What’s actually changing in Search
Search has changed more in the last two years than it did in the decade before it. Not the fundamentals. The interface, the click economics, and the way visibility gets decided.
Here’s what’s actually shifted, and what it means if you’re a UK business relying on being found.
The results page stopped being a list of links
AI Overviews launched broadly in the US in May 2024 and reached the UK shortly after. By early 2026 they were triggering on roughly 48% of tracked queries, up 58% year on year according to BrightEdge. That’s not a feature bolted onto the top of the page. That’s the page.
Then came AI Mode. Google made it available to all US users in May 2025 before expanding to the UK in July. At I/O 2026, it stopped being experimental, moving to a core part of the product running on Gemini 3.5 Flash and handling longer, more complex queries. Google said at I/O 2026 that AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users, with query volume more than doubling each quarter.
The important detail: AI Mode is not yet the default search experience. That’s the difference between a slow shift and a cliff edge. But the direction is not ambiguous.
Clicks are drying up, and the numbers are grim
SparkToro found the share of searches generating at least one click fell 9.51 percentage points between 2024 and 2026, a 22.9% decline. Over the same period, the share of searches leading to another Google search rose 7.2 points. People aren’t leaving Google. They’re staying in it.
SparkToro’s 2024 baseline had 58.5% of US searches and 59.7% of EU searches ending without a click, so this isn’t a US-only phenomenon. The CTR damage when an AI Overview appears is consistent across every independent study:
- Ahrefs measured a 58% CTR drop on position one for AI Overview queries in February 2026, up from 34.5% in April 2025. The effect grows as the feature matures.
- Seer Interactive tracked organic CTR on AI Overview queries falling from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025, a 65% collapse. Even queries without an AI Overview saw a 41% CTR decline year on year.
- Pew Research found that with an AI Overview present, only 8% of users click an organic result, versus 15% without.
And the one nobody talks about enough: roughly 1 in 4 users end their session entirely after seeing an AI Overview. That’s not traffic going to a competitor. It has left the web.
One caveat on the data. Most of the granular click-loss research is US-based, and the largest European dataset (Sistrix, February 2026) is DACH-specific, so I’ve left it out. The UK-specific picture is thinner than anyone would like, which is itself worth knowing. Run your own numbers rather than importing someone else’s.
Ranking stopped predicting visibility
This is the single biggest change, and most businesses haven’t caught up to it.
Top-10 ranked pages accounted for about 76% of AI Overview citations in mid-2025. By early 2026, that was roughly 38%. Ranking in the top 10 used to be a near-guarantee of being quoted. Now it’s a coin flip.
What replaced it? Passage retrieval and information consistency across independent sources now drive AI citations more than backlink count. The AI isn’t ranking your page. It’s pulling a specific paragraph out of it and checking whether other sources agree with you.
That’s a different game. You can rank first and never get mentioned. You can rank eleventh and get cited in every answer.
Google’s own position on GEO
Worth being clear about this, because there’s a lot of noise.
Google published guidance stating that from Google Search’s perspective, optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and thus still SEO. Their line is that you don’t need a separate strategy for their surfaces.
That’s true and misleading at the same time. True in that the foundations are shared: crawlable, well-structured, credible content. Misleading in that Google is not the only engine anymore. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude have their own retrieval, their own source preferences, and no interest in your Google rankings. Optimising for Google’s AI is a subset of the work, not the whole of it.
The core updates changed what wins
The March 2026 core update was significantly more disruptive than December 2025. Nearly 80% of top-three results shifted, and about 24% of pages ranking in the top 10 fell out of the top 100 entirely, compared to 14.7% after December. The May 2026 update followed and hit harder still.
The pattern across both: visibility moved away from intermediary and aggregator sites toward stronger destinations. Recent core updates reward brands, official sources, and data-rich destinations, while penalising sites that simply compile or summarise content from elsewhere.
If your content strategy was “write a decent summary of a topic other people have already covered,” that strategy is now actively working against you.
What Google shipped in May 2026
Five changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews on 6 May. Suggested angles linking to in-depth articles on facets of a topic, highlighting of links from news subscriptions, firsthand-source attribution showing creator and community names on social and discussion citations, more inline links placed next to relevant text, and hover previews showing the source site on desktop.
Only two of those change what earns citation. Suggested angles rewards topical depth across the facets of a subject. Firsthand-source surfacing rewards lived experience and attributable community presence. The other three change how links display, not what earns them.
Also from I/O: Google placed ads directly into AI Overview responses. Which makes earned citation more valuable, not less, because it’s the position that holds as a paid layer builds around it.
What this actually means for you
Three things.
Your top-of-funnel content is no longer a traffic play. Informational queries now run a 74% zero-click rate against 31% for transactional. The “what is” and “how do I” content still matters, but the metric for it is citation frequency and brand recall, not sessions. If you’re judging that content by traffic, you’re reading the wrong meter.
Third-party mentions matter more than your own pages. Information consistency across independent sources is a citation driver. That means directories, reviews, awards, “Top X” listicles, and forum mentions carry weight that owned content can’t replicate. An AI deciding whether you’re a credible Liverpool solicitor is not going to take your word for it.
Structure your content so it can be extracted. The shift toward inline citation places references next to the specific claim they support, which rewards self-contained, passage-level writing. Every paragraph should make sense lifted out of the page. Vague, flowing, context-dependent prose is invisible to retrieval.
In summary
Search hasn’t been replaced. Google still handles the overwhelming majority of queries, AI Mode isn’t default, and organic clicks still exist. Anyone telling you SEO is dead is selling something.
But the value of a ranking has been decoupled from the value of visibility, and that’s structural, not a blip. The businesses that adapt aren’t the ones publishing more. They’re the ones making sure the right signals show up in the right places.