What the End of the Click Means for Websites
For almost three decades, the internet has operated on a relatively simple social contract. Search engines indexed the web, publishers, brands and creators produced content, and people searched for information before clicking through to a website. Everyone benefited from the arrangement: users found what they were looking for, brands gained traffic and search engines monetised the ecosystem by serving advertising alongside organic results.
That contract is now beginning to fracture. What started quietly with Google’s introduction of featured snippets accelerated with the arrival of AI Overviews in 2024 and has now shifted into overdrive through the sweeping AI Mode updates unveiled at Google I/O in mid-May.
The Clickless Era
The implications for brands, publishers, marketers and agencies are serious. Where the old search model rewarded visibility by sending people outward to websites, the new model is designed to keep us within the search experience itself, surfacing answers without requiring us to leave Google at all.
Alphabet itself described these updates as the biggest change to Search in more than 25 years, with AI Mode rapidly becoming the default experience. At the centre of it all is what Google calls the ‘Intelligent Search Box‘ which is far more sophisticated than the traditional search bar and list of blue links we’ve grown used to. It now behaves more like an AI assistant, capable of understanding conversations, interpreting images and files, responding to follow-up questions and pulling everything together through Google’s broader Gemini AI ecosystem.
Although the interface seems to be really intuitive, it is potentially catastrophic for the open web for the simple reason that we no longer need to click. This is what the industry now calls zero-click search where the answer is delivered directly inside the platform itself, removing the need for people to visit a website at all. Recent Semrush analysis suggests that between 92% and 94% of Google AI Mode sessions end without a click through to an external site, while other studies indicate that AI Overviews are having a significant impact on traffic to publishers and information-based websites.
Machines Need Feeding
With these changes, Search is moving away from being a directory of destinations towards becoming an operating system for answers and this raises an interesting question for brands: if AI is going to continue to disintermediate the relationship between brands and consumers, do we even need websites anymore?
The short answer is yes, but not for the reasons we once did. Rather than functioning primarily as destinations designed to attract human traffic from informational searches, corporate websites will increasingly need to be built for machines first. Their role will shift toward becoming verification engines that feed AI systems structured information such as product data, pricing, FAQs, schema markup, imagery and clear semantic context.
In other words, the corporate website becomes less of a digital brochure built for browsing and more of a machine-readable source of truth designed to be understood, referenced and trusted by AI systems. In the future it’s entirely possible that consumers may never visit your homepage directly as they’ll discover your brand entirely through AI-driven environments like Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, voice assistants or whatever comes next.
From SEO to GEO
While traditional SEO was about ranking pages, the next era of generative engine optimisation (GEO) will be about becoming referenceable. Brands will need to optimise not only for humans but for large language models which means content strategies will need to shift away from sheer volume and keyword stuffing toward authority, clarity, credibility and structured expertise. That’s not to suggest that GEO will be any less of a confusing - and at times dark - art than its predecessor, as Thomas Germain recently illustrated in a BBC piece on attempts to game AI search results, devouring the subject with almost the same intensity that Joey Chestnut brings to a plate of hot dogs.
For performance marketers, this requires a fundamental rethink of how search success is measured. Where the old playbook focused on clicks, rankings and traffic acquisition, the new one will need to focus on visibility inside AI-generated answers themselves. That means investing far more heavily in technical optimisation to create structured data and schema markup that AI systems can confidently reference.
The Slop Reckoning
Brands will also need to rethink how they create content. Generic SEO articles designed to game algorithms are unlikely to survive in a world where AI will inevitably become more proficient at spotting inauthentic slop. The content that will matter is original material and this is likely to consist of unique insights, proprietary data and credible thought leadership. In many ways, AI search may end up rewarding the very things that traditional SEO diluted.
The good news is that brands with technical prowess, distinctive intellectual property, strong PR machines and recognisable voices should have an advantage because AI systems still need credible sources to cite and reference. The challenge is that visibility becomes harder to track - if a consumer receives a recommendation inside ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, traditional attribution models begin to break down which has enormous implications for media strategy.
For years, the digital economy rewarded performance marketing because attribution was relatively measurable - traffic could be tracked, clicks optimised and conversions quantified. But in a zero-click, AI-led future, visibility becomes far more opaque as many of the metrics marketers have relied on for the past two decades start to lose their usefulness.
The Long and the Short
And that may ultimately push the industry back toward brand-building because when AI systems compress the internet into a set of answers, the brands with the strongest mental availability are the ones most likely to surface and win. In other words, the rise of AI-mediated discovery could reinforce the core argument made by Les Binet and Peter Field: that sustainable growth comes from balancing long-term brand investment with short-term activation rather than over-optimising for immediate performance metrics alone. They’re probably raising a glass already.
