Your site is still ranking. Your content is still showing up. But no one’s clicking.

Instead, Google is answering queries directly. AI Mode, AI Overviews, and summaries are eating the SERP alive. Meanwhile, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are becoming the new gatekeepers of discovery.

What’s going on? This isn’t a traffic dip. It’s the start of a platform-wide reset.

We’re watching the great decoupling of search in real time: impressions are up, visibility is intact, but clicks have fallen off a cliff. It’s like an open-mouthed crocodile, the curve where impressions rise and traffic plunges.

And Google sees the cracks.

 In June 2025, they began offering buyouts to their own Search Ads division. That’s the team in charge of monetizing the blue-link era. This isn’t just a quirk that’s going away. It’s a warning. And for CMOs, content, and SEO leaders, it’s the beginning of a new and different era, where visibility is divorced from traffic, and where influence is measured in impressions and citations, not sessions.

The CMO’s Moment: Stop Optimizing for Clicks. Start Optimizing for Influence.

Clicks are no longer the currency. 

The traditional organic search funnel — powered by search rankings and CTRs — is being replaced by something else entirely: answers and agents in LLMs.

And CMOs are already feeling it even if they don’t have the language for what’s changing.

A choice has to be made: 

1. Keep chasing traffic in a system designed to withhold it

Or:

2. Start optimizing for influence in the systems that are replacing it.

This is where CMOs need to lead:

• Not by demanding more traffic
• But by asking: “How can we leverage this influence?”

Right now, it’s like the interstate in every major city just had all of its billboards cleared. The space is wide open. 

Agents, answer engines, AI interfaces, and even Google are giving brands new surfaces to show up. You have to be smart enough to seize them.

Modern CMOs must rewire their content strategy and lead gen goals to capitalize on that visibility. Not by optimizing for a single click path, but by painting their brand across the full discovery landscape.

Track and expand your influence around:

• Citation share (how often you’re quoted in AEO results)
• Agent visibility (how often you’re mentioned in Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude)
• Pipeline-assisted impressions (who saw your brand before converting)
• Brand authority across platforms LLMs trust (like Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and LinkedIn)

Yes, clicks are down. But if your brand is showing up in answers, recaps, and AEO, you're still in the room.

This isn’t about SEO anymore. It’s about survival at the strategic layer.

Clicks Have Collapsed and Your Links Are Pushed Out

Your content is still ranking. It’s still showing up. But users aren’t clicking. We’re watching traditional organic listings get displaced in real time.

Clicks have collapsed.

• Google’s AI Overviews push classic blue links out of sight
• AI Mode rewrites the SERP into a single-stream answer feed
• Click-through rates drop by up to 70% when AI Overviews are present 

Independent research by Kevin Indig backs this up. In one of the first UX and behavioral studies of Google’s AI overviews, Indig found that outbound click-through rates on desktop dropped by two-thirds when an AI Overview appeared and by nearly half on mobile. In essence, the more generative the SERP, the less likely a user is to leave it.

Across both studies, the takeaway is clear: AI Overviews are soaking up clicks that satisfy users within the interface and cutting off the route to your site. 

If you’re not being cited in the answer itself, you may not be seen at all.

Users no longer want 10 blue links. They want a direct answer. And increasingly, they’re getting it without ever landing on your site.

They’re answering the question before a user clicks anything. And your hard-earned content is getting cannibalized. But impressions are up.

Why Impressions Are Up: You’re Being Quoted, Not Clicked

Just because no one’s clicking doesn’t mean no one’s seeing you.

LLMs don’t rank websites — they remix them.
They synthesize answers from dozens of sources to generate a single, authoritative reply.
If your content makes it into that answer, you’ve won influence — even if you didn’t win the click.

And when attribution does happen, what you get is brand exposure, not traffic.
It’s frustrating if you’re still measuring sessions. But it’s gold if you’re measuring reach.

Instead of a funnel, it’s a billboard or TV commercial and your logo just made the cut.‍

As Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and a founder of Moz, put it: ‍

The way to improve is to improve your marketing and the experiences people have off of your website….I’m trying to influence the searches.”

That’s the paradox of modern SEO and content: You can be more visible than ever and less visited than ever. 

Now, the question has changed from: “How do I drive more clicks?”

To: “How do I get mentioned and become the source?”

The Strategic SEO Shift is Influence over Traffic

Traditional SEO was about ranking #1 and AEO is not about gaining traffic, but gaining influence.

That means thinking not only about humans, but also for AI agents that comb through, assemble, and deliver knowledge to users in real time.

Sustainable success in both search and LLM platforms require integrated, cross-channel strategies that drive search demand for your brand and experts. AEO includes strengthening your brand and social media presence, diversifying platforms and formats to ultimately be authoritative, everywhere,” said Lauren Welles Medley, senior channel director of SEO at Amsive.

That shift means:

• Content must be structured clearly, with headers, definitions, and schema.
• Topics must be deeply covered, not thin or generic.
• Your brand must appear across ecosystems in blogs, forums, review sites, Quora and Reddit threads that AI agents pull from.

