The Click Is Disappearing — and Most Marketers Haven’t Noticed
For twenty years, the game was straightforward. You researched keywords, published content, earned backlinks, and watched organic traffic climb. That playbook is not dead, but it is being rewritten in real time — and most marketing teams are still optimising for a version of Google that no longer exists.
Here is what changed: AI is no longer a feature bolted onto search. It is search. Google’s AI Overviews now sit above the traditional ten blue links on a growing share of queries. Bing has Copilot. Safari is testing generative summaries. Arc browser barely shows you a results page at all. The browser itself is becoming the answer engine.
The downstream impact is brutal. Studies tracking click-through rates on queries where AI Overviews appear show organic CTR dropping from roughly 2.94% to 0.84%. That is not a rounding error. That is a seventy-percent collapse in the clicks that content marketers have built entire careers around capturing.
If your growth model depends on organic traffic, you cannot afford to ignore this.
SEO Is Not Dying. It Is Evolving.
Let me be clear — I am not writing an obituary for SEO. Search engines still process billions of queries. People still click links. Organic content still drives pipeline. But the shape of the opportunity is fundamentally different now, and the marketers who recognise that earliest will have an enormous advantage.
Think of it this way. Traditional SEO was about ranking. You wanted position one, position two, position three. The new game is about citation. When an AI generates an answer, it pulls from sources. Your goal is to be one of those sources — to be the reference the model trusts enough to cite.
This shift has a name that is gaining traction in the industry: AI Engine Optimisation, or AEO. It is not a replacement for SEO. It is the next layer on top of it. And it requires a different way of thinking about content, authority, and discoverability.
What Actually Changes in Practice
The principles of good content — depth, accuracy, originality, expertise — still matter. In fact, they matter more, because AI models are remarkably good at identifying thin, derivative content and ignoring it. But the tactics around those principles need to shift.
First, structure becomes critical. AI models parse structured content far more reliably than long, wandering narratives. Clear headings, direct answers to specific questions, well-organised data — these are the signals that make your content easy for a model to extract and cite. If your blog posts read like stream-of-consciousness essays, they are invisible to AI summarisation.
Second, entity authority matters more than keyword density. Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT’s browsing feature both weigh the credibility of a source when deciding what to cite. That means your brand’s topical authority — how consistently and deeply you cover a subject — is now a ranking factor in a way it never was before. Publishing one article on a topic is not enough. You need to be the definitive resource.
Third, you need to think about AI platforms as separate channels. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude all have different retrieval behaviours. Some pull from web crawls. Some use real-time search. Some weight recent content more heavily. Treating “AI visibility” as a single channel is like treating “social media” as one platform — it is technically true and practically useless.
Fourth, direct answers win. When someone asks “What is the best CRM for startups?” and your content opens with three paragraphs of preamble about the history of customer relationship management, the AI will skip you and cite the page that leads with a clear, direct answer. Front-load your value.
A Framework for the Transition
If I were rebuilding a content strategy today — and I have done this for several brands over the past year — here is the framework I would use:
Audit your current AI visibility. Search for your key topics in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview. Are you being cited? If not, you know where you stand.
Map your content to questions, not just keywords. AI models are fundamentally question-answering machines. Reframe your content calendar around the specific questions your audience asks, and answer them directly.
Build structured, citable content. Think of each piece as a reference document that an AI could pull a clean, accurate excerpt from. Tables, numbered lists, clear definitions, and concise summaries all increase your citability.
Invest in brand authority signals. Backlinks still matter, but so do mentions, reviews, expert quotes, and presence across multiple credible platforms. The more an AI model encounters your brand in authoritative contexts during training and retrieval, the more likely it is to cite you.
Track new metrics. Organic traffic and keyword rankings are still useful, but add AI citation tracking to your dashboard. Tools are emerging that monitor when and where your brand appears in AI-generated responses. Start measuring this now, even if the data is imperfect.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here is what most marketers do not want to hear: you cannot control AI visibility the way you controlled SEO rankings. There is no equivalent of a title tag optimisation or a meta description tweak. You cannot game a model the way you could game an algorithm.
What you can do is build content that is so genuinely useful, so clearly authoritative, and so well-structured that AI models have no choice but to reference it. That was always the promise of good SEO — create the best content and the rankings will follow. The difference now is that the “rankings” are citations in AI-generated responses, and the bar for “best content” is significantly higher.
The marketers who treat this as a threat will spend the next two years watching their organic traffic erode and blaming the algorithm. The marketers who treat it as an evolution will build a new kind of visibility that is, in many ways, more durable than the old one.
The shift from SEO to AEO is not coming. It is here. The only question is whether you adapt your strategy now or scramble to catch up later.
