AI Killed the Click: The Marketing Shift You Can’t Ignore

[00:00:00] Search traffic is drying up. AI tools are rewriting the rules. And Google? It's no longer your best source of website visits. In this episode, I break down the silent collapse of traditional SEO and what smart marketers must do to stay relevant. If you've been relying on search to grow your business, this is your wake-up call. It's time to stop chasing traffic and start building trust in the age of AI. So make sure you stay tuned to this pretty important episode.

[00:00:30] of the Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:01:00] on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. This is Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. For those longtime subscribers,

[00:01:30] of this podcast, every other episode, I do an interview with a thought leader, expert, author. And the other half, I do solo episodes where really I unveil my latest thinking. Well, today is going to be a solo episode that I've spent a lot of time doing research, doing a lot of thinking about, and wanted to package this together in a consumable and actionable way because there's been a lot said about the subject. And I wanted to be crystal clear.

[00:02:00] As to how we got here and clear as to how we got here and what is the way forward. Obviously, if you are new, I hope that this will convince you to subscribe to this podcast. But nevertheless, let's get into today's content because it really is, I believe, one, if not the most important episode of this podcast that I will be publishing or have published since I began this back in 2013.

[00:02:22] Because there comes a point when, with enough hindsight, we can finally connect the dots and make smarter, more strategic decisions. Businesses did this when the internet emerged. It obviously didn't happen right away, but it happened over time. And we're seeing the same thing play out now with AI. And it's only accelerating. I mean, it's only been about two and a half years since ChatGPT hit the scene, but already it's clear.

[00:02:52] The writing's in the wall. And only when we look back with a little historical perspective can we truly understand the changes in front of us and, more importantly, plan accordingly. Today, I want to zoom in on one of the biggest shifts I'm seeing and I'm sure, well, unless you're living under a rock, you've seen as well. The quiet transformation of search. If you've read digital threads, you know I break digital marketing into three core containers.

[00:03:20] Search, email, and social. Now in the book, I pointed out how social's role in driving traffic had declined while search remains strong. That made it the foundation of many digital strategies. But now, well, it's safe to say that that assumption needs to be re-examined. Search engines, especially Google, aren't delivering the traffic they used to.

[00:03:46] And this isn't some seasonal dip or minor trend or caused by some algorithmic change. This is a structural change. Now, digital threads was all about creating balance across all of your digital marketing channels and using each one strategically. So yes, search still matters. But how we think about it and how we build strategies around it needs to evolve. In digital threads, I dedicated three chapters to my ideas around search.

[00:04:16] One was building a library of content. Number two was earning backlinks and digital relationships. And the third was about repurposing content across channels from that library of content that you had invested in. Now, this guidance still holds, but the why behind it is shifting. Today, your content library is less about ranking for clicks and more about fueling your presence across social, email, and AI.

[00:04:44] Backlinks may not influence LLMs the way they did traditional SEO, but digital PR and mentions across credible sites, those matter more than ever. If you want AI models to find and include your content, it has to show up, or I should say you have to show up, and your brand has to show up in the broader digital conversation. So here's the big idea behind this episode. Traditional SEO no longer holds the same value it once did, even until very recently.

[00:05:13] Search traffic is in decline. And all signs point to a continuing in that direction. The playbook that many have relied on for decades is no longer enough. So let's talk about how we got here and where we go next. Let's start with behavior. Even before AI started changing the game, we were already seeing a big shift in how people discover and consume content.

[00:05:39] Now, this is something I wrote about in all of my books since Maximize Your Social, the convergence of information and communication that really began when that U.S. Airways jet landed on the Hudson River outside of New York City, for those that remember. Because it was the first time that the media was quoted as saying, as reported first on Twitter.

[00:06:00] Now, social media since then has now overtaken television as the leading source of news for U.S. adults, according to Oxford's 2025 Reuters Institute digital news report, which was recently released. Now, Pew Research had already flagged this trend for many years. In 2024, they said that half of Americans were already getting news from social platforms. But it's not just news, though. People are using social platforms to search.

[00:06:29] And we see this activity, especially in younger generations. Today, it is said that 24% of Americans say they use social platforms more than search engines to discover information. And among Gen Z, that number climbs to 46%. Even Google admits that 40% of young users turn to TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Maps or traditional search when looking for lunch spots.

[00:06:59] This is a generational shift in real time. Back in the day, we started with curated directories. Do you remember? Often they were our ISPs, so America Online. Maybe at some point we then transitioned over to Yahoo. Maybe we had a GeoCities website back in the day. I'm definitely aging myself here. And then Google came along and completely changed the game. Just Google it became second nature. SEO exploded.

