Telepathic - AI for the new era of search

Written by: Killian and Navin from Telepathic // Published Date: September 8, 2025

Introduction

Traditional content optimisation is losing relevance. AI-driven search no longer ranks entire pages; it extracts short segments and combines them into answers.

This shift changes how content should be planned and written. Instead of chasing keywords or long-form rankings, the priority is clarity, structure, and being the best possible source for a specific question.

This playbook focuses on owned content published on company websites, since that is the foundation AI engines rely on when building answers. We’ll walk through the patterns that consistently earn citations, the formats that perform best, and the practical steps teams are using to adapt their content strategies.

Why Your Content Strategy Must Evolve

Shift in Search Behavior

50% of traditional search engine volume is expected to move elsewhere by 2028 according to Gartner research.

****This transformation is already underway:

• ChatGPT weekly active users doubled from 400 million in February 2025 to 800 million by mid-2025 [Source]
• Only 12% overlap between ChatGPT and Google's top results for the same queries [Source]
• AI search visitors convert at 4.4x higher rates than traditional search visitors [Source]
• In some cases, AI search visitors convert at a 23x higher rate than organic search visitors [Source]

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Our Take: Companies optimizing only for traditional SEO are missing the highest-converting traffic channel. We used our AI platform traffic distribution to validate this and identified that AI channels are gaining traction across the board.

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