Google’s AI Overviews (those AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of search results) have exploded. According to seoClarity’s research, they’ve increased by nearly 475% year-over-year. They now show up on roughly 30% of all desktop searches, and that number keeps climbing.
Why does this matter? Because when an AI Overview answers someone’s question, they don’t click through to your website. They got what they needed. They’re done.
Chegg, the education company, watched their traffic drop 49% in a single year because Google’s AI started answering homework questions directly. They’re now suing Google over it. That’s how serious this is.
And it’s not just Google. ChatGPT has over 200 million weekly users now. Perplexity is growing. Microsoft’s Copilot is baked into everything. People are getting answers from AI instead of scrolling through search results, and that behavior is only accelerating.
Gartner is projecting that traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026 as people shift to AI assistants. Some analysts think that’s conservative.
Your Rankings Might Not Save You
Here’s the part that’s hard to hear: you might have great SEO. You might rank on page one for all your important keywords. And it might not matter as much as it used to.
If Google’s AI pulls information from your competitors (or from some random article that happens to answer the question well) and serves it up in an Overview, your beautiful page-one ranking gets pushed below the fold. On mobile, users might have to scroll past two full screens of AI-generated content before they even see a traditional result.
A study of over 300,000 keywords found that when AI Overviews appear, click-through rates to the top-ranking pages drop by about 35%. Some publishers have reported declines of 70-90% for certain queries.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s happening right now, to real businesses.
Gen Z Already Left the Building
Want to know where this is all headed? Look at how younger people are already searching.
Google’s own internal research found that nearly 40% of young people use TikTok or Instagram instead of Google when they’re looking for something, like where to eat lunch or what product to buy. A Her Campus survey found that 74% of Gen Z uses TikTok for search, and more than half of them prefer it to Google.
Only 46% of 18-24 year olds start their information searches on Google, compared to 58% of millennials. The gap is real and it’s growing.
These aren’t future customers. These are current customers. And they’re not typing queries into Google. They’re scrolling TikTok, asking ChatGPT, or watching YouTube Shorts.
If your entire visibility strategy is built around Google rankings, you’re optimizing for a behavior that’s fading out.
So What Do You Actually Do About This?
Alright, enough bad news. Let’s talk solutions, because there are real moves you can make right now.
Don’t abandon SEO, but stop relying on it alone.
SEO still matters. Google still processes trillions of searches. But SEO needs to become one channel in a broader strategy, not your entire strategy. The days of “rank well and the leads will come” are ending.
Start thinking about Answer Engine Optimization.
This is the new discipline. It’s about structuring your content so that AI systems (Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of them) can find it, understand it, and cite it when they answer questions.
That means writing content that leads with direct answers. It means using schema markup so AI can parse your information. It means building genuine expertise signals like author credentials, citations, and consistent topical authority so AI systems trust your content enough to reference it.
When you ARE cited in AI results, the data looks pretty good. Seer Interactive found that brands cited in AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks than brands that aren’t. And Adobe’s research shows that traffic from AI sources converts better with lower bounce rates, more time on site, and more pages viewed.
Fewer visitors, but better visitors. You can win that trade if you’re positioned correctly.
Diversify into paid advertising on platforms where your audience actually is.
This is the big one, and it’s where a lot of businesses are behind.
If organic reach is getting squeezed (and it is), paid advertising becomes more important, not less. But not just Google Ads.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram): Still the largest paid social platform with targeting capabilities that let you get in front of exactly the right people. For local businesses, the geo-targeting alone is incredibly valuable. You can reach homeowners in specific zip codes, people who’ve recently moved, business owners in particular industries, whatever your market looks like.
TikTok Ads: If any part of your customer base is under 45, you should be testing TikTok. The platform has over a billion users, the ad costs are still relatively low compared to Meta, and the engagement rates are strong. Plus, showing up in TikTok’s paid and organic results means you’re visible where younger consumers are actually searching.
YouTube Ads: YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and it’s owned by Google, which means your video ads can show up both on YouTube and across Google’s display network. Video content is also what AI systems are increasingly pulling into results.
LinkedIn Ads: For B2B companies, LinkedIn’s targeting is unmatched. You can target by job title, company size, industry, seniority level. It’s expensive, but the lead quality can be excellent.
Programmatic Display: Retargeting people who’ve visited your site, reaching people who match your customer profile across thousands of websites. Display advertising works because it’s one channel that AI can’t really disrupt.
You need multiple ways to reach your audience. Organic Google traffic was never guaranteed, and now it’s less reliable than ever. Paid advertising gives you control. You decide who sees your message, when they see it, and how much you’re willing to pay for that visibility.
Build your brand, not just your rankings.
When AI systems answer questions, they often mention brands by name. “NerdWallet recommends…” or “According to Mayo Clinic…”
The businesses that get cited are the ones with recognized authority in their space. That means investing in brand awareness through content, through PR, through social media presence, through advertising, so that when an AI is synthesizing information about your industry, your name comes up.
NerdWallet is a great case study here. Their traffic dropped 20%, but their revenue grew 35%. Why? Because even when people didn’t click through to their site, NerdWallet’s brand was being mentioned in AI answers. People remembered the name, searched for them directly, and converted.
Brand building isn’t fluffy marketing stuff. It’s a hedge against algorithm changes and AI disruption.
Actually be helpful.
AI systems are trained to find and surface the most helpful, authoritative, accurate content. If your website is full of thin service pages and generic blog posts written to hit keyword targets, AI isn’t going to cite you.
Create content that genuinely answers the questions your customers ask. Go deeper than your competitors. Include specific numbers, real examples, actual expertise. Be the source that deserves to be cited, and you’ll have a much better shot at getting cited.
What We’re Doing For Our Clients
At 561 Media, we’ve been watching this shift closely, and we’ve been adjusting our approach for the clients we work with.
We’re still doing SEO. Technical optimization, content strategy, link building, all of it. That foundation matters. But we’re layering on top of it:
Comprehensive paid media strategies across Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, depending on where each client’s audience actually spends time. We’re not putting all the eggs in the Google basket anymore.
Content restructuring for AI visibility. Rewriting key pages to lead with direct answers, implementing schema markup, building out FAQ content that AI systems can easily parse and cite.
Multi-platform presence building. Showing up on Google isn’t enough when your customers are searching TikTok, asking ChatGPT, and scrolling Instagram, or just asking Grok on X everything they wonder about.
Brand awareness campaigns that build recognition beyond search rankings, so that when AI mentions solutions in your industry, your business is part of that conversation.
The businesses that will do well through this transition are the ones that adapt now, before the shift is complete. The ones that keep doing exactly what they’ve always done are going to wonder where their leads went.
Where This Leaves Us
Google isn’t dead. It’s not. Google still processes more searches than every other platform combined. SEO still drives real business results.
But things are changing. Zero-click searches are the majority now. AI is answering questions that used to send people to websites. Younger consumers are searching on platforms that didn’t exist ten years ago.
The businesses that win in 2026 and beyond will be the ones that diversified into paid advertising, into multi-platform visibility, into content that AI wants to cite, into brand building that doesn’t depend on any single algorithm.
Your great SEO got you here. It won’t be enough to keep you here.
If you want to talk about what this means for your specific business, where your vulnerabilities are, what channels you should be testing, how to structure your content for AI visibility, give us a call. This is what we’re helping South Florida businesses figure out right now.
