Crypto Projects Risk Irrelevance in ChatGPT Era

Crypto founders have long seen X and Discord as mainstays of the community. But LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are beginning to replace them.

Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode is already siphoning visits from traditional publishers. The Financial Times and the Daily Mail report traffic declines of up to 89% and executives warning of an “existential crisis” for news.

Considering Google is doubling down on its AI strategy, this is clearly not something here today and gone tomorrow — the company continues to expand its investments across AI infrastructure and related technologies.

For crypto projects, which operate at a far smaller scale, the risk is even greater. If LLMs do not perceive them as worthy of inclusion, they are unlikely to be found by their audiences at all.

Crypto’s Adoption Boom Meets an Attention Crash

The success stories of early Web2 winners who mastered SEO optimization are still fresh in the memory — from Amazon and eBay in e-commerce to Wikipedia and HuffPost in digital content. Today, AI tools are increasingly serving as discovery gateways to information and the crypto information space is no exception.

Of course, X and Discord are still the first stop for breaking crypto news or community engagement. The problem is that LLMs see those as hype channels, and projects that do not appear in credible sources risk being excluded from visibility altogether.

It is also true that most users are not ready to trust flawed AI summaries when searching for crypto investment advice and will likely dig deeper before committing significant capital. Still, reputations are already mediated by LLMs. If a project is not surfaced there, it may never enter the deeper due diligence funnel at all.

To illustrate the trend with figures, consider Latin America — a region where adoption grew by 18.3% in Q2 2025 according to the RankingsLatam survey. Logically, rising adoption should have translated into greater visibility for crypto publishers.

But that did not happen. Our own analysis, based on publicly available SimilarWeb data covering 55 regional media outlets across 19 countries, found that despite booming adoption, crypto-native publishers lost 54% of their traffic during the same quarter.

It also showed that AI platforms have already emerged as a measurable source. In Q2, they averaged 15% of referral traffic per crypto-native outlet in Latin America. For some outlets, it was as high as 60%.

PR Now Influences What AI “Believes”

AI platforms curate information from well-structured, high-authority sources. This means reputation begins long before a user searches.

Crypto projects that have done the hard work of appearing in op-eds, detailed explainers, or top lists in reputable outlets stand a far greater chance of being cited in AI-generated answers.

It’s an entirely new communications playbook, where flooding crypto-specific social media channels is no longer enough. Optimizing for AI readability requires a clear content hierarchy on the brand’s own site, updated statistics, consistent language across profiles, and no technical clutter such as crawl errors or duplicate pages.

A brand’s public footprint should also appear in structured business databases like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Clutch, which help models contextualize credibility.

AI visibility is becoming a new layer of reputation. Whether or not users consciously rely on AI for discovery, the models are already shaping what surfaces first and which projects are quietly filtered out. Those who align early with this new logic will dominate the narrative long after today’s hype cycles fade.

In a broader sense, PR now steers not only what people read, but what AI trusts.

AI Visibility Will Define the Next Market Leaders

Looking ahead, LLMs are not only influencing which projects appear in the narrative. They are actively framing which projects are perceived as “leaders.” That, in turn, will determine capital flows and exchange listings as visibility directly affects perceived legitimacy.

Moreover, AI outputs may be used by policymakers as background, contributing to regulatory perception.

While this trend is still in its early stages, it is safe to say that projects adopting AI visibility ahead of others will dominate Web3. Gone are the days when crypto founders could rely on hype. AI visibility is now a crypto survival issue.

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