For over a decade, the SEO playbook looked a lot like “feeding the machine.” Publishing more blogs, using more keywords, and posting more on social media.

For a long time, that playbook worked. Search engines rewarded volume and visibility as a numbers game. If your business or organization could just out-publish the competition, you’d earn your slice of attention.

With AI, that era is over. And the businesses still running the old play are spending money to produce content that, increasingly, no one will ever see. Or, at least, not the right people.

Here’s what changed

Your customers no longer find you through a traditional Google search. They find you inside an answer. 

When Google rolled out AI Overviews — those AI-generated summaries that now sit at the top of many search results — user behavior changed quickly. A Pew Research Center study published in July 2025 tracked the real browsing behavior of 900 U.S. adults across nearly 69,000 Google searches. When an AI summary appeared, only 8% of users clicked on a traditional search result, compared to 15% when no summary was present. The organic ranking you spent years chasing can now sit directly beneath an AI answer that many people never scroll past.

This isn’t a niche phenomenon. Semrush’s ongoing study of more than 10 million keywords found that AI Overviews expanded rapidly throughout 2025 and shifted from mostly informational queries toward commercial and transactional searches. In other words, the searches that actually drive revenue are increasingly being answered by AI first.

If your strategy is still “publish a high volume of keyword-targeted content and wait for traffic,” you’re optimizing for a search engine that no longer exists.

The good news

There is a silver lining.

The clicks that do come through in the AI era are worth dramatically more. Semrush’s June 2025 research found that the average visitor arriving from an AI search tool converts at 4.4 times the rate of a traditional organic search visitor. Ahrefs, a marketing software company, saw something even more striking in their own data: AI search made up just 0.5% of their traffic, but drove 12.1% of their signups.

Why? Because by the time someone lands on your site from an AI recommendation, they’ve already done their homework. The AI compared their options, summarized the landscape, and pointed them toward you.

Which means the game hasn’t gotten harder, exactly. It’s gotten pickier. Volume no longer wins, but being the answer does.

You’re now writing for two readers

This is the insight that should reshape every website, blog, and social channel you run. As Tim Parkin put it in Search Engine Land, your audience has expanded. You now have to persuade two readers at once:

The human decision-maker: the customer, client, donor, buyer who wants a quick answer.

The LLM acting as a recommender: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — deciding whether your organization deserves a mention when asked.

Both audiences want clarity from you. Both need you to be explicit about the problem you solve, who you solve it for, how you solve it, and why your approach works. And, real evidence to back it up. 

Where the story comes in

An AI can surface your organization as an option, but proper brand positioning and storytelling close the deal. When that pre-qualified, 4.4x-more-valuable visitor finally lands on your site, what happens next depends entirely on whether your words make them feel understood. Whether your brand’s story connects their problem to your purpose and provides a solution.

This is why copywriting built on positioning, audience insight, and narrative has become one of the highest-leverage skills in marketing. Saying the right thing, to the right reader, with proof behind it.

For scaling businesses and nonprofits, this is genuinely good news. You will never out-publish the giants in your space. But you can absolutely out-clarify them. A focused brand with a sharp story can now win recommendations that used to be reserved for whoever had the biggest content budget.

Ask yourself…

So here’s the question worth sitting with: if a potential customer asked an AI assistant today, “Who’s the best at solving my problem?” — would you come up? And if they clicked through, would your website provide an answer to their question?

If you’re not sure, it starts with a conversation about your existing strategy. Are you nailing down your clear positioning and messaging to become a viable option for your audience?

At Novella Brandhouse, this is the work we do every day: sharpening the story and building brands that both humans and AI can comprehend. If your marketing is still using the old playbook, let’s chat about how your brand can adopt the new one.

Sources

• Tim Parkin, “Why copywriting is the new superpower in 2026,” Search Engine Land — https://searchengineland.com/why-copywriting-is-the-new-superpower-in-2026-467281
• Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” July 22, 2025 — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
• Semrush, “We Studied the Impact of AI Search on SEO Traffic,” June 2025 — https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/
• Semrush, “AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us About Google’s Search Shift” — https://www.semrush.com/blog/semrush-ai-overviews-study/
• Ahrefs, AI search conversion data (June 2025), as reported across industry analyses of AI referral traffic