragmented environment where different AI platforms surface different brands, in different volumes, under different trust models.
The full State of Search Report explores how AI systems construct answers, how citation patterns differ by prompt intent, why educational content outperforms promotional pages, and what marketing leaders need to rethink as search shifts from links to synthesized answers. The full report is available here.
About ReSO
ReSO helps companies understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated search results. It's a Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) platform that tracks how brands are cited, referenced, and surfaced across LLMs. Built to replace fragmented teams, tools, and agency dependencies, ReSO gives brands a structured way to influence AI visibility, generate inbound demand, and adapt to a search landscape increasingly shaped by answers instead of links.
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