SEO Isn’t Dying. It’s Finally Being Marked Properly

Earlier this year, Ahrefs, the Singapore-headquartered SEO software firm, put a number on what many of us had been watching on client dashboards. Across 300,000 keywords, when Google showed an AI Overview, the top-ranking page earned about 58% fewer clicks, up from a 34.5% reduction in the firm’s April 2025 study [1]. Then a separate randomised study of 1,065 Chrome users, which tested cause rather than mere correlation, found outbound clicks fell by nearly 40% when an overview appeared [2].

Cue the annual funeral for SEO. I’d hold the flowers. What’s dying isn’t SEO. It’s the click, and with it a great deal of lazy SEO that only ever worked because nobody was checking the homework.

Old Google was a librarian who handed you a shortlist of ten books. Your job was to be on that list, ideally at the top. Today the librarian reads all the books herself and answers you in a single paragraph, sometimes naming her sources. The game has shifted from getting on the shortlist to being the book she quotes.

The part where I lose a few friends

A cottage industry has sprung up selling “GEO”, “AEO” and “LLM optimisation” as brand-new disciplines. Read the playbooks, though, and the advice is strangely familiar: answer questions clearly, structure your content, earn mentions from credible sources, build topical depth, fix your technical foundations.

That isn’t a new discipline. It’s good SEO, finally being enforced.

For a decade, you could rank with thin pages, bought links and keyword-stuffed headings. A language model deciding whom to quote has little interest in your keyword density. It wants the clearest, best-corroborated source on the question. So if your SEO agency’s “AI strategy” is an old invoice with a new label, ask harder questions. And if your SEO was done properly all along, you’re probably better placed than the headlines suggest.

What genuinely has changed

Three things are new, and they’re worth understanding.

The unit of competition has shrunk from page to paragraph. AI search systems break your question into many smaller sub-searches, a process known as query fan-out. They pull the best passages from dozens of sites and stitch them together. A section that only makes sense after the three before it is hard to lift out. A section that opens with a direct answer and then backs it up is easy to quote.

Being machine-readable is no longer just about Google. Many AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript the way Googlebot does, so content that only appears after scripts load may be invisible to them. Meanwhile, plenty of sites blocked AI crawlers in their robots.txt a couple of years ago, often by default. Whether to let them in should be a deliberate business decision, not an inherited setting.

Brand has become a ranking factor in all but name. Ask an AI assistant for the best physiotherapy clinic in Tampines and its answer leans heavily on how often, and how favourably, you’re discussed: reviews, forums, press coverage, Reddit threads. PR and SEO are becoming one job. There are early signs this pays off beyond organic search, too. Seer Interactive data, as reported by GrowthSpree, found that across 2025, brands cited in AI Overviews on informational queries earned a 15.74% paid click-through rate, versus 11.19% for uncited brands on the same results pages [3], though stronger brands are likelier to be cited to begin with. If anything, that caveat proves the point: brand strength is now doing the heavy lifting.

Stop worshipping the traffic graph

Here’s the twist: the clicks that survive tend to be the ones worth having. SparkToro’s research found branded searches, local business queries and high-intent transactional searches still benefit significantly from SEO [4], even as zero-click behaviour has eaten into informational content. The person who reads an AI summary of “how does invisible grille installation work” and leaves was never your customer. The one who searches your brand name afterwards is.

That’s why falling sessions don’t automatically mean a falling business. Better measures are branded search volume, how often you’re cited in AI answers, and how well the visitors who do arrive convert, since many of them have been pre-sold by the answer they just read. The tools for tracking AI citations are still immature, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a dashboard.

The real question

The librarian has read everything now. “How do I rank?” was always slightly the wrong question; until recently, you could just get away with asking it. The question now is “Why would anyone quote me?”

Businesses with a good answer will find the death of the click survivable. Some may even find it an upgrade. Do not take every SEO agency's advice as hard rule without healthy scepticism.

References

[1] R. Law, “Update: AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58%,” Ahrefs Blog, Feb. 4, 2026. Accessed: Oct. 10, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/

[2] S. Agarwal and A. Sen, “AI summaries and online search behavior: Evidence from a field experiment on Google Search,” SSRN Working Paper, Apr. 2026, rev. Jun. 2026. [Online]. Available: [SSRN URL to be confirmed]

[3] GrowthSpree, “AI Overviews & B2B SaaS paid search 2026: The collapse, the reversal & why citation now decides,” GrowthSpree Blog, 2026. Accessed: Oct. 10, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.growthspreeofficial.com/blogs/b2b-saas-paid-search-ai-overviews-benchmarks-2026

[4] R. Fishkin, “In 2026, less than one third of Google searches still send a click,” SparkToro Blog, Jun. 9, 2026. Accessed: Oct. 10, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/