There has been a lot of discussion in the marketing community about the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on marketing analytics, particularly following a recent Gartner report predicting that by 2026, search engine volumes will decrease by 25%. This anticipated shift is raising concerns among marketers who rely heavily on website signals to evaluate the effectiveness of their brand messaging and audience acquisition strategies.
For those whose marketing strategies depend on organic search traffic, this change can be unsettling. However, it is crucial to determine which audiences within your organization will be most affected and how to adapt.
This requires internal education and alignment—particularly among revenue operations (RevOps) professionals, who must help bridge the gap between marketing insights and executive decision-making.
Whether we like it or not, every account in our pipeline will crawl all over our company website. Most B2B websites see thousands of visitors per month from a variety of sources, and organic search sourced visitors have traditionally been the population that are most ready to buy and most likely to convert.
When architected properly and if you’re lucky enough to do a majority of your business in countries that allow carte blanche deanonymization (we’re looking at you, United States – well, most of you), website data can provide a treasure trove of insights.
Marketers have used this goldmine of information for years to understand which pages are operating well, which pages are duds, and how effective changes on the website have been to positively impact lead generation. If they’re working with a talented analyst, they can even see when certain personas engage in the buying process, what content accounts that turn into customers engage with the most, and A/B test the efficacy of message updates and navigation updates.
When these data points are analyzed by a skilled professional, they can inform customer interviews and change the company’s overarching go-to-market strategy. They can also pick up on market shifts before the pundits are talking about them and predict when messaging needs to change. When done well, a CMO can seem prophetic and lead the overall strategy.
If we’re being honest, we’ve only seen B2C companies and a select few B2B companies reach peak analytical efficacy. Most B2B startups rely on default GA4 insights to figure out if their web traffic and engagement are going up or down and (hopefully) use key events to understand effective conversion points.
In other words, for most marketers this change will be frustrating because traffic and engagement will decline without warning. For the elite marketers, they’ll need to rely more heavily on prospect and customer interviews to inform their strategy, although they’ll still have plenty of data to work with to prove their impact.
Marketing and sales alignment remains an ongoing challenge, largely because of the differing priorities between the two teams. While marketing takes a long-term approach, focusing on sustainable strategies, sales often requires immediate lead generation to meet short-term revenue goals. The disconnect between these functions often results in tension, making it critical for RevOps to facilitate alignment (you can read our recommendations on how to improve alignment here).
One of the major difficulties marketers face is proving their impact due to fragmented and messy data. Attribution remains a contentious issue (more on that here), and with search traffic projected to decline, marketers will struggle even more to demonstrate their contributions to revenue.
RevOps needs to keep the executive team focused on what truly matters:
By emphasizing topline revenue and pipeline metrics, RevOps can prevent unnecessary panic when website traffic declines. It’s also important to recognize that while website analytics provide valuable data on messaging effectiveness, they do not replace direct interactions with customers.
Customer and prospect interviews can provide critical qualitative insights that data alone cannot. They help answer key questions such as:
RevOps professionals should encourage marketing teams to rely more heavily on direct audience feedback and even offer to conduct interviews themselves. This can uncover operational inefficiencies while strengthening go-to-market strategies.
To mitigate the impact of declining search traffic, RevOps should take a proactive approach:
For more on how marketers think of this change and what RevOps can do to help, check out this webinar.
GenAI’s rise is reshaping how marketing analytics function, forcing companies to move beyond surface-level website metrics and embrace a more comprehensive understanding of customer engagement. While search traffic may decline, the fundamental goal remains the same—delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.
RevOps professionals are uniquely positioned to help marketing and executive teams navigate this change by reinforcing a focus on revenue-impacting metrics, improving analytics infrastructure, and facilitating direct customer insights. The organizations that adapt quickly will be the ones that continue to drive meaningful growth, regardless of how search behavior evolves.
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