AI broke SEO. For better or worse.
For two decades, Google and SEOs worked under a silent agreement: we structure the web, while you send us users. But AI and answer engines breached it, inviting a clickless business model that plunged the whole industry into panic.
Much like anyone facing a sudden loss, SEOs and marketers are currently cycling through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Our goal here is to help you process the change and unemotionally come to terms with the parts of SEO that have changed (and the parts that haven’t), so you can focus your energy on the strategies and tactics that still work in 2026.
Google’s AI Overviews, initially introduced in May 2024, were a laughingstock at first.
The AI-generated text summaries recommended glue as a pizza topping, among other wild hallucinations. The consensus was clear: the US rollout would be a massive flop, users would hate it, and Google would quickly roll back its “featured snippet on steroids”.
This denial was also rooted in a common belief that Google would never cannibalize its own traffic. That it would never be able to monetize AIOs. That everyday searchers would miss the 10 blue links too much.
But while SEOs were busy laughing at the pizza glue, they were ignoring the writing on the wall. Just a year earlier, ChatGPT became the first app in the world to acquire 100 monthly active users, proving that people do, in fact, prefer instant answers over clicking a bunch of websites.
The anger started to build when SEOs realized that AI Overviews weren’t just temporary volatility tests. They were infrastructure replacements here to stay once Google rolled out the feature globally and used Gemini 2.0 as the under-the-hood engine.
But the anger finally burst with the arrival of the dreaded “crocodile charts” in Google Search Console.
SEOs and marketers alike watched their dashboards in horror as the lines diverged like an open-mouthed crocodile: with impressions soaring and clicks plummeting.
The “great decoupling” directly coincided with the massive rollout of AI Overviews following Google’s March 2025 Core Update, which saw the presence of AIOs almost double overnight.
Not surprisingly, AIOs reduced clicks to top-ranking pages by 34.5% in the following month, with informational keywords taking the heaviest hit.
The March Core Update introduced another twist: automatic translations.
Google began to systematically siphon international search traffic. It did so by translating pages for queries that lacked sufficient native-language content and hosting them on its own subfolder (rather than sending the translated traffic to your own website).
In short: if your site wasn’t fully localized, you were handing your international traffic over to Google on a silver platter.
Publishers realized they were trapped. If they blocked AI crawlers from scraping and *cough* plagiarising their content, they risked disappearing from search results altogether.
So they fought back with lawsuits and lobbying. Not just against Google, but against all AI chatbots that were gaining popularity:
- OpenAI was sued by The New York Times for having ChatGPT scrap millions of their articles
- Anthropic faced a $1.5 billion lawsuit for allegedly training Claude on millions of books pirated from pirated libraries like LibGen
- Google got hit with a major antitrust lawsuit for using their monopoly to force publishers into handing over their content to AI Overviews
Despite this, conversational chatbots continued to rack up more users.
With the knife at their throat, SEOs did what they know best: game over-optimize the system.
After clicks plummeted, brand mentions became the new visibility metric. Because the more brand mentions you have, the more touchpoints LLMs have to cite your brand as the answer.
The desperation dragged the whole industry into a new black-hat era, this time manipulating any online asset that could potentially influence a brand’s AI visibility. I’m talking about:
To many experienced SEOs, these tactics felt less like optimization, and more like capitulation.
“Welcome to the zero-click search era, please leave your traffic at the door,” as Ahrefs’ Louise Linehan brilliantly put it.
Google’s clickless model wasn’t a novelty. SparkToro found out in 2024 that roughly 60% of all searches ended in no clicks (both across the US and Europe).
Again, the real blow came when AI Overviews almost doubled overnight. According to a recent Ahrefs’ study, these now change every two days in terms of the text generated, URLs cited, and brands mentioned. So expect your brand mentions and AI citations to be volatile.
Speaking of metrics, SEOs are also stuck with the good old attribution dilemma. Apart from Bing introducing an AI performance report for Microsoft Copilot, none of the AI platforms are disclosing their prompts and search volume. Unlike traditional search engines, answer engines are non-deterministic: no two questions, nor two results, are the same.
Because of this, search volume is less relevant for AI search. Any search volume provided by the new AI visibility tools is, at best, directionally accurate – including Ahrefs’ (although we ground our prompts in real keywords from real users).
Yet, most CMOs will urge their SEO teams to buy an AI visibility tool so their brand magically shows up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. As Eli Schwartz argued, this isn’t a job for SEOs. It’s a job for brand marketers and PR teams who’re better suited to manufacture demand for a brand.
Nevertheless, expect SEO budgets to be cannibalized as AI continues to favor the most referenced brands on the web, even if they’re fake ones. We ran our own AI misinformation experiment…and it worked.
What might the final phase of SEO grief look like?
Before showing you what matters in the new SEO era, it’s worth summarizing (and accepting) what has permanently changed:
- The 10 blue links are not coming back. And this is by design. With AI search engines, you don’t need to click through multiple pages anymore, unless you specifically want to research a topic or product in more depth. Look no further than Google’s AI Mode, which now delivers personalized, ChatGPT-like experiences right above the SERPs, and you get the point.
