Feb 11, 2026 • Five & Done Insights • 9 Min Read
AI search is replacing links with direct answers and over 60% of searches are now zero-click searches. To stay visible, make your content accessible to AI crawlers, build brand authority across trusted sources, and structure content for easy extraction. You don't need to abandon SEO, but you do need to layer AEO on top. The question isn't whether AI search will reshape discovery. It's whether your brand will be part of the answer.
Three fundamental shifts are reshaping how people find and consume information online:
Zero-click search is the goal – AI search is designed to keep users from visiting your website
Ranking is dead, reconstruction is king – AI doesn't try to find the best page; it builds the best answer from fragments across the web
The browser is becoming optional – Voice assistants, chat interfaces, and AI agents are replacing traditional web browsing
The question isn't whether AI search will reshape the internet. It's whether your brand will be part of that new reality, or absent from it entirely.
The good news? You don't have to abandon everything you've built. But you do need to evolve.
Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room: Yes, sites are seeing significant drops in SEO-driven traffic. Some sites are reporting drops as low as 5-10%, while others have seen losses as high as 50%.
When we started researching Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), we knew AI search was changing the game. What we didn't expect was just how dramatically or how quickly. The data tells a stark story: more than 60% of searches are now "zero-click" searches, meaning users get their answers without ever visiting your website.
AI now owns the relationship between searchers and your information.
This can be pretty scary to your digital marketing team because you’re losing visibility into the customer journey now. Without that visibility, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop marketing insights and refine your site experience to encourage higher converting behaviors and properties.
For better or for worse, this is by design. Perplexity isn’t shy in saying, “Direct answers instead of links: Traditional search engines respond with a list of links. Perplexity gives you the answers upfront…”
And the fact of the matter is that consumers seem to prefer this. As Google found, “AI Overviews is driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews.” The more people use AI mode, the more they continue to use it.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom over here. While SEO-driven traffic is dropping, many sites are seeing an increase in highly qualified, direct traffic. That tells us that shoppers are using AI search to do their research, learn about brand offerings, and then visit the brand site to complete their shopping journey. Ultimately, people are still buying things, they’re just going about it in a very different way now.
SEO is about ranking, AEO is about representation
Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room: Yes, sites are seeing significant drops in SEO-driven traffic. Some sites are reporting drops as low as 5-10%, while others have seen losses as high as 50%.
When we started researching Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), we knew AI search was changing the game. What we didn't expect was just how dramatically or how quickly. The data tells a stark story: more than 60% of searches are now "zero-click" searches, meaning users get their answers without ever visiting your website.
AI now owns the relationship between searchers and your information.
This can be pretty scary to your digital marketing team because you’re losing visibility into the customer journey now. Without that visibility, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop marketing insights and refine your site experience to encourage higher converting behaviors and properties.
For better or for worse, this is by design. Perplexity isn’t shy in saying, “Direct answers instead of links: Traditional search engines respond with a list of links. Perplexity gives you the answers upfront…”
And the fact of the matter is that consumers seem to prefer this. As Google found, “AI Overviews is driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews.” The more people use AI mode, the more they continue to use it.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom over here. While SEO-driven traffic is dropping, many sites are seeing an increase in highly qualified, direct traffic. That tells us that shoppers are using AI search to do their research, learn about brand offerings, and then visit the brand site to complete their shopping journey. Ultimately, people are still buying things, they’re just going about it in a very different way now.
Traditional search engines respond with lists of links. AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews give you the answer upfront. To give you an answer, AI search doesn’t just search for pages that match your query (the way SEO does); instead, it searches for verbatim answers to piece together into one comprehensive answer to your question.
This distinction is important because where SEO looks to return the best “page” to a search query, AEO looks for the best “passages” to cobble together the best answer to a search query. In other words, where SEO is about ranking, AEO is about representation. It's about becoming the answer, not just a potential destination.
This happens through two mechanisms:
The Query Fan-Out: AI breaks down your question into subtopics and issues multiple parallel queries, finding hyper-relevant content that matches your underlying intent.
Reciprocal Rank Fusion: Results from those multiple queries get merged and ranked by prioritizing content that ranks highly across multiple searches.
But here's what makes this even more interesting: the sites getting cited by AI aren't necessarily the ones ranking in Google's top 10. In fact, on average, 88% of AI search citations rank beyond the top 10 (or don't rank at all) for the original query.
This is a fundamental shift in how content gets discovered and recommended.
All the same, we feel that it’s a little arrogant to reject the foundation that SEO has laid down in efforts to surface the best answer. Given that AI search is relatively new, and the mold hasn’t set so to say, we anticipate that AI search will gradually learn from and borrow more from SEO down the road.
