A recent podcast by Ahrefs raised two issues about optimizing for AI search that can cause organizations to underperform and miss out on opportunities to improve sales. The conversation illustrates a gap between realistic expectations for AI-based trends and what can be achieved through overlooked opportunities elsewhere.

YouTube Is Second Largest Search Engine

The first thing noted in the podcast is that YouTube is the second-largest search engine by queries entered in the search bar. More people type search queries into YouTube’s search bar than any other search engine except Google itself. So it absolutely makes sense for companies to seriously consider how a video strategy can work to increase traffic and brand awareness.

It should be a no-brainer that businesses figure out YouTube, and yet many businesses are rushing to spend time and money optimizing for answer engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT, which have a fraction of the traffic of YouTube.

Patrick Stox explained:

“YouTube is the second largest search engine. There’s a lot of focus on all these AI assistants. They’re in total driving less than 1% of your traffic. YouTube might be a lot more. I don’t know how much it’s going to drive traffic to the website, but there’s a lot of eyes on it. I know for us, like we see it in our signups, …they sign up for Ahrefs.

It’s an incredible channel that I think as people need to diversify, to kind of hedge their bets on where their traffic is coming from, this would be my first choice. Like go and do more video. There’s your action item. If you’re not doing it, go do more video right now.”

Tim Soulo, Ahrefs CMO, expressed curiosity that so many people are looking two or three years ahead for opportunities that may or may not materialize on AI assistants, while overlooking the real benefits available today on YouTube.

He commented:

“I feel that a lot of people get fixated on AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity and optimizing for AI search because they are kind of looking three, five years ahead and they are kind of projecting that in three, five years, that might be the dominant thing, how people search.

…But again, if we focus on today, YouTube is much more popular than ChatGPT and YouTube has a lot more business potential than ChatGPT. So yeah, definitely you have to invest in AI search. You have to do the groundwork that would help you rank in Google, rank in ChatGPT and everything. …I don’t see YouTube losing its relevance five years from now. I can only see it getting bigger and bigger because the new generation of people that is growing up right now, they are very video oriented. Short form video, long form video. So yeah, definitely. If you’re putting all your eggs in the basket of ChatGPT, but not putting anything in YouTube, that’s a big mistake.”

Patrick Stox agreed with Tim, noting that Instagram and TikTok are big for short-form videos that are wildly popular today, and encouraged viewers…


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Last Update: November 12, 2025