For almost two decades, the way people discovered information online hardly changed. Search meant one thing: the “10 blue links.” You typed a query, a ranked list appeared, and you decided which website to visit. Businesses that mastered SEO could count on clicks. Rankings equalled revenue.
That model is collapsing.
Today, discovery is moving into an era dominated by AI-generated answers and conversational interfaces. Search engines are no longer gatekeepers to information; they are answer machines in their own right. Instead of curating a set of resources, they synthesise the information, provide the response directly, and often end the journey right there on the search page.
For New Zealand businesses, this isn’t a distant trend either. It’s already happening here. Cucumber reports that since AI Overviews became a fixture in Kiwi SERPs around October 2024, the top-ranked “how” queries have suffered a 36 % drop in clicks year-over-year, despite no change in ranking positions.
This change is more than a tweak in user experience. It’s the most fundamental transformation in online discovery since the birth of Google. And it demands a new approach: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
From Links to Answers
To understand why GEO matters, it helps to see how we got here.
Search engines started as librarians. They didn’t try to answer your question; they simply handed you a stack of books to read. The “10 blue links” were just that: a list of possible sources. But Google’s mission was never just to help you find information. It was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Over time, that mission led to product changes that chipped away at the role of external clicks:
- Universal Search introduced maps, images, and videos into results.
- The Knowledge Graph began surfacing entities and relationships directly.
- Featured Snippets answered questions at the top of the page.
- Local Packs gave business details without visiting a website.
- Shopping Carousels turned search into a storefront.
Each of these updates reduced the need for a click. The SERP became an answer surface, not just a list of destinations.
The arrival of AI-generated answers is simply the culmination of this trajectory. With AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, and ChatGPT Search, engines don’t just list resources; they explain them. They summarise context, connect dots, and even take actions, from writing emails to booking tables. Gartner predicts that by 2026, traditional search volume will decline 25% as users embrace instant, conversational answers. Search has evolved from finding information to providing it.
The Collapse of the Click
The shift is already visible in the numbers, and they are stark. Our data shows that in July 2025, organic traffic fell 10% year-on-year, even though total sessions across all channels remained stable. Search traffic’s share of total sessions dropped by another 10%. And in February 2025, we saw the largest single-month decline in organic traffic, a turning point in search behaviour.
Independent studies reinforce what we’re seeing in the data:
- Zero-click searches dominate: According to a recent study, approximately 60% of global Google searches now result in zero clicks
- Declining CTRs: Ahrefs shows the #1 organic result now suffers a 34.5% drop in click-through rate when AI Overviews appear. For news, the share of users not clicking anything rose from 56% in May 2024 to 67% in May 2025.
- User satisfaction with AI answers: Pew Research found that only 1% of people click links inside AI summaries, while 26% abandon their search entirely once they’ve read them.
Clicks are collapsing. Visibility is no longer the same as traffic.
The Great Decoupling
This phenomenon has been called the Great Decoupling. Content is still visible, but it no longer guarantees site visits. Instead, content has become raw material, fuel for AI systems to train on, remix, and present back as generative answers.
The pace of this change is staggering:
- AI Overviews adoption: According to data from Ahrefs, Google’s AI Overviews, launched in May 2024, now appear in 54.61% of all Google searches by volume. With a global rollout to more than 100 countries, including New Zealand, they’re already accessible to well over 1.5 billion users worldwide.
- Explosive growth: Semrush reported that AI Overviews appeared in 6.49% of U.S. queries in January 2025, 7.64% in February, and 13.14% by March, more than doubling in just two months.
- AI-generated content saturation: According to Originality.AI, by July 2025, 19.56% of search results contained AI-generated content.
For businesses, this decoupling is a wake-up call. Content still matters, but the way it creates value has changed forever.
The Erosion of SEO’s Value Proposition
For twenty years, SEO was the closest thing digital marketing had to a cheat code. Rank well, collect the clicks, watch the revenue roll in. That loop was so reliable that it shaped entire industries, job descriptions, and marketing budgets. But the loop has broken.
Why? Because visibility no longer guarantees action. AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and ChatGPT don’t just point to answers; they deliver them. And users, conditioned by years of featured snippets, knowledge panels, and zero-click results, are perfectly happy to stop there. The click, once the oxygen of SEO, is no longer required.
That means the things SEO teams once obsessed over, chasing keywords, tweaking metadata, nudging rankings up one position, are steadily losing their commercial punch. This change isn’t to say the fundamentals are worthless. Technical hygiene, crawlability, site speed, and good UX still matter. But they’ve shifted from differentiators to table stakes. They’re the basics you need just to get a seat in the game, not the levers that will win it.
The uncomfortable truth is that SEO’s traditional value proposition has eroded. Rankings don’t guarantee traffic. Traffic doesn’t guarantee revenue. And in a world where answers are generated, not linked, playing by yesterday’s rules is the fastest way to disappear.
The Rise of GEO
That’s where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) comes in. GEO is the necessary evolution of SEO, a framework for ensuring your brand is visible, trusted, and cited in AI-driven answers.
Unlike SEO, which optimises for humans scanning snippets, GEO optimises for machines. The goal is to make your content understandable, machine-readable, and authoritative enough to be pulled into generative responses.
GEO requires four shifts:
- Semantic Clarity: Content must be unambiguous, structured, and a
ligned with concepts AI recognises. If your content is fuzzy, the machine will pass you by. - Authority Signals: Expertise and trust must be evident. AI models are trained to prioritise strong entities, so your brand must project authority if you want to be cited.
- Multimodal Accessibility: Information should be available in multiple forms: text, images, video, tables, charts, and PDFs. AI consumes knowledge across formats, and your content should be ready to meet it.
- Relevance Engineering: This is the discipline of positioning your brand inside the context, intent, and relationships that AI engines rely on. It’s about moving beyond keywords to build data structures that machines can understand.
Think of GEO as the operating system for visibility in the generative era. The rest of this whitepaper unpacks GEO in depth, providing a playbook for how New Zealand businesses can adapt, stabilise organic performance, and thrive in this new AI-first discovery landscape.
Why This Moment Matters
The numbers make it plain:
- Organic traffic fell 10% year-on-year.
- Search’s share of sessions dropped 10%.
- February 2025 marked the sharpest single drop in search traffic we’ve ever seen.
This isn’t a blip. It’s the inflection point.
Businesses that stick to SEO alone will continue to see discoverability erode. But those that adopt GEO will stabilise their visibility and gain an early-mover advantage in AI-first discovery. Because in 2025 and beyond, one truth matters more than any other: SEO gets you ranked. GEO gets you cited. And being cited is the only way to stay visible.
