ChatGPT Did Not Replace SEO. It Replaced Top-of-Funnel Blog Posts

And the brands still optimising for “what is content marketing” are paying for it in slow motion.

Here is what is actually happening, and how fast it is moving.

In June 2024, the average click-through rate for a number-one organic ranking on an informational query was 7.3%. By December 2025, Ahrefs found that number had fallen to roughly half, with AI Overviews now correlating with a 58% drop in click-through rate for the top-ranking page. Ahrefs That is not a trend line. That is a structural rewrite of the economics of informational content, and it happened in 18 months.

The more unsettling finding came from Seer Interactive, who tracked 25 million impressions across 42 client organisations throughout 2025. Even on queries without AI Overviews, organic click-through rates fell 41%. Search Engine Land That detail is the one most brands are glossing over. It is not just a Google feature causing this. The behaviour itself has changed. People are getting their questions answered before they ever reach a search results page, and the habit is compounding.

Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy at Amsive, said at Affiliate Summit West in January what the data had been building toward for two years: clicks will decline, and brand visibility becomes the new KPI. SEO still powers AI. Ranking influences RAG citations. Affiliate Summit She also offered a planning figure that should be sitting above every marketing team’s Q3 budget: traffic projections must be increasingly conservative, with numbers potentially cut in half in 2026. Lily Ray

Half. Not a correction. Half.

What actually got absorbed

The category of content AI ate is worth naming precisely, because the instinct is to panic about everything when the threat is actually quite specific.

Informational queries. The “what is,” “how does,” “difference between,” “explain to me” content. In January 2025, 91.3% of queries that triggered an AI Overview were informational. By October, that share had dropped to 57%, with commercial and transactional AI Overviews rising steadily. Semrush The wave started at top of funnel. It is moving down. Slowly, but it is moving.

Bottom-funnel content like case studies and pricing pages get the highest AI referral traffic, while top-funnel content saw massive drops over the past two years. Position Digital The funnel is not gone. It is compressed. The research phase now happens inside the AI interface. The decision phase still happens on your website. Which means the stakes for what your site does when someone arrives have tripled quietly, while most teams are still debating subject lines and publishing schedules.

The speed of this is the part worth sitting with. AI Overviews went from appearing on 6.49% of searches in January 2025 to 13.1% in March 2025. Semrush Blog A doubling in two months. These are not gradual slides. They are step-changes, and the steps are getting bigger. Publishers have been surprisingly candid about losing 20%, 30%, and in some cases 90% of traffic and revenue over the past year. AdExchanger The instinct is to file that under “publisher problem.” It is not. Any brand whose organic strategy rests on educational, definitional, or early-stage informational content is sitting on the same fault line, just one update cycle behind.

The opportunity inside the disruption

Here is the part the hand-wringing coverage consistently misses.

While generic informational queries are seeing steep declines, branded searches with AI Overviews show an 18% increase in click-through rate. Search Engine Journal The gap between branded and non-branded performance is widening every quarter. Brand building, the thing marketers have been quietly deprioritising in favour of keyword volume for fifteen years, is now a functional SEO lever in a way it has never been.

The mechanism is worth understanding. AI systems are not just reading your website. They are triangulating credibility from every direction: third-party mentions, review platforms, communities, consistent signals across the web. A brand referenced repeatedly in credible external sources is more likely to appear in AI-generated answers than a brand with a technically perfect site and no off-site presence. If you publish unique data, contrarian views, and proprietary information, the AI cites you to ground its answer. Search Engine Land

One case study makes this concrete. Within 60 days of publishing original research designed to make their brand the primary cited source on key topics, one organisation went from appearing in 8% of relevant AI responses to 67%. That correlated with a 3x increase in attributable AI discovery pipeline. HubSpot

That is the mechanism in practice. Publish what only you know. Become the source. Let the AI handle distribution to an audience you could never have reached through keyword targeting alone.

Lily Ray has been consistent on this point throughout 2025: the GEO wins being celebrated can almost always be explained by something simpler: strong pre-existing SEO performance. Substack The foundation still matters. What sits on top of the foundation has changed.

The window that will not stay open

Nearly one-third of digital marketing leaders now prioritise generative engine optimisation as their most critical growth challenge for 2026. An average of 12% of 2025 digital budgets went to these initiatives, and 97% of those leaders already report positive impact. MarTech

The early movers are compounding. They are building citation history, topical authority, and off-site presence that AI systems are actively learning from right now. The brands waiting to see how this resolves are watching that foundation pour without them. By the time the traffic drop is obvious in the dashboard, the gap will be considerably harder to close.

As AI consolidates answers directly in search results, the users who do reach your site will be much farther along in their decision process. The goal shifts from more visitors to attracting the right visitors, primed to convert. Envisionit

Smaller audience, sharper intent. But only if your site is built for the conversation they arrive wanting to have, and only if the AI knew to send them to you in the first place.

The brands that get this right are not thinking about blog posts. They are thinking about what only they know, how to publish it in a form AI systems can parse and cite, and whether their site is the kind of place a high-intent visitor feels they have landed somewhere that actually knows what it is talking about.

The brands still building traffic strategies around “what is” queries will notice the decline eventually. The question is whether they notice it while there is still room to rebuild, or after the window has closed.

If this feels familiar, you are probably already seeing it in your own numbers.