[00:07:29] Organic traffic from Google became the engine behind online growth. And then social media emerged. By the mid-2010s, discovery began to slowly shift from search boxes to scrolling feeds. That trend only deepened. And now in the 2020s, AI is accelerating this transformation. So let me be clear. Search still brings in traffic. My website still gets traffic from search engines. Don't get me wrong.

[00:07:57] As of early 2024, Google accounted for about 63% of referral visits in the United States, according to Rand Fishkin at SparkToro. It is said that organic search still powers roughly 50% of total site traffic. But here's the thing. The search engine we once knew is changing. And it is changing fast. Google is evolving from a search engine into an answer engine. Now we always had feature snippets. People also ask.

[00:08:27] Now we have AI overviews. And these features give users what they need right in the SERPs. Often, no click is required. Ahrefs found that these elements are cannibalizing organic clicks across nearly every industry. And I'm sure you felt it as well. Google's goal is shifting from driving traffic to owning the answer. Now that creates what some have called, and I would agree, visibility inflation.

[00:08:57] Your content might rank, but it doesn't always drive visits. And a lot of people have already seen this recently with Google Search Console impressions still higher, getting higher, yet the traffic is actually going down. And I have found that to be the case. You see, users are getting the answer, just not from your website. And it's about to get even more complicated. Nearly 65% of Google searches now end without a click, especially on mobile.

[00:09:26] AI mode is making this even more extreme by offering fully synthesized answers. Kevin Indig in a great article on Search Engine Journal. And if you subscribed to my newsletter, you would have seen these articles appear, actually a majority of them, in last week's newsletter. Make sure you go to newsletter.neilshafer.com and subscribe so that you're the first to know.

[00:09:48] But Kevin Indig in this article on Search Engine Journal noted that one AI response can now replace 20 to 50 traditional searches. And the kicker, those answers are often built from publisher content, from our content, without sending users to the source. So even if your content powers the answer, you might get no traffic at all. In fact, you're lucky to get any traffic at all is the way to think about it.

[00:10:15] SEO still matters, but ranking isn't enough. It's about inclusion, being part of the AI's output. And I would, again, add being part of the AI's output that someone would want to go out of their way to actually go to your website. So what does this mean for all of us?

[00:10:31] Well, it means we're no longer optimizing just for traffic because the traffic as we once knew it does not exist anymore with the recent changes in habits that have been brought about by the development of AI technology and the integration of that AI technology in the search engines. So now we're optimizing for presence, for reputation, for inclusion. This recent article from Ahrefs puts it perfectly.

[00:10:57] We now need to feed, not fight the AI. You want your content to show up, not just in search and not just in AI summaries, but in Reddit threads, in Quora answers, YouTube explainers, influence reviews. It's about influence, not just impressions. Yes, it brings new meaning to my book, The Age of Influence. Success means appearing everywhere your audience might look. That is the new SEO.

[00:11:27] Some have called it search everywhere optimization, but I think we need to just get rid of the term SEO because it is so heavily reliant on Google and the existence of traffic, which just does not exist to the extent that it used to. And the open web is shrinking. SparkTor reports that only 36% of U.S. searches in 2024 resulted in a click to a non-Google site.

[00:11:54] That's the lowest we've seen, and wow, we can only imagine how low that number has become in 2025. Publishers are feeling that health sites, review blogs, major media, everyone has seen the drop. The New York Times organic traffic fell from 44% to 36.5% over three years. Some outlets are now exploring licensing deals just to survive. Even trust is eroding.

[00:12:22] A 2025 survey showed that only 12% of Americans fully trust search results. Only 90% say they double-check what they find. Think about that. Now, search is still seen as more reliable than social, but just barely, and people are adapting. Many now add Reddit to their searches to find human opinions. Others skip search engines entirely.

[00:12:48] And this is because AI has become the new discovery engine for many people. Now, chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, Bing Chat, Gemini, perplexity, AI chatbots are quickly becoming the new front door to information. Over half of U.S. adults have used an AI chatbot. Many now use them in place of traditional search. Now, Google says total search activity is rising, but it's clear that site visits are falling.

[00:13:16] People are staying on the results page. SparkToro, and I mentioned them a few times, they have a really fantastic blog post about this. Ren Fishkin, obviously one of the thought leaders in the industry, found that when Google shows an AI summary, clicks to organic results drop 70%. Even paid ad clicks fall. So while AI is undoubtedly making search more efficient for users,

[00:13:43] it's making it harder for marketers and businesses to get seen. So this isn't just about Google, right? Users now expect fast, smart answers without needing to visit multiple sites. And AI has enabled them to do this, and they trust AI more and more. One third of those surveyed said that AI improves their productivity. Half says it knows more than they do in certain areas.

[00:14:11] But people still want transparency. Over 75% worry about misinformation. So they want answers. They also want to know where those answers came from. And thus, AI search engines and even Google are still showing those links and those sources, whether people go to them or not is the question. So discovery has been democratized. From web search to social discovery to AI, the way people find information keeps evolving.

