The third and final session from the Growth Forum that was worth talking about was titled “The Future of Search.” It explored how AI is rewriting the rules of the search ecosystem and how to future-proof your strategy as consumer behavior continues to change.
I have to be honest with you about this topic. It is probably the most overused subject in our industry. “SEO is dead, AI is taking over” has been written ten thousand times, almost always by someone trying to sell you a course.
That is why I waited before writing about it. I did not want to add more noise to the noise. I wanted to understand what is actually happening.
And what is actually happening is far more interesting, and far more useful, than the usual alarmism.
The Collapse Everyone Is Talking About Is Only Half True
Let’s start with the numbers that scare people, because they exist and there is no point pretending otherwise.
When an AI Overview appears, organic click-through rates for the top results drop significantly, according to several studies, sometimes by as much as 50% or 60%. In the United States, more than half of searches already end without a single click, and on mobile that figure rises to three out of four. Gartner predicts that traditional search volume will decline by 25% by 2026 and, looking further ahead, forecasts drops in organic traffic that could exceed 50%. AI Overviews have already reached more than 2.5 billion monthly users. ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly users.
So far, this is the part you already know. The part that makes you anxious.
But if you stop here, you have only read half the story, and the wrong half at that.
It Is Not a Collapse. It Is a Redistribution With a Different Price
Here is the point that received less attention at the Growth Forum but is actually at the heart of everything.
Traffic does not simply disappear. It moves. And its quality changes.
Someone who reaches your website through an AI-generated answer is not necessarily a casual visitor. They are someone who has already done their research, narrowed down their options, and clicked because they genuinely want to learn more.
The data around this is striking. Visitors coming from ChatGPT convert at around 16%, while those coming from Perplexity convert at more than 10%, compared with just 1.76% for traditional organic search. Ahrefs measured something even more dramatic: AI traffic generated 12% of sign-ups while accounting for only 0.5% of total visits.
That is a ratio of twenty-four to one.
Read that again, because it changes the entire picture.
You lose volume, but the smaller amount of traffic that does arrive can be worth significantly more. You are not necessarily losing customers. You may be losing low-intent clicks that were never going to buy anything in the first place.
Those who measure only visits panic. Those who measure conversions may discover that the numbers still make sense.
And there is another detail that challenges the most common objection, the idea that “AI is stealing my clicks.” Being cited within an AI Overview tends to increase nearby organic clicks by around 35%.
Being referenced inside the answer does not necessarily take traffic away from you. It can bring traffic to you.
The Currency Has Changed: Visibility Is No Longer Paid in Rankings, but in Citations
If traffic has been repriced, then the currency we use to measure visibility has changed too.
And this is where the real shift in thinking begins.
For twenty years, the goal was simple: rank first on Google. Get the number-one position in the list of ten blue links.
That metric is becoming the wrong dashboard.
Google AI Mode, the conversational version of search, does not simply pull information from the organic results sitting at the top of the page. It uses a different system. It breaks a question into multiple subqueries through a technique known as query fan-out, retrieves passages from dozens of different sources, evaluates them individually, and decides which ones to cite.
You can rank first for your target keyword and never appear in the AI-generated answer.
You can also rank far lower and still be cited.
The new currency is citation.
The question is no longer simply, “How high do you rank?” It is, “How often are you cited when AI builds its answer?”
An entire discipline has even emerged around this concept: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, theorized in a Princeton research paper as early as 2023.
GEO is not about optimizing for a list of links. It is about structuring content so that a language model can extract it, trust it, and identify you as a source.
And This Is No Longer Some Distant American Future
Here is the part that matters immediately, and the one you are unlikely to find in articles simply translated from English.
Google AI Mode has been available in Italy since October 2025, powered by Gemini.
We are not talking about a scenario happening in the United States that may eventually arrive elsewhere. It is already happening inside the searches your Italian customers are making while you read this.
That changes the urgency of the conversation.
This is no longer about “preparing for when it happens.”
It is about catching up with something that is already happening.
The difference is not philosophical. It is the difference between moving now and waking up a year from now with half your informational traffic gone and no idea why.
How to Future-Proof Your Search Strategy
So what do you actually do?
The session offered a direction, and it aligns with what I am already seeing work across projects.
Stop chasing rankings alone and start building entity authority.
AI does not cite whoever managed to place the right keyword in the right position. It cites sources it recognizes as trustworthy on a particular subject.
That means creating content that answers questions clearly and structurally. It means using verifiable data. It means building a presence that is referenced by third parties rather than relying exclusively on what you say about yourself.
It means writing to be extracted, not simply crawled.
And it means looking beyond Google.
The same principles increasingly apply to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. One detail says a lot about where this ecosystem is heading: Reddit and YouTube are among the sources most frequently cited by AI systems.
AI likes content where real people are talking, not just corporate press releases.
What I Took Away From It, and What I Leave With You
Put together, the three Growth Forum sessions tell one story.
Measurement tells you how to understand what works in a world with fewer cookies.
Creative tells you how to get people to watch in a world where television now lives inside YouTube.
Search tells you how to get discovered in a world where people no longer simply search. They ask an AI, and the AI decides who to mention.
The thread connecting all three is the same.
None of these things is dead.
All three have been repriced.
The rules are changing, not the game. And as always, the winner is not the person who is most afraid of change. It is the person who understands it before everyone else.
SEO is not dead.
It is simply that ranking number one on Google, by itself, is no longer worth what you thought it was.
The real question now is different:
When someone asks their AI assistant about what you do, is your name in the answer?
