Goodbye to Google search as we know it – and what to do about it
Tim Woodall reports on recent news from Google, and how not to panic about it pulverising your search traffic. Organic search is dead, long live organic search.
Today we’re talking about (more) search-related developments that are changing the role of digital content in our organisations.
In this guest post, Tim Woodall interprets announcements from Google’s recent I/O Conference, and shares some helpful tips about how you can start thinking about it.
Formerly Marketing Director at the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Tim is currently Head of Direct-to-Consumer Marketing at Faber and Faber, and an all-round expert in digital, marketing and the creative industries. Over to Tim.
All good things come to an end. For 20 plus golden years, Google was an unparalleled channel for connecting with audiences. Google was the web’s librarian, offering pages of blue links to websites that its algorithm matched to a particular search, with the best results at the top. Set up your website well and match the content on it to likely searches and you were in business. If your content was good, the potential was there to build a stable audience base.
At Google’s I/O Conference in May, the end of this functional system was effectively announced. Google is becoming an answer engine, pretty much immediately. A new “intelligent search box” actively assists users to ask a question, a step on from autocomplete. There is then the option to ask follow-up questions, which then takes the user into full AI mode and away from the SERP (search engine results page).
There was plenty else announced – agentic search, a new commerce function – but this development is the big one and will mean fewer visitors to your web properties. As SEO expert Lily Ray put it succinctly: “I imagine this will be another big traffic killer”.
As that quote implies, this isn’t the first development to hamper search traffic. For years Google has been under pressure from the rise of social media (where people spend most time online, by far), other forms of search (Amazon, for example) and from an ever-rising tide of spam and algorithmic trickery.
As search has become ever more complex, Google has been increasingly faltering in its ability to connect users with independent websites. Today, according to a study from another SEO hall of famer, Rand Fishkin, just 23% of Google searches in the U.S. lead to a click to the open web.
It makes sense if you think about your own Google use. The engine answers simple questions at the top of the page, reducing the need for users to click through to a website (not a bad thing necessarily as anyone who checks the Premier League table will know). It sends traffic to its own properties like YouTube and maps. And more recently, AI Overviews (see One Further’s recent AI Overviews report for more on the impact of that).
Of course, there are always going to be some users who want a deeper dive and will click through, but the reality is that traffic from organic search is likely to drop significantly.
It can all sound a bit depressing for content professionals and digital marketers whose job it is to reach and engage audiences online. It’s going to be a challenging time, for sure, but it’s a fast-moving picture and new opportunities will arise.
If you work with content and audiences online, here are a few ideas on what to be thinking about, specifically about the role of websites, in this new digital age.
1. Firm foundations still matter
Visitors from organic search aren’t going to disappear overnight. This new search world is still built on the same fundamentals that the SEO industry grew from. AI models search the open web for the answers that they give. A sound technical set-up, links back to your site from others, optimised pages and high-quality content is still the name of the game.
AI search will also favour incumbents. If you’re an established organisation with a legacy and a strong digital footprint, you’re in a good place.
Practical tip
Get a sense of how important search is to your visitor base in GA4. Look at the user acquisition report and toggle to ‘source / medium’. Is Google ‘organic’ and ‘paid’ together more than 50% of site traffic? If so, search is your dominant channel and requires attention.
2. The purpose of your site is going to change
Putting it overly simply, content marketing in the old model aimed to attract the largest possible audience via Google search, and then to engage that audience once on the site. The content designed to do this (known as TOFU in the jargon – Top of Funnel) is going to become radically less effective. For example, an art gallery specialising in Renaissance art publishes an article with a basic introduction to Michaelangelo. Where before the institution could potentially bring in lots of readers via the search engine results, realistically most users are now going to read that type of information within an answer engine.
Instead, users are much more likely to land on your site when they are ready to ‘perform an action’, which is a dry way of saying that they’re going to complete their journey with you. That could be taking out a membership, buying a product or making a donation. Homepages may become less crucial, as generic searches are answered by Google in situ (or indeed by Chat GPT or any of the others). Visitors are more likely to land on deeper-level pages, and each individual page on your site needs to have a purpose and do its job well.
That list of actions will include consuming content, but it will be content that is original to your organisation and its expertise, and by an established expert. Basically, content is going to need to work harder in terms of uniqueness. Think: an original case study, an amusing quiz, unique content from deep in your archive.
Practical tip
Not all TOFU-style content will become redundant. In addition to seeking unique value in online content, Google’s AI mode is particularly hot on classic reading lists (or “listicles”) – but they need to be up-to-date and by a recognised expert. It’s worth refreshing older content accordingly.
3. Keywords are replaced by “entities“
Which brings me on to keywords. The search terms people have traditionally used on Google – aka keywords – were short, three or four words. Google would interpret the intent behind those keywords and serve results accordingly. Because searches were short, many thousands of people ran the same searches, creating a natural hierarchy within search. It was a simple system around which SEO platforms like SEMRush and AHREFs grew.
AI search isn’t like that. Initial prompts are longer. It’s conversational and chaotic. Very few prompts will ever be the same. Thus keywords will be phased out of search in time. Instead of matching content to keywords, to have an impact on AI search content marketers need to approach site architecture like a mini-Wikipedia. Your content should be less a random collection of blog posts and more like a web of ideas. Define your core niche and connect it to your subtopics with internal linking (always good practice anyway). If AI Search can cleanly map your site’s logic, you will have much higher visibility.
The buzzword for this is “entity”. An entity (explainer here) is a specific thing or item that a search engine can clearly identify and understand, rather than just a string of words. AI systems map how entities relate to each other.
What does that look like in real life? Let’s go back to our art gallery from earlier. Examples of entities connected by its website could be: the gallery (an organisation); Michelangelo (a person); High Renaissance (an Art Movement); and Florence (a Location). You can map the entities on your site using a mark-up language called Schema, which is important for Google to understand entity relationships.
Practical tip
Ask your developer, agency or technical person about Schema. But, as a starting point, just get a pen and paper (an A3 sheet!) and scribble out some of the entity relationships on your site and looking for gaps in the picture.
The bottom line
Keep calm but don’t just carry on. In the face of any overwhelming challenge, it’s tempting to work harder on what worked before and hope for the best. But that’s not going to wash here.
If you do one thing, start talking about these changes in your organisation. When the user base begins to drop away, legitimate questions will be asked about the value of websites and digital content. It’s important to frame the subject properly.
The message for executives and boards needs to be: “our website is now more important than before, not less. In an AI search world, our site needs to be the source of truth for our brand and our story.”
Look out for a follow-up post from our own Chris Unitt, who will be thinking about other ways to replace your lost online visibility.
I switched to using Kagi a couple of months ago and haven't looked back. I do wonder if we're going to see a splintering of search and user behaviour, shifting back to something that's closer to the late-90s when there were multiple players in search depending on what you were trying to find.
I quite like the idea of there being more than one game in town. Some people will lean towards traditional search-based systems, others will be quite happy with Google's chatty LLM approach, and then you've got hybrid systems like Kagi that aim to blend the best of both worlds.
Looking forward to Chris' follow-up!