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I work with several hundred+ million dollar brands. What you’re experiencing is pretty common. The crowding of search results with extra stuff is impacting everyone. The only ones I see growing are the ones that were at a lower starting point, and/or are increasing the scale of products/services offered or locations served.
I’d suggest recalibrating expectations. You’re already positioned really well organically from what it sounds like. If there are opportunities for you to appear in some of these additional search results features (e.g., you aren’t on the free Merchant Center listings), you can make up some real ground/visibility there.
Otherwise, yea. Google is prioritizing a bunch of other stuff beyond the 10 blue links now.
My advice? Focus on building relationships with partners that have audiences that naturally flow into what you’re doing and get some backlinks going. Work on YouTube and the socials (and their optimization) if they aren’t crisp and well stocked. Make sure the content teams are aligning the copy on your product pages to your customer’s needs first and always. To that end, make sure you’re acutely aware of what their feedback is saying and adjust accordingly (FAQs derived from their reviews are the best kind). Track the traffic you’re getting from “AI” in GA4 or similar source of truth. You should be able to filter by ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot and others. Have those as separate sections in your Looker Studio reporting or similar. It’s probably next to nothing, but worth keeping an eye on. I wouldn’t recommend spending any time or money exclusively LLM optimization. Just do really good SEO and you’ll be present in LLM systems too. And again, make sure your brand is present in all of the SERP features that your brand should appear in and address gaps where your team identifies them. Oh, and probably invest in a good CRO program to squeeze more performance out of the traffic you’re getting from organic (and all of your channels, for that matter). Oh, and look for opportunities where your keywords are positioning your brand high that you may be able to draw down some of the paid spend to allow the organic channel to drive that traffic instead of over-relying on PPC. My teams have had success with a combination of those, depending on the client and their individual need.
Best of luck.
