With searchers now asking those search engines conversational questions instead of simply dumping in the keywords, the lines are getting a bit fuzzy between search as a performance function and as an awareness channel. And all of this is leading us to the land of zero-click – which is where users stop their journey in the AI summaries themselves. This means less and less clicking to land on other websites. And while yes there is traffic through the AI summaries to those websites – it’s more of a trickle than a flood.

So what to do? Well first off, stiff upper lip as the Brits say. You are, after all, still competing for that AI-summary-to-your-website traffic – no matter how little it might be – and the organic results below the AI summaries are still getting plenty of juicy clicks.

But the content production has to change. To appease the AI powers that be (all those page crawlers that populate the AI engines), you need to supercharge your content. Blog articles, landing pages, press releases – and everything in between – need to be written also with the AI crawlers in mind. So in addition to writing the traditional way to appear high up in those Google SERPs, you also need to be thinking about writing to get snatched up by those AI engine crawlers.

Bottom line: Your SEO – which now includes those AI summaries – needs to be sharper than ever. And you are going to need to divert more budget towards this area of marketing.