Alex Halliday, CEO of AirOps put in this way when describing how to create winning content for AEO: 

“Content must persuade not just human readers but also AI agents who are the new ‘middlemen’ between brands and customers. These AI systems are becoming the gatekeepers of information, deciding what content to surface in response to user queries. It’s a new and poorly understood optimization challenge. Successful content strategies must now consider both audience persuasion and agent persuasion as critical objectives.”

This is no longer a game of keywords. It’s a game of trust, authority, and clarity all surfaced by machines trying to answer human questions.

Train LLMs to Speak On Your Behalf

Today’s search journeys don’t start and stop with Google. They jump across platforms, interfaces, and AI agents and your content needs to show up everywhere users are asking questions.

Think about how people search now:

• They ask Perplexity to compare tools.
• They use ChatGPT to summarize a topic.
• They expect a direct answer from Google (not a list of pages)

And increasingly, users are skipping Google altogether. They’re asking for tool recommendations in Slack channels, scanning Reddit threads, or searching directly on TikTok.

These are the new discovery surfaces and in every case, your visibility depends on whether an agent recognizes your content as credible and useful.

In each case, your brand’s presence depends on whether an agent recognizes your content as trustworthy. If your brand isn’t being chosen as a source, you’re invisible.

As Kevin Indig described it like this:

“‘Performance’ SEO is morphing into an “influence” play that spans Google, LLMs, and every social feed your customers consult for a second opinion.”

Here’s another way to look at it: you’re not just optimizing for search engines but are educating your future distributors.

Traffic Compression is Changing the Metrics

Clicks used to be the north star. Now, they’re just one signal in a complex map.

New AEO visibility metrics to keep an eye on:

• Citation Share: How often your brand is mentioned or linked in AI results
• Impression Trends: Growth in AI-triggered impressions, even without clicks
• Snippet Coverage: % of your content pulled into summaries, AI overviews, and LLM answers
• Brand Recall: Increase in direct traffic (like to the homepage) or branded searches post-visibility
  
  

In fact, some brands are already reporting that while traffic is down, conversions are stable or rising because AI-powered search is filtering out the low-intent crowd. 

Think of this as traffic compression and it means every click you do get matters more than ever.

Traffic compression is the phenomenon where the total volume of traffic decreases, but the quality or intent of that traffic increases usually as a result of LLMs, AI, aggregators, or AI mode filtering out lower-intent users before they ever reach your site.

In the context of SEO and AEO:

• You're getting fewer visits, but the people who do click are more qualified, engaged, or ready to convert.
  
  
• AI Overviews, featured snippets, and tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT satisfy low-intent queries (usually top of funnel) on the SERP, leaving only high-intent users who need more depth or action to click through.

You Can Win in the AEO Era

To prepare your content for the LLM-driven future, your content must be structured for extractability, trust, and clarity.

This change is already reshaping how modern product-led companies approach SEO.

Take Vercel, a front-end cloud platform. Faced with the same drop in clicks and rise in AI summaries, they’ve restructured their strategy from the ground up. Instead of chasing keywords, they’re designing content to feed LLMs, not just rank on SERPs.

In an article about their changing SEO strategy, Kevin Corbett, a software engineer, and Malte Ubl, the Vercel CTO said:

“The shift from link-building to concept clarity changes how we approach content. Traditional and LLM SEO serve different systems, but you can't neglect one for the other. To be found by people and machines, you need to support both.

They’re investing in answer-ready content — short, cited, and deeply technical. If you want AI to speak on your behalf, this is the blueprint.

Recently, AirOps ranked 50 top SaaS brands to see how each was performing in AEO results.

These 5 factors stood out: 

• Freshness signals
• Readability & structure for parsing (e.g., FAQs, how-tos, schemas)
• Snippet extractability
• Evidence and attribution
• Brand alignment

These are machine-readable trust signals. They help LLMs confidently pull from your work and cite it in their answers.

So if you're optimizing for agents, not just algorithms:

• Structure for clarity. Use Q&A formats, headers, and definitions.
• Keep content fresh and frequently updated.
• Make it easy to quote. Put clear, extractable facts and examples near the top.
• Attribute sources and cite evidence. Machines trust citations.
• Match tone and coverage to your brand. Make your voice consistent across channels.

Because in this new era, getting cited is the new getting clicked.

‍

Final Thought: Influence Over Everything

The blue-link era is fading. Search is no longer about getting clicks. It’s about getting cited, mentioned, and embedded into the way LLMs answer questions. The brands that will win next aren’t just optimizing for Google, but are optimizing for every AI agent, chat interface, and answer engine their customers use to search, evaluate, and buy.

It’s not about traffic anymore. It’s about turning LLMs into your next great revenue channel. AirOps is the only AEO and search optimization platform that helps brands do just that. It turns content insights into structured actions, and actions into measurable ROI.

AirOps is the only all-in-one AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) platform that helps teams visualize, act on, and measure their content’s influence in AI-driven search, so they stay visible and cited where clicks alone can’t reach. 

Book your strategy session today.