How Google Search is Changing & What Marketers Need to Do in the Next 90 Days

Jun 2

The Search Shift Field Guide

Something Changed, And It's Not Just Another Algorithm Update

Google just announced what it's calling the most significant redesign of Search in over 25 years. For reference, I was still a teenager, the internet was still new, and social media and smart phones didn’t exist yet… 25 years is a long time ago.

By now, we’re used to algorithm updates, but unlike the algorithm updates we've learned to weather, this change is causing a shift in the most fundamental ways people search (or will, in the very near future).

The headline change is something called AI Mode. Where Google used to return a list of links and let you do the research yourself, it now increasingly synthesizes an answer and hands it to you fully formed, generated in real time from sources across the web. You ask a question and Google gives you an answer. You may never click a single link.

For marketers and business owners who have spent years building websites, writing content, and optimizing for search, the implications are real and worth understanding clearly, without the panic that's been circulating in a lot of marketing circles right now.

What You Need To Know & Do About The New Google Search

The Click Problem (And Why Your Traffic Numbers Are Lying to You)
The Distinction Nobody is Talking About: Ranking vs. Being Cited
What Google is Rewarding Now
What to Do: Your 90-Day Starting Point
Common Questions & Answers About the New Google Search

The Click Problem (And Why Your Traffic Numbers Are Lying to You)

According to Ahrefs' December 2025 data, AI Overviews reduce click-through rates for position-one content by 58%. You can do everything right in traditional SEO terms — publish quality content, earn that top ranking, optimize your metadata — and still lose more than half the clicks you used to get. Six out of ten Google searches in 2026 now end without a single click to any website. On mobile, that figure reaches 77%. In AI Mode specifically, it climbs to 93%.

A drop in traffic is not the same thing as a drop in influence.

Don’t panic. Before you conclude that your content strategy is broken, let’s reframe this. A drop in traffic is not the same thing as a drop in influence. Your content can still be shaping what a buyer sees, thinks, and decides. This can happen through AI-generated answers that draw from your content without sending the click. Brafton, one of the leading content marketing firms in the country, put it clearly: the goal is no longer simply earning a click. Increasingly, it's about remaining visible and credible wherever search experiences happen.

This is why your analytics are telling you an incomplete story right now. If you're measuring success only in sessions and page views, you're only seeing part of the picture. Traffic may have dropped, but that doesn't mean your content stopped working. It means the measurement model most businesses are using hasn't caught up with how search actually behaves. (If you're wrestling with this question, my Field Guide on how to track attribution and measure marketing ROI is worth a read alongside this one.)

The Distinction Nobody is Talking About: Ranking vs. Being Cited

This is the conceptual shift that matters most right now, and I want you to really sit with it: ranking #1 in Google and being cited in an AI Overview are no longer the same thing.

The old mental model was simple. Rank high, get the click, do a dance because you win. The new reality is more nuanced. Research from Discovered Labs shows that top-ten rankers accounted for 76% of AI Overview citations in mid-2025, and that figure had dropped to roughly 38% by early 2026. Ranking still matters. It still gives you a foundation. But it no longer guarantees you'll appear in the AI-generated answer your potential customer sees.

What AI systems are also evaluating is how your content is structured, how clearly and independently a specific passage answers a question, and how consistently your brand appears as a trusted source across the web. They're not just indexing pages. They're looking for authority signals, passage-level clarity, and evidence that you know what you're talking about.

This is where a term called GEO comes in — Generative Engine Optimization. If traditional SEO is about ranking on page one, GEO is about being part of the answer itself: optimizing your content so that AI search engines cite it in their responses, not just index it. It's an evolution of what we've always done, not a replacement for it. If you want the full breakdown of SEO, AEO, and GEO and how they work together, I've written a dedicated Field Guide on that: SEO, AEO, and GEO: What Small Businesses Need to Know About the Future of Search.

What Google is Rewarding Now

What I find genuinely encouraging in all of this is that the businesses that are positioned to win in this new search environment are the ones that have been doing the real work all along.

Google has been sharpening its focus on what it calls E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Strip away the acronym and what it means is that basically, Google is trying to detect whether your content was written by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, from lived experience, with a real perspective. It’s looking for content written to help the searcher.

