Traditional Search Failing You? Whole Search Is the Solution

Paid search costs are on the rise.

Organic site traffic is down 20%, 35% lower CTRs compared to terms without AI overview.

​80% of the population self-report NOT clicking past Google's search results on 40% or more of their searches.

Search has clearly changed. The rise of the Generative Engine Search (GEO), proliferation of social search and profound changes in human behaviour and user intent actions have compounded into a mega-shift in the way humans find information—and how we build and activate search marketing.

Why Most Brands Are Failing: Neglecting the Full Search Ecosystem

Sadly, most brands are suddenly waking up to the realisation they’ve over-invested in paid search and last-click attribution and have completely neglected other parts of the search ecosystem. They’ve been complacent around the middle of the funnel for a while, but as paid performance plummets, they’re rushing to digital media agencies, asking what to do; “How can we improve performance?” “How can we “hack” the GEO algorithms?”

Search behaviour hasn’t just evolved — it’s fractured. Generative engines, social discovery, and shifting user expectations have upended the traditional path to brand visibility.

Too many brands are still built for a pre-generative era — where SEO lives in one lane, SEM in another, and neither talks to PR, influencer, or UX. That model doesn’t map to how discovery works today. It’s siloed, inefficient, and increasingly invisible.

Generative AI doesn’t care which team wrote the copy. It doesn’t distinguish between SEO landing pages, influencer testimonials, or performance media. It pulls from what’s trusted, consistent, structured, and semantically aligned. And that means brands need to reorganise not around channels, but around user intent.

This is the underlying shift: intent is no longer a tactic. It’s the organising principle. It’s the connective tissue across disciplines. That might sound uncomfortable for functions used to operating independently, but in a GEO-led environment, alignment isn’t optional. It’s survival.

To win in GEO, brands need unified search squads — not just SEO and SEM specialists, but performance, comms, influencer, UX, and content working from one playbook, one framework, and one definition of success: intent-aligned, answer-visible brand presence.

The smartest brands are already adapting. For those who haven’t started, the window is still open — but closing quickly.

The Whole Search Solution

To stop the bleeding, brands can’t just throw more dollars at traditional SEM. At Citizen, we believe they need truly integrated agencies who can lead a modern WHOLE SEARCH APPROACH. One that is anchored in a proven human-intent-led process and incorporates comprehensive search activation across modern paid, earned, owned and shared tactics.

The Whole Search System - Five Core Components:

Human Intent Research: leverage key audience segmentation data as a base for robust, cross channel user intent research that helps identify the intersection of person, topic and brand.

A Whole Search Audit: evaluate the brand’s fulsome ecosystem, spend and prioritisation of multi-channel search. This includes siteside SEO, offpage search in earned media, social and even influencers, Generative Engine brand and unbranded search audit, along with robust competitor assessments of share of search in paid branded and unbranded keyterms. Then go further to understand sentiment and misinformation, and the brand’s optimisation readiness for generative shopping and payments.

The Whole Search Strategy: by identifying the key gaps between user intent (and shifting technologies and customer behaviour) and brand optimised assets (PESO search assessment), you’ll be ready to build a comprehensive rebalancing plan.

The plan helps brands optimise LLM visibility through strategic text sequences: short, semantically rich modules embedded in brand pages, influencer content, and PR placements. These sequences combine user intent and audience insights — and are designed to feed LLMs exactly what they look for when constructing answers. By incorporating search into a wider array of their marketing efforts (influencer, social, site, credentialing, exec comms and paid) you can improve GEO and social search rankings. Citizen’s unique Performfluence model was based wholly on this approach and has driven outstanding full-funnel results through influencer search integration.

Finally, the plan helps develop editorial strategies beyond text utilising a multichannel Whole Search Playbook that anchors paid, web, earned and social teams in a single source of user intent truth with regular bursts of content to help improve share of branded and unbranded keyterms.

Whole Search Activation: the approach we’re taking at Citizen includes a mix of tech and talent to help brands measure, adjust and improve search performance across all of their marketing/comms channels regardless of which internal or external teams execute the plan.

By providing quarterly whole search assessments, content recommendations, multi-channel search-infused briefs and regular user intent insights, brands can rebalance their approach to the mid-funnel and regain share of high-intent audiences. AND, they can do more to support their actual customers as they discover, research and shop in completely new ways.

Whole Search Measurement: it’s imperative to reset the roles of discovery/search in your customer journey, and refocus a measurement model to help best understand and adapt our whole search strategy in real time. Our proprietary AIOS platform is a great example of what can serve as the core decision engine for the measurement model.

Additionally, its important to utilise a robust suite of intelligence and analytics capabilities to improve whole search measurement and visibility including some unique data sets like:

Brand Visibility Audits: Regularly measure frequency, sentiment, and accuracy of brand mentions within GEO platforms (Google SGE, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity)
Conversion Attribution Changes: Monitor how shifts from traditional clicks to zero-click influence overall funnel conversions
Authority Score Tracking: Track domain and content authority improvements driven by earned coverage and strategic text sequence optimisations

If you’re a brand seeing losses in Search, you can’t spend your way out of it. You need a modern, comprehensive Whole Search Approach. Without one, brands will continue to lose share to more agile, innovative DTC companies who have been scrappy and testing/yielding incremental gains using this model already. NOW is the time to take a modern approach to search!

Thoughts on modern search? We'd love to connect.