The Death of Traditional Search and the Rise of Social Discovery

Jun 24, 2025

A few weeks back, I posted this stat on LinkedIn:

60% of Google searches now end without a single click.
(Source: SparkToro / Similarweb)

It sparked a wave of conversation. And for good reason.

If you’re relying on search and SEO to drive brand discovery, you’re playing a game where the rules have quietly changed.

What’s really happening?

Success is no longer about showing up on page one of Google and seeing ‘traffic’ as our primary KPI. Success is now about showing up in the right conversations—the ones happening on Reddit, WhatsApp, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Not to mention in the answers served by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

Here’s my take on what’s happening and how you can get in front of it.

📉 Search is collapsing into AI

Google’s search results are being replaced by AI overviews. Bing already leads with chat. And platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT are answering queries without showing links at all.

What does this mean for your brand?

People trust people, not websites.
LLMs are increasingly being seen as trusted resources. This does concern me. I’ve been in several conversations with marketers recently who described their chosen LLM as ‘unbiased’. Whilst we know that’s not actually true, it demonstrates how buyer preferences are increasingly going to be formed by LLM’s
And AI search has no second page. If you're not in the answer, you're out of the game.

📈 Reddit is the new homepage

Reddit is now the 6th most visited site in the world. Reddit threads frequently rank above brand pages on the 1st page of Google. Their data fuels AI training and it’s where real buyers go to ask real questions.

That means:

A single helpful comment on Reddit can drive meaningful, lasting impact.
If you’re not contributing to these discussions, you are missing out.

Social proof is shifting from reviews to conversations.

📱 Social media is not a throwaway tactic anymore

Most brands still see social as an awareness channel and recently I’ve seen entire social teams (especially in B2B) laid off. Many brands are still stuck thinking that social media is a discretional spend and a throwaway, non-strategic job. That thinking is now dangerously outdated.

Here’s the truth:

People build brand preference on social long before they fill out a form.
LLMs learn what’s trusted from social conversations. It used to be that social platforms were ‘walled gardens’ and content posted on Instagram and others would not appear outside of the platform. Now that’s no longer the case and social content is now being surfaced in both search and LLM results.
Buyers ask their peers for recommendations in communities, not via Google.
Searches on YouTube are surging as buyers preferences are increasingly shaped by those they follow.

When someone shares:

A quick tip that solves a problem
A tool that saved them hours
A personal use case that actually worked

That’s how discovery happens now.

🔮 What forward-thinking brands should do next

Here’s how to stay relevant as discovery shifts from search to social:

1. Shift your mindset
Social isn’t just a distribution channel it’s where trust and intent are built. Optimise for relevance, not reach. That means using tools like SparkToro to understand the spaces your audience frequent and focussing your efforts there.

2. Be where the conversations are
Reddit. Slack groups. LinkedIn comments. WhatsApp threads. Find your buyers’ watering holes and show up helpfully, not transactionally.

3. Partner with trusted voices
Your competitive advantage is influence. Not celebrity influencers, but subject matter experts, creators, and community leaders your audience already trusts.

The delightful thing is that these three components are interlinked. When you show up where buyers are, they notice you. When they notice you, they talk about you. When are you spoken about, people trust you. And when this happens, you’ll start to appear more in Google AI overviews and LLM recommendations.

I can’t promise that you’ll see your website traffic increase. But you’ll certainly notice buyer preference shift. And that is the far more important measure to track.

TL;DR

Traditional search is fading.
Social discovery is surging.
The brands that win will be the ones showing up - not just in search results, but in the stories, threads, and conversations that shape perception and drive preference.