- Traffic from informational keywords is diminishing. Who wants to read a 1,000-word definitional article about investing, when an AI can instantly summarize from multiple sources? In the old SEO world, top-of-the-funnel content existed to push users towards more qualified pages. With zero-click search and AI Overviews (now powered by Gemini 3) potentially eroding traffic for both publishers and Google itself, the traditional funnel is forever broken.
Those changes are not all bad news, though.
Here are the tactics that matter in the new AEO/GEO/AI SEO world:
1. Fanout queries are the new keywords
When you ask a question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, LLMs use a framework called Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG).
This process refers to AI systems drawing information from real-time searches on Google, Bing, and other traditional search engines.
When they already “know” an answer, they use their own training data. But when they encounter a new or nuanced question, they perform a live search looking for the freshest and most relevant information via emerging topics called fanout queries.
Think of those fanout queries as building blocks for your topical clusters. Understand how LLMs build these fanout queries, create content to cover crucial topics and sub-topics, and you’ll boost your chances of showing up in AI search.
To track them, go to Brand Radar, search for AI responses for your brand, and check the Fanout queries column.
2. Brand IS the new moat: go multi-platform
In AI search, most of your mentions and citations in AI conversations will come from third-party websites, and not your own content.
For example, looking at the top sources for Ahrefs’ brand mentions in AI responses, ahrefs.com wasn’t cited as a primary source in ChatGPT.
We fared much better in AI Overviews on position #7, yet we still weren’t showing up in the top three.
What does this mean?
SEOs and marketers have a new job overnight: to proactively monitor mentions of your brand on other websites that can potentially influence a brand’s AI visibility.
AI doesn’t just favor the company with the biggest SEO budget anymore. It favors the brand with the strongest narrative across a wide range of off-site touchpoints: videos, podcasts, PR, community forums, and even OOH advertising.
These touchpoints were always essential to a brand’s health. But AI has elevated them to a first-rate brand signal—a thesis confirmed by most CMOs on the Ahrefs podcast.
In fact, YouTube and Reddit are the second and third most cited sources in AI search, according to this Ahrefs study.
This means that SEO now needs to work much closer with brand and PR teams to secure brand mentions by pitching journalists, influencers, podcasters, advertisers, and community moderators.
You can already start monitoring multi-platform brand mentions in Ahrefs’ Brand Radar, which aggregates indexes from YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit.
For example, the YouTube report highlights brand mentions across video titles, descriptions, and even timestamped transcripts. Just jump straight to the minute when your brand was mentioned in case you’re looking for warm partnerships.
3. Track fluid AI metrics
AEO fundamentally breaks static SEO KPIs.
Answer engines are probabilistic by nature, meaning the exact same question can return different results. Ranking positions are not fixed either, and they also operate in a black box system that won’t show prompt search volume.
While fanout queries are incredibly helpful, they are also long-tail, low-volume questions that might often be totally unique, even never searched before. Don’t fall into the hyper long-tail trap of chasing every single prompt.
Instead, do this:
(a) Go for aggregate prompt tracking
This evens out the data and gives you a clear picture of how much market your own. Tags are available in Ahrefs’ Brand Radar for saved reports, making it easy to track AI visibility across broad topics and themes.
(b) Track your AI Share of Voice (SOV)
Non-deterministic AI answers shouldn’t stop you from tracking your AI market share.
The secret is to track your relative market share across a set of thousands of prompts, against the same competitors, on a consistent basis.
This ties back to the previous point. Don’t ask: “Did my brand appear for this exact query?”
A better question is: “Across thousands of prompts, how often does AI connect my brand with this topic or category?”
To do so, enter your brand in Brand Radar, add competitors, and check your AI Share of Voice percentage across Ahrefs’ 250+ million search-backed prompts. Then save the report for later monitoring.
4. SEO is no longer a zero-sum game
Before, going up in the rankings meant replacing someone else.
But the introduction of AI has actually enlarged the search market because people are searching more across all platforms. Adobe’s 2025 study backs this up: 3 in 10 U.S. respondents now trust ChatGPT more than traditional search engines, while 36% discovered a new product or brand through it.
In short, the “search pie” hasn’t shrunk. On the contrary, it got bigger!
The sooner you stop stressing about lost traditional rankings, the sooner you can start claiming your share of this new AI-driven demand.
Recommendation
According to it, AI traffic hit an all-time high in July 2025, but is making a comeback as of January 2026.
Whether you call it AEO, GEO, or LLMO, it ultimately boils down to the same reality: AI search is a layer on top of SEO.
There is a massive overlap between the two disciplines. Foundational SEO best practices—like crawlability, site structure, and high-quality content—still apply. After all, traditional web visibility heavily impacts the RAG process in AI search.
However, the nuances of execution have shifted. You now have to play both games simultaneously: traditional SEO to ensure your content can actually be found and retrieved, and AEO to build the off-site brand authority required to be cited as the go-to answer in your niche.
The grief of losing the old SEO world is real. But once you reach acceptance, you’ll realize the new game isn’t about fighting the answer engine.
It’s about becoming the brand they can’t afford to ignore.