What Ahrefs' research found is striking for brand strategy. Brand web mentions (i.e. when your company name is in the search phrase) now correlate more strongly with AI Overview visibility than backlinks do. That's a significant shift! It means when you show up consistently across the web — in press coverage, in podcast mentions, in reviews, in other people's content, etc. — it matters more than it ever has. The signal Google and AI systems are looking for isn't just technical authority (and sneaky SEO pros who work the system), but social proof at a web-wide scale. I like this a lot.

Think about what that actually means for a small business doing intentional, purposeful marketing. Every piece of original content you publish that reflects real expertise. Every client testimonial. Every guest article or podcast appearance. Every consistent, value-driven presence you build… it all feeds the very signals that determine your AI visibility now. This isn't a new tactic. It's the compounding return on doing good work and letting people know about it!

Generic content — the kind that could have been written by anyone about anything — is not just less engaging for your audience. It's actively losing ground in search. Rankings in 2026 are shaped more by trust and clarity than by keywords. Content written primarily to rank is struggling. Content written to genuinely help a specific person with a specific problem is exactly what both Google and your reader are looking for. I'd call that a win, honestly.

What To Do: Your 90-Day Starting Point

There's a lot of noise out there right now telling you to rebuild your entire marketing strategy from scratch. Please don't. The fundamentals of good content — clarity, credibility, usefulness — haven't changed. What's changed is how they're measured and surfaced. Start here.

Watch your impressions, not just your clicks. Open Google Search Console and look at pages that are earning impressions but generating few or no clicks. Those are the pages getting seen inside AI Overviews without the click-through. That is influence you weren't measuring before. Start treating impressions as a more meaningful signal.
Restructure your most important pages to lead with the answer. AI systems extract passages, not pages. If the answer to the question your page targets is buried three paragraphs in, it won't get cited. Rewrite your key content pages to open with a clear, direct response to the central question, and then support it with depth below.
Build your brand's presence off your own website. Guest articles, podcast appearances, industry directories, consistent reviews, participation in forums where your audience already gathers, etc. Brand web mentions now drive AI visibility more than links alone. This is off-site authority work, and it's no longer optional.
Stop publishing content that could have been written by anyone. Originality, lived experience, and a clear point of view are what both Google and your reader are rewarding right now. If a piece of content doesn't have your fingerprints on it (your specific perspective, real examples, and hot takes), it's probably not earning you much ground in 2026.
Resist the urge to do everything at once. If you've been doing intentional marketing, like building real content, maintaining your Google Business Profile, earning genuine mentions, and publishing with a clear point of view, you are better positioned than most. Your adjustment doesn’t require demolition. Just a tune-up. Calm down, then level up. 💪

Common Questions & Answers About the New Google Search

Google AI Mode is a redesigned search experience that uses Gemini AI to synthesize answers directly on the search results page, rather than returning a list of links.
Instead of directing you to multiple websites to find your answer, AI Mode interprets your question, pulls from sources across the web, and delivers a generated response — often without requiring a click.
Most likely because AI Overviews and zero-click search behavior are answering more queries directly on the results page.
Your content may still be influencing buyers by appearing in AI-generated answers and shaping decisions before a click, but those interactions don't show up in traditional session-based analytics.
Check your impressions in Google Search Console alongside your clicks for a more complete picture.
GEO is the practice of structuring your content so that AI search engines like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity cite it in their generated responses. It builds on traditional SEO rather than replacing it. Whether you 'need' it depends on your goals, but if discoverability matters to your business, understanding GEO is increasingly important.
Zero-click search happens when a user's query is answered directly on the Google results page through an AI Overview, a featured snippet, or a knowledge panel without them clicking through to any website.
It affects your traffic numbers, but not necessarily your influence. Appearing as the cited source in an AI Overview still builds brand credibility, even without the click.
Yes! But the way it matters has shifted. Your content can still be shaping what potential customers see and believe before they ever visit your site. The goal is to be the trusted, cited source inside AI-generated answers, not just the top-ranked link.
Quality, originality, and genuine expertise are now the primary currency.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is the framework Google uses to evaluate content quality.
You demonstrate it by writing from real experience, citing evidence, publishing consistently on topics you genuinely know, maintaining an accurate and complete web presence, and earning mentions and citations from credible sources.
Focus on these five things:
1. Monitor impressions in Google Search Console (not just clicks).
2. Rewrite key pages to open with a direct answer to the question they target.
3. Build your brand presence off your own website through mentions and earned media.
4. Publish only content that reflects genuine expertise and a clear point of view.
5. Resist the urge to overhaul everything at once.
The fundamentals of good marketing still hold.

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