Search is no longer a box on Google. From AI to social feeds, communities to marketplaces, discovery is everywhere. To win, brands must embrace a ‘search anywhere’ mindset, or risk being left behind.
The search ecosystem is in the midst of a seismic shift. AI, social search, online communities, and digital marketplaces are fragmenting the traditional search journey. Audiences now move fluidly between platforms guided by emotion, intent, and identity, not limited by search engines. In this new reality, relying solely on Google is no longer enough.
To remain competitive, brands must adopt a ‘search anywhere’ mindset; rethinking how, where, and why.
Recent studies underscore the urgent need for brands to evolve their search marketing strategies. According to SEMRush’s July 2025 clickstream data, the world’s most visited websites (excluding adult content) were google.com, youtube.com, facebook.com, instagram.com, chatgpt.com, wikipedia.org, reddit.com, x.com, yahoo.com, and amazon.com.
This diversity underlines an important point: brands can’t rely on a single platform. Effective organic search strategies must be platform-agnostic, meeting customers wherever they are. The Q2 State of Search study from Datos reinforces this: the same top global domains were also among the leading referral sites from Google within the US, EU, and UK.
Google still dominates the open web, driving more than 60% of all US referral traffic. By comparison, the combined referrals from other leading platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit) account for just 10%. This gap illustrates how user behavior has shifted and why brands must rethink how they measure and attribute engagement.
Unlike traditional search engine optimization, which has been dominated by Google, we now have the opportunity to innovate and capture the entire spectrum of organic searches across platforms and media, provided we leverage the right technology, data, and eliminate channel silos.
As SEO specialists, we’ve been spoiled by the dominance of one entity: Google. But its dominance is slipping from a high of 93.2% in March 2023 to 89.6% by July this year. For now, it’s still important to prioritize Google – along with metrics like search volumes and impressions – based on its strong, in-market audience affinity. But as marketers, we must adapt to this ongoing shift.
It’s now time for brands to move to a model of holistic discovery for search, to capture their bespoke audience and customer base. And they need to do this where these customers and audiences are present and engaged at various levels of their purchase journeys.
Brands can build a holistic discovery model by analyzing their customers’ audience data. This means starting with a baseline view of platform affinity, then layering on custom audience insights that reflect the specific platforms their consumers actually use.
For example, with the aid of SparkToro, we can see that consumers searching for ‘over 50s life insurance’ have a 40% higher platform affinity with ChatGPT than the general UK searcher baseline. Conversely, ‘used clothing’ consumers exhibit a positive skew on social platforms: Instagram (+21%), X (+34%), and TikTok (+83%).
So the holistic strategy would differ for each of these searches, with ‘life insurance’ having a potential strategic skew of Google, YouTube, Reddit, and ChatGPT. For ‘used clothing’, though, the strategic skew would be Google, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok.
The data is clear: brands must act now with a differentiated organic search strategy – one that aligns with customer platform preferences and behaviors to stay visible and drive results.
The modern organic marketer – part technologist, part strategist – has never been more valuable. Trained in a search engine-centric world, they’re uniquely equipped to scale beyond traditional SEO and succeed across today’s algorithm-driven platforms. Their expertise in authority, trust, and experience translates seamlessly into a much broader digital landscape, where these same principles now define visibility and influence across AI, social, and marketplace ecosystems.
Across platforms like Google, Amazon, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and ChatGPT, the same fundamentals for organic visibility apply: keyword and semantic relevance, quality engagement, brand authority and trust, fresh content, and validation through user-generated content (UGC). All of which resonate with the ‘technologist and strategist’ ethos within an ‘organic marketer’ as long as engagement with social, paid, and brand teams is robust.
It’s never been more important to pair tailored platform strategies – spanning SEO, platform optimization, digital PR, and experience design –with deep expertise and a unified approach. Done right, this ensures your brand is visible at every step of the customer journey and drives results across the organic landscape.
As we move into a ‘zero-click’ world, success demands sharper, more refined measurement.
While Google is the top referrer to the open web, a significant portion (under half) of searches on Google do not result in a user going out to the open web.
On most social platforms, links are either not allowed, limited to your bio, or cause your post’s reach to drop significantly if included. Essentially, the majority of platforms prioritize native content, meaning they want the user to stay in their ecosystem. Meanwhile, some referrals are completely hidden from platforms like TikTok, meaning that your analytics platform is attributing this under ‘direct traffic’ when it is not.
This translates to a two-pronged measurement approach that brands can grow into.
The shift is already happening. LLMs, social-first behavior, and changing platform loyalties and engagement levels are redefining how, where, and why people search.
This is the moment for brands to evolve. Expand brand search strategies, break down silos, optimize for audiences, and champion a new measurement framework.
Search is anywhere. Brands should be too.