The SEO system that built the last decade of online businesses is collapsing. Not slowly, right now, and most marketers haven't caught up yet. I run NP Digital. We're a global ad agency. We just won performance marketing agency of the year by Ad Age, and we do SEO for hundreds of companies. Fortune five hundreds, scaling brands, every industry you can name. And over the last eighteen months, I've been telling all our clients, rankings are holding relatively steady. Organic clicks, dropping hard, especially on the queries AI or views touch the most. The old system isn't dying slowly. It's being replaced. So let me start with this. One, nobody wants to admit out loud that for twenty years, ranking number one on Google met, we won. That was a game. Page one, top three, you got the click. Page two, you didn't exist. Every SEO strategy, every agency, every marketing budget was built on that foundation. The foundation just broke. Inside NP Digital's client profile,
we are seeing the same pattern we've been discussing publicly. Rankings, relatively stable. Organic traffic down on queries, AI reviews touch the most, and the rankings didn't fall. Their rankings are doing their job. The click isn't just happening as much anymore because the SERP itself changed. You search something, Google answers it at the top of page, and you never click through. And industry data, which I've cited myself on my blog, shows that well over half of Google searches now end out of website click. Now this doesn't mean SEO is dead. It actually still drives a ton of revenue if done right. You just gotta adjust how you're doing things. But before we get into that, think about what that means. More than half of your addressable search audience is getting what they came for without ever visiting anyone website, including yours. And the SERP used to be a doorway. Now it's a destination.
And two, Google is never giving that traffic back. Everybody's waiting for Google to fix this, like a bug, like a pendulum swing. But Google is the one swinging the pendulum. Google is in an existential
fight right now, not with another search engine, with ChatGPT,
with Plexi, with Claude, with every AI system that answers a question faster and better than the list of BlueLinx ever could. If you're Google, you have one move. You answer the question on the page. You make the SERP do what ChatGPT does. Synthesize, summarize, keep the user from leaving because the second a user leaves Google for ChatGPT,
Google loses them. Every AO review you've seen at the top of the search result is Google choosing your traffic over your business on purpose as a survival strategy, and it's working. And the data backs this up hard. When my team analyzed around a thousand keywords, click through rates dropped significantly on queries where AI overviews appeared compared to similar queries without them. And in our paid search test, we've seen AI overviews reduce click through rates by more than 50% on affected queries. 50%
on paid. And it gets even more wild. When I looked at 48 sites in our portfolio,
organic traffic was dropping, but direct revenue was going up because people were seeing the brand in a a overview then just navigating to the site directly, skipping the click entirely.
So stop budgeting for a rebound. There is no rebound. The traffic equation you built your business on is never coming back in the shape you remember it, which brings us to the question every CMO I talk to is asking me right now. What actually sends traffic now? The new game isn't about ranking. It's about being cited. Stay with me because this is important. AI systems don't work like Google's old index. They don't just show a list of options. They pull from information,
a collection of sources, put together an answer, and then tell the user where the answer came from, sometimes with the visible citation,
sometimes baked directly into a response. The brand mentioned in that answer wins. Every other brand in the category, they don't appear. There's no page two. There's no almost rank. You're either inside the answer or you're invisible. I wrote a whole breakdown on my blog about the discipline replacing traditional SEO. It's called generative engine optimization.
And I put it this way, generative engine optimization puts your brand in the answers, making your content easier for AI platforms to find, understand, and cite. In a zero click world, being part of the answer matters as much as being part of their rankings because marketers haven't wrapped their heads around this yet. When a buyer asks ChatGPT what's the best accounting software for a service based business, they're not going to compare five options. They're going to get three names. They're going to trust the list. There's an entire purchase funnel now. A few names, one question. If you're not one of the few names, you don't exist in that purchase decision. So now you may be wondering where AI actually pulls its sources from. When you look at where AI overviews and generative answers pull their citations, the pattern is not what most SEO teams expect. A huge chunk of these citations don't come from the brands on the website. They come from third party mentions, Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, industry publications, forums, places where real humans are talking about the brand. The traditional SEO play, optimize your page, build your domain authority, rank your blog, is now the floor, not the ceiling. It's still required, but you gotta do even more. The ceiling is being mentioned everywhere else. I've been saying this in my geo right. The more your expertise appears across different platforms, the more signals AI engines have to work with, and the more likely they are to surface your content and their answers. Social media, YouTube, forums, this isn't just SEO anymore. It's search everywhere optimization.
This is the single biggest mental shift for marketing teams right now. Your website is not the product anymore. Your brand's presence across the Internet is the product, which means your entire measurement system just became obsolete. So now you need to know the metrics that replace rankings. The smartest marketing teams I'm working with stopped reporting keyword rankings months ago. Sure. They look at it, and it still drives revenue, and it's not gonna fully die. But there's more to SEO. You need to now optimize for Google, traditional search, and the AI results as well. So you gotta look at things like share a voice inside of AI answers. How often does your brand show up when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or even Google's AI or viewer Gemini a question in your category? Not your ranking, your citation room. There's a whole new generation of tools being built for this. Ubersuggest,
we've released a lot of these features for free. You also have paid solutions at companies like WriteSonic or Ahrefs or even SEMrush. Each of them gives you a way to report a share of voice inside AI Answers instead of just keyword rankings. If you're still reporting rank tracking to your CEO, you're measuring the old game. You're telling your executive team the scorecard of the game that already ended. Start measuring AI share of voice this quarter. Benchmark where you are. Benchmark where your top three competitors are. And, again, you can do a lot of this inside Ubersuggest for free using our AI visibility report. That number is the single most important metric in enterprise marketing for the next twenty four months. Okay. So you know the game change. You know what to measure. But knowing the game isn't the same as knowing how to win. So let me show you. Here's what the winners are doing. The brands dominating AI citations right now didn't get there by writing better blog posts. They got there by being talked about in more places than their competitors. That's the mechanism. Large language models look for consensus
across sources. The more places a brand is being mentioned as a category leader, the more AI treats the brand as a default answer. I just hosted NP Digital's future of organic traffic webinar, which makes this more explicit. Brand mentions digital PR and multi format authority are the levers that keep you visible when AI is curating the results page. Here's what this means in practice. I had a client recently, I won't name the category, who wasn't ranking in the top 10 for their best keywords. But then when we ran the AI citation analysis, they were the most cited brand in their category across every AI system. Why? They spent three years investing in PR, podcast, community, and career partnerships. They weren't optimizing for AI. They were building brand presence, and AI rewarded them for it. So here's the reframe for your next strategy need. Digital PR plays a major role in SEO now. Community is SEO. Career partnerships are SEO.
The line between brand marketing and search is gone, which changes the kind of content you actually need to produce. The old SEO content was written for Google's crawler. Keyword optimized, thin, volume driven. The new content has to survive being pulled into AI Answers and still make your brand the one that gets cited. That means three things. It has to be the most definitive, the most complete, the most authoritative answer on the Internet to a specific question. It has to be structured. Clear claims, clear evidence, clear attribution, and it has to be quotable. An AI system should be built to lift one sentence out of your content and have a stand on the side. This is exactly what my geo framework pushes towards. The thin content, the keyword stuff post, the community listicles,
the AI generated filler, all of that is deadweight now. A lot of enterprise content libraries are going to need to be cut significantly, which brings me to what I was saying when you first started watching. The old system is collapsing. The new one is being built. The question isn't whether to move. It's how fast. If you want the full playbook exactly on how AI decides which brands to cite, watch this next video.