SEO in the Age of AI Mode

The End of the Click Era

Clicks once defined SEO. Top rank = click = traffic = conversion but that cycle is now broken.

Google’s AI Overviews now deliver immediate summaries, ads included, often in place of the click. Google’s forthcoming AI Mode promises to go further, elevating AI-generated answers even higher and reducing the necessity of site visits entirely.

Google Isn’t Stealing Your Traffic. It’s Monetising It.

This isn’t accidental. Google designed AI Overviews and AI Mode to keep users within its ecosystem, extending sessions, increasing ad exposure, and reshaping the distribution of digital attention.

Your content still powers the answers. Yet the credit, visibility, and traffic are filtered through Google’s monetisation engine, where clicks are taxed, routed, or replaced entirely.

From Clicks to Presence

If clicks vanish, presence becomes the true currency.

Appearing in AI summaries, being cited or surfaced as trusted, builds familiarity. Familiarity fosters trust. Trust leads to later conversions, even if they don’t happen in the same session.

In modern SEO, impressions are not vanity, they’re brand equity. Visibility now holds equal weight to click-through.

Evidence That Clicks Are Already Decreasing

Google Search Console often reveals the same pattern, impressions climb while clicks flatten or fall. That “crocodile graph” is real.

• Pew Research found that when an AI summary appears, users click traditional results in just 8% of visits, down from 15% without it, and clicks within summaries occur only 1% of the time. Sessions also ended more frequently, 26% versus 16%
• Ahrefs reports average CTRs at position one dropped from 7.3% in March 2024 to just 2.6% by March 2025 when AI Overviews are present, a 34.5% decrease
• Even more stark, Authoritas research shows that sites previously ranking first can lose up to 79% of their search traffic when their link appears below an AI Overview
• Major news publishers have reported traffic plunges between 28% and 40%, directly tied to AI-augmented search results

Lessons From PPC’s Evolution

Paid search has already lived this reality. Organic space shrank, ad copy multiplied, clicks grew costlier. Marketers adapted.

SEO now faces a similar pivot, AI Mode will pick winners, cite the trusted, and keep users inside. The search funnel is no longer wholly yours.

What Brands Must Do Now

The instinct might be panic. The better strategy is to evolve.

1. Redefine success – Rankings and traffic aren’t enough. Visibility and trust matter more.
2. Optimise for inclusion – Create content AI can’t resist citing; clear answers, structured data, authoritative sources.
3. Shift metrics – Measure engagement, conversions, brand recall beyond just traffic numbers.
4. Invest in authority – Strengthen backlinks, reviews, expert signals, and data structuring to become AI citation-worthy.
5. Break silos – SEO and PPC must coordinate, AI snippets may include ads. Visibility now operates as a team sport.

AI Overviews were the messy middle. AI Mode is the future. In that future, clicks aren’t guaranteed, but presence is.

Ranking #1 or racking up traffic won’t suffice. Brands must be unignorable inside AI, building visibility, trust, and equity that survive beyond Google’s interface.

The crocodile’s jaws are already closing. The essential question is will your brand be visible before, or swallowed after?

How Remarkable Can Help

AI has reshaped organic search and it will reshape paid media. The key isn’t simply surviving the click-draining environment, it’s thriving through visibility and trust.

Get in touch with the Remarkable team to evaluate if your SEO and PPC strategies are AI-ready and to ensure you’re building presence, not just chasing clicks. Or, get a free Discoverability Audit today.