Until then, can your brand afford to wait and see how AI search evolves? The answer isn’t so simple, and yet it also is.
The reality is that no one can say with 100% confidence how to "win" at AEO. The landscape is evolving rapidly, and best practices are still emerging. Answer engines are currently the worst they'll ever be, which means they'll only get better and more influential.
However, by waiting on the sidelines, brands risk misrepresentation. When AI synthesizes information from across the web to answer questions about your products, services, or industry, you want to ensure your authoritative voice is part of that answer. Otherwise, you're letting others define your narrative.
A good way to think of it is like the mobile revolution. When the iPhone launched in 2007, no one knew exactly how mobile would reshape digital experiences. But the brands that started optimizing early gained significant advantages.
88% of AI search citations rank beyond the top 10 (or don't rank at all) for the original query
Answer engines are currently the worst they will ever be. Yet they are already changing people’s behavior. When you think about the future of answer engines, they’re going to be a lot more capable than what we’re experiencing today. To reference the original iPhone again, today’s “chat” interface will probably feel like 2007’s iPhone.
This matters because as you think about preparing your content for an AI search crawler to intake, it’s important to think about how the end user will be consuming that content. For years, we’ve taken it for granted that people will consume our content on our website with our context. This isn’t the case anymore.
Poke turns your messaging app into a proactive AI assistant that anticipates your needs and handles tasks before you have to ask.
Claude's voice mode lets you have natural, flowing conversations with AI entirely hands-free, no screen required.
ChatGPT apps bring third-party tools like Canva, Spotify, and Zillow directly into your conversation, letting you create presentations, build playlists, or browse home listings without leaving the chat.
Demis Hassabis, DeepMind CEO, sums it up nicely: “I think in the nearer term the web is going to change quite a lot. If you think about an agent-first web, it doesn’t necessarily need to see renders and things like we do as humans. ”
It’s time to start preparing your content for parallel internets that look very different from what we’ve become accustomed to building for.
To invest in AEO readiness, focus on the ABC's of AEO:
Agent Accessibility: Make sure AI crawlers can actually read your content. JavaScript-heavy rendering can make your site invisible to AI search crawlers. Don't block them with your Web Application Firewall. Ensure your content is rendered server-side or in a way that these agents can access.
Brand Authority: Brand Authority reflects who the AI trusts and how often. AI models trust externally validated credibility, such as brand mentions in authoritative sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and media coverage. Interestingly, AI search trusts many of the same authoritative domains that Google does.
Because ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity increasingly rely on plain-text mentions, it means earning consistent, authentic recognition across trusted sources and communities. For example, LLMs value the credibility of “Hagerty” over the backlink profile of “hagerty.com".
Content Quality + Structure: When it comes to AEO, format matters as much as substance. AI models favor content that's easy to parse and extract, which means adopting short question-answer formats and building sequential heading hierarchies. ChatGPT cites content with clear heading structures three times more often than content without them. Lists and comparative data are equally powerful; 80% of ChatGPT-cited articles include lists, compared to only 28.6% of traditional Google results.
The ABC's of AEO don't mean abandoning everything you've built with SEO. Instead, think about your content strategy in three tiers:
Maintain your SEO foundations: Elements like backlink profiles, mobile responsiveness, internal linking, and secure HTTPS connections remain crucial for search visibility. These fundamentals haven't disappeared; they're simply no longer sufficient on their own.
Double down on overlapping priorities: Content expertise, clear structure, authoritative sources, and comprehensive topic coverage pay dividends across both traditional search engines and AI platforms. This is where SEO and AEO naturally reinforce each other.
Layer in AEO-specific elements: Question-answer formats, comparative data, clear citation formatting, and verified statistics. The key is making your content objective, extractible, and comprehensively structured in a way that AI can confidently pull from and cite.
The goal isn't to abandon SEO fundamentals, but to evolve them. You want to build on what works while adding the elements that make your content extractable and trustworthy for AI search experiences.
The shift to AI search isn't coming, it's here. But unlike some transitions, this one doesn't require throwing out everything you've built. Good SEO fundamentals still matter. Quality content still wins. Authority still counts.
What's changing is how that content needs to be structured, formatted, and validated. The brands that will thrive aren't necessarily the ones that pivot fastest, but the ones that prepare thoughtfully.
The art of becoming the answer means
allowing for retrieval
building an authoritative brand
and positioning content with depth and clarity
Your brand doesn't need to plug in completely just yet. But your content and websites should be prepared. While we can't predict exactly how AI search will evolve, we know this: not showing up in AI citations means not showing up to customers.
And that's one future you can't afford.