A lot of marketing managers are quietly (or not so quietly) panicking because they are suddenly looking at the SEO work they poured into their websites and wondering what good it was if the reward no longer results in a visit, but a Google snippet, an AI Overview, or an answer that never requires someone to actually land on their site.
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You Did Everything Right
And still you end up asking the same uncomfortable questions.
If Google answers the question directly, how do I get people to my website?
If someone asks the same question in ChatGPT, do we even show up?
Is there anything I can actually do to influence how I get found by AI?
Oh, and the most obvious question of all:
When exactly am I supposed to find the time to figure this out while still running campaigns, reporting on performance, updating the site, and answering leadership when they ask how I’m going to solve this problem?
You’re Not Alone
This anxiety is not isolated. Nearly 90 percent of businesses say they are worried about losing organic visibility and search traffic as AI changes how people find information online. The most common fear is simple and blunt, not being able to get my business found online at all. Close behind that is the fear of a total loss of organic traffic, followed by growing frustration around traffic attribution just as pressure to prove ROI continues to increase.
What makes this worse is that the fear is not hypothetical anymore. Early research into AI powered search experiences, including Google’s AI Overviews, suggests that traditional websites can see anywhere from a 15 percent to as much as a 64 percent decline in organic traffic depending on the type of query, the industry, and how much of the answer gets surfaced before a click is ever required. Even when brands still rank well, the behavior around those rankings has changed, and visibility no longer guarantees visits in the way it used to.
Traffic Was the Scoreboard
This is the part no one really prepared marketers for.
- SEO did not suddenly stop working, but the feedback loop that made it feel manageable and predictable has started to break down.
- Traffic used to be the scoreboard. Rankings moved, clicks followed, leads came in and you had a chart to prove it!
- Now the scoreboard is harder to read, and in some cases it feels like it has disappeared altogether.
Here’s Our Take On It
From an agency perspective, the conversations have changed too. Clients are no longer just asking how to rank higher or what keywords to target next, they are asking whether their website still has a job if search engines and AI tools are answering questions on their behalf.
They want to know why they still show up in search but see fewer leads, why being visible feels emptier than it used to, and whether all the foundational work they invested in still matters.
The uncomfortable truth is that there is no clean, universal answer yet, and anyone claiming they have fully solved AI search is either very early or selling you something that does not exist.
What we do know is that search is no longer a straight line from query to website to conversion.
Your website still matters
What seems to be changing is not the importance of having a strong website, but the role it plays. Your site is not always the destination anymore. Sometimes it is the source that informs an answer, influences a decision, or builds familiarity without a click ever happening, which is harder to measure, harder to explain internally, and harder to budget for using the same frameworks we relied on in the past.
SEO is not dead, but it does mean that SEO alone is no longer enough to carry the full weight of growth expectations. The work still matters, but the way success shows up is shifting, and that shift is what so many marketing teams are struggling to get their arms around right now.
If you feel like the ground is moving under your feet, it is, and clinging to old metrics will not make it stop. What matters now is being clear about what outcomes actually drive the business, testing what influences those outcomes in a world shaped by AI, and being willing to admit when familiar tactics are no longer pulling their weight.