Field note · September 2026

Why most businesses are optimizing for a search engine that's already shrinking

Every business I talk to is still fighting for Google's front page. Most of them are fighting for a front page that fewer and fewer people ever scroll to. AI Overviews now sit on top of roughly a fifth to half of all Google searches — by Google's own account, close to half of US queries — and every one of those answers can end the search before a single organic link gets clicked.

The click-through data makes the shift concrete. When an AI Overview appears, organic click-through on the page in position one falls by more than half in some measurements. The searcher got their answer at the top of the page and never scrolled down to the ten blue links a business spent years optimizing for.

You're not losing rankings. You're losing the moment the click used to happen.

Meanwhile traffic from AI-native search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — to websites has grown roughly sixteenfold since 2024. It's a smaller river than Google's, still, but it's the one rising while the other one's flow gets diverted upstream into the answer box itself.

None of this means Google SEO is dead. It means it stopped being the whole game. The businesses adapting fastest are treating "get cited in the answer" as its own discipline, sitting next to classic SEO rather than replacing it — because the two audiences, human clickers and AI answer-engines, no longer respond to exactly the same signals.

— Enoch George helps businesses get found, cited, and chosen inside AI search results. Tracked with RankAssistAI.