If your CEO forwarded you a screenshot of an AI answer and wrote “so… do we still need SEO?” you are not alone. We are hearing it from performance marketers and founders constantly. And the anxiety is justified: Pew found that when Google shows an AI summary, searchers click a traditional result in 8 percent of visits versus 15 percent without the summary. They click a source inside the AI summary only 1 percent of the time.
Here’s the thing: SEO is not dying. “Traffic from Google” is dying, at least as the primary success metric.
What’s actually happening (and why it feels like whiplash)
Google is pushing AI deeper into the search experience. Google says AI Overviews drive more than a 10 percent increase in usage for the types of queries where they appear, at least in big markets like the U.S. and India. Which sounds like good news until you pair it with the Pew behavior data above.
So yes, people might search more. But they are clicking out less. That is the decoupling everyone is feeling.
On top of that, the footprint of AI Overviews is moving around. Semrush analyzed 10 million-plus keywords and reported AI Overviews triggering on 6.49 percent of queries in January 2025, rising to 24.61 percent in July, then dropping to 15.69 percent in November. If your organic sessions look like a heart monitor, this is a big reason.
Then stack in two more realities:
- Gartner has predicted that traditional search engine volume will drop 25 percent by 2026 as users shift to chatbots and virtual agents.
- The open web is getting scraped aggressively. Cloudflare’s CEO said the company blocked more than 416 billion AI bot requests since July 1, 2025.
Put differently: discovery is fragmenting, answers are getting synthesized and your content is getting consumed without the courtesy of a click.
So, should you still invest in SEO?
Yes, but the investment thesis changes.
Old thesis: “Rank, earn the click, convert the visit.”
New thesis: “Own the customer’s question wherever it gets answered, then capture demand when they are ready to buy.”
That might sound like a semantics game. It is not. It changes what you build, what you measure and what your leadership team can reasonably expect from the channel.
In our work, the brands still winning from SEO in late 2025 are doing three things in parallel:
- They protect high-intent queries that still produce clicks and pipeline. Think “pricing,” “alternatives,” “best X for Y,” “implementation,” “integrations” and “reviews.” AI can summarize, but buyers still need proof, screenshots, specs and a credible next step.
- They manufacture branded demand. If AI answers the top of funnel question, the next move is often a navigational search. If that search is your brand name, you win the click anyway.
- They optimize for inclusion, not just position. The question is not “are we No. 2?” It is “are we the source the model trusts enough to cite or paraphrase?”
What to measure now (so you do not get gaslit by “traffic is down”)
You still care about rankings, but rankings alone are a vanity metric in a zero-click world.
Track these four signals together:
- Share of high-intent traffic (non-branded, commercial pages only).
- Branded search growth (Search Console and paid brand CPC trends).
- SERP click-through rate by query group (especially where AI appears).
- Assisted conversions from organic (GA4, MMM, incrementally tests).
This is where you earn credibility with stakeholders. You can say, “Yes, total organic sessions fell 18 percent, but organic assisted revenue is flat and brand demand is up 22 percent.” That is a different conversation.
The practical playbook: where we would spend the next 90 days
If you only have budget for one push, do not spread it across 40 blog posts. Concentrate on assets that either close deals or become the canonical reference AI keeps pulling from.
Start with the pages that buyers actually use to make decisions:
- Pricing and packaging pages
- Alternatives and comparisons
- Integration and implementation guides
- Industry-specific landing pages
Now make them harder to summarize and easier to trust. The brands that hold up best tend to include specific screenshots, real workflows, decision criteria, quantified outcomes and objections handled in plain language.
Then create one “citation magnet” per quarter. That is usually a benchmark report, dataset, calculator or teardown that only you can credibly publish. AI systems love consolidating consensus, and original data becomes consensus fast.
One more operational note: Google is still Google. It shipped a December 2025 core update starting Dec. 11, 2025, and volatility is part of the job now. So build for resilience, not perfect rankings.
What “AI-first SEO” looks like without turning into buzzword soup
You do not need a new acronym to do the work. You need to ship content that is structured, verifiable and uniquely useful.
A simple checklist we use before we call a page “AI ready”:
- Clear author, credentials and update date
- Specific claims backed by evidence or methodology
- Clean definitions, tables and scannable sections
- Internal links that map the topic cluster
If that sounds like “good SEO,” it is. The twist is that “good SEO” now has to perform even when the click never comes.
The bottom line
If your SEO strategy is still “publish more content and hope,” AI will make the ROI math uglier, fast. But if you treat SEO as your owned distribution layer for trust, demand and decision support, it is still one of the few channels that compounds.
AI is replacing some searches. It is not replacing the need to be the brand people choose after they get the answer.
Methodology
The insights in this article come from Relevance’s direct work with growth-focused B2B and ecommerce companies. We’ve run the campaigns, analyzed the data and tracked results across channels. We supplement our firsthand experience by researching what other top practitioners are seeing and sharing. Every piece we publish represents significant effort in research, writing and editing. We verify data, pressure-test recommendations against what we are seeing, and refine until the advice is specific enough to actually act on.