[00:14:39] Each step has made content more accessible, but also more fragmented. In Google's heyday, a few blue links shaped what most people saw. Rank high, get traffic, simple. Social media slightly shifted that discovery to be more personal and more unpredictable. But now AI curates the answer directly. It pulls from everywhere. And the user may never leave, and in many instances, don't leave the AI app. This changes the entire dynamic.

[00:15:09] So the big picture is that search is no longer centralized. And I wrote about this in digital threads, that discovery is becoming decentralized. Kevin Indig, this article from Search Engine Journal, calls it multi-agent search. You're jumping from AI answers to Reddit threads to YouTube videos. Every app is a mini search engine now. And for those of you that remember my interview on this podcast with the author of product-led SEO, Eli Schwartz.

[00:15:37] And he predicted this before the emergence of ChatGPT. He predicted there would be new search engines because, as he said, as long as the answer is good enough, people will use whatever tool gets them there. And he was right. And we're seeing that with AI. Marketers can no longer dominate just one platform. We need to build presence across an entire ecosystem, across all of our digital threads,

[00:16:02] machine and human, centralized and distributed, SEO and social, and it's all connected. So where do we go from here? Traditional SEO and search, let me repeat myself, aren't just disappearing, but their dominance is. More and more people are turning to a TikTok or Reddit or ChatGPT or YouTube before they go to Google. And even when they do use Google, they're clicking less and questioning more. If you've been relying on search traffic, this is a wake-up call.

[00:16:32] The way we earn trust, build awareness, and drive discovery is changing. You need to show up in the places your audience actually goes. That is the future. And that is also the present. So my final recommendations, and these echo some advice from some of the articles that I mentioned, but I want to align it with what I teach in digital threads and add my own spin. Four things I want to talk about.

[00:16:58] Number one, only create content directly tied to your business goals. So if someone finds you in an AI summary, make sure what they see converts. See, in digital threads and really in traditional SEO, we talk about doing keyword research and confirming with search intent. But if more and more of these keyword queries are going to end in people finding the answer on Google,

[00:17:24] the value of us creating content around those now becomes very little. Now before, like when I was writing digital threads not so long ago, there was a hope that some of those people might visit our website because people were not finding the entire answer in Google, but now they are. So we really need to be clear and build a library of content where every single piece of content might convert someone.

[00:17:51] So yes, I am actually reducing my library of content. I am doing, and hopefully you listen to my podcast episode on my quarterly audit system, but I'm doing quarterly audits and I'm retiring content that I think AI is replacing. And I'm really keeping my core content that ties more directly into my own business goals so that I can maintain those and refresh them and try to own them,

[00:18:17] for lack of a better word, over time so that I might get less traffic, but I get more conversions. So that's the first thing that we can do. And it might require you to prune. It might require you to merge articles, redirect, change your editorial calendar. I highly recommend you do that. The second one is not only are we creating content directly tied to our business goals, but we want to make sure that when we write that content,

[00:18:43] we naturally weave in our products and services as the solution. This is an idea that came from that Ahrefs article that I thought was brilliant. That will help us increase the conversion. That also gives us, you know, going back to what Google was looking for with helpful content and EEAT, right? That makes it a very, very individual response that nobody can copy, that can't be AI generated. It is so specific to our products and services.

[00:19:13] It is that unique value, that unique stickiness that hopefully will convert others. And that will also help you get indexed and be seen in more AI searches. The third point related to the second and how we write our content is to go deep. Satisfy the user's intent as much as possible. Make your content worth citing, not just by AI, but by humans.

[00:19:40] And the fourth point I want to add, because I believe very strongly about this and it's something that I am doing in my own marketing, and I wrote about this in digital threads with a dedicated chapter, is repurposing, but only create content that you also want to repurpose or create that content with repurposing in mind. Because search alone isn't the destination anymore. Or I should say, search alone isn't the sole destination anymore.

[00:20:08] So for some, this is going to be an uncomfortable shift. But if you've already been building across multiple channels, take this advice, optimize, and keep going. This is not about abandoning search. It's about reframing it. We're entering a new era of discovery and the brands that adapt will thrive. Those that don't adapt will continue to waste precious resources

[00:20:32] and ignore other important digital threads that need your attention because they have the attention of your target users and prospects. What do you think of all these changes that I talked about? Are you seeing the same trends that I am? Or do you see something different? I'd love to have a conversation with you. And no, send me a DM on the socials or email me at neil at neilshafer.com.

[00:20:58] Hopefully you know how to spell that, but it's N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R. I would love to hear your thoughts. So that's it for another episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schafer, signing off. You've been listening to Your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilshafer.com.

[00:21:25] Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group Coaching Membership Community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand, see you next time on Your Digital Marketing Coach.