I’ve been around Digital Marketing for long enough that I can see returning trends. I really wish I had been given a £1 for every time I heard that SEO was dying. It’s had more premature obituaries than just about any other service. But, if you’ve felt like search traffic doesn’t behave the way it used to, you’re not imagining it.
Google’s results pages now routinely lead with an AI-written summary before a single blue link appears. That single change has rewritten the economics of organic search faster than any algorithm update in the last decade. It’s not killed SEO, but it has changed how the sales/lead gen funnel works to some degree.
Scale of change in SEO
The scale of it is worth sitting with. Google’s AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of tracked search queries, up from around 31% a year earlier (BrightEdge, 2026). For UK businesses relying on organic search to bring in enquiries, that’s not a minor shift. It’s nearly half of all searches now potentially resolving themselves on the results page, with no click required.
The traffic hit is real, and it’s uneven. Here is what the change means in basic terms. Quick queries and questions are being dealt with by the AI, but to actually achieve something, be that buying something, engaging professional advice, or even arranging a curry delivery, then the AI can’t cut it. They still need to come to your site to complete their action.
Multiple studies prove the AI shift in SEO
Multiple independent studies, using different methods and different data sets, have landed on broadly the same conclusion.
- Ahrefs, analysing 300,000 keywords via Search Console data, found that when an AI Overview appears above the top-ranking result, click-through on that top position drops by 58% (Ahrefs, 2025).
- Pew Research, tracking nearly 69,000 real Google searches, found users click through to a traditional result in just 8% of visits when an AI summary is present, compared with 15% when it isn’t, roughly half the click behaviour (Pew Research Centre, 2025).
- A randomised field study published in early 2026 backed this up with a causal test rather than a correlation: hiding AI Overviews for one group of users increased their outbound clicks from 0.38 to 0.61 per search (Search Engine Journal, 2026).
What does the shift to AI mean for your SEO strategy?
Here’s the detail that matters for planning, though: the damage isn’t spread evenly across query types. AI Overviews trigger far more often on informational, “how to” and research-style searches. They appear much less frequently on transactional and local intent searches, the “book a survey”, “solicitor near me” or “get a quote” kind of query that most service businesses actually depend on for enquiries and sales.
If your organic strategy has been built entirely around blog content designed to rank for broad informational terms, that’s the traffic most exposed. If it’s built around service pages and location pages designed to capture people ready to buy, you’re in a considerably safer position.
Being cited is now worth more than simply ranking
So, is that the death knell for copywriting and blog pages? No, not really. They’re still a great source to feed your social media outreach and for newsletter content to reach your existing clients, just as they have always been, but as one window closes, another has opened.
The other shift worth understanding is what happens to the businesses that do get pulled into an AI Overview. Being cited inside one doesn’t restore the old click-through rates, but it does meaningfully outperform being ignored. Seer Interactive’s research found that brands cited within an AI Overview earn around 35% more organic clicks than uncited competitors appearing on the same query (Seer Interactive, 2025). In other words, showing up inside the AI-generated answer has become a distinct and valuable outcome in its own right, separate from your position in the traditional ten blue links below it.
Is this the new SEO, or is this just an AI hallucination?
This is the part of SEO that’s genuinely new, and it’s why “is SEO still worth it” is the wrong question. The more useful one is whether your content is structured so that Google’s AI, and increasingly tools like ChatGPT, can actually extract, understand and cite it.
That means answer-first writing, clear and specific claims, proper use of structured data, and unique, human content. The need to create this clarity, structure and quotability is exactly what SEO’s have been saying for years, as even pre-AI, it had benefits for search engines.
Combining the skill of the copywriter with access to your in-house experts allows you to create high-quality content, which is exactly what the AI wants to ingest and regurgitate, with citations, to its readers.
Concentrate on creating things that show your knowledge, rather than thin, generic content. If it looks like anyone could have written it, then that is exactly the kind of material AI can summarise in a single sentence without ever needing to send a visitor to the source.
What do AI generated fact boxes mean for your digital marketing strategy?
AI is evolving at a rapid pace, but so far we’ve seen that it is organisational rather than truly inventive. It still needs facts to be able to give meaningful answers, and they have to come from somewhere.
None of this means organic search has stopped working. Google Search revenue actually grew 17% year on year in Q4 2025, which tells you people are still searching in enormous volume, and businesses are still winning enquiries through it (Alphabet earnings, 2025). What’s changed is where the value now sits.
Broad informational content chasing search volume is doing less work than it used to. Well-built service and location pages, the kind designed for people who already know roughly what they want and are close to enquiring, are largely untouched by this shift and remain some of the most valuable real estate on a website.
For West Midlands professional services firms for example, this is arguably good news. Hyper-local, specific, genuinely expert content is exactly what both traditional search and AI Overviews reward, and it’s precisely the kind of content that large national competitors are usually too generic to produce. The businesses that treat this as a reason to abandon SEO will lose ground to the ones that treat it as a reason to get considerably more deliberate about it.
If you want to see what ZenithSpark can do to help your digital marketing contact us or call us on 01384 468035
Sources: BrightEdge (2026); Ahrefs (2025, 2026); Pew Research Center (2025); Search Engine Journal (2026); Seer Interactive (2025); Tyneside Marketing (2026); Alphabet Inc. Q4 2025 earnings release.