You may not have noticed yet, but the search engine is dying – and that includes Google. The systems that have underpinned information discovery and online retail for the past couple of decades are being dismantled, as, inevitably, AI reshapes yet another aspect of modern life.
Since the emergence of Google, businesses and publishers have relied on search engines to drive traffic, sales, and ad revenue. Now, a mere 276 of every 1,000 searches result in a clickthrough. That’s because Google serves up AI overviews in its results, which means they don’t have to click on anything. It’s also because Google itself has made its core search product worse over the past decade.
Meanwhile, referrals to websites from ChatGPT and Claude are rising fast as people start to realise that the latest AI models are actually pretty good at answering questions – much better, in fact, than Google.
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Media owners now accept that the era when web traffic was driven by search engines is over. The CEO of Condé Nast, Roger Lynch, is just one business leader preparing for the worst when it comes to traffic from Google.
Back in May, Lynch appeared on a live daily tech talk show called TBPN, which in a jarring irony just happens to be owned by OpenAI, and said: “Last year, I told our teams: assume there’s no search… you have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.”
How, then, are businesses and brands hoping to get in front of people’s eyeballs? While we wait for adverts to swamp AI (they launched for ChatGPT in July, but are still largely experimental), welcome to the exciting world of GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation!
For the uninitiated, this is the term given to the practice of “trying to influence what an AI chatbot spits out when asked a particular question” and what PR and marketing agencies around the world are rushing to flog to their clients (as much of the rest of their business model is eaten by, er, AI).
What this has meant is a wave of self-promotional corporate bullshit engulfing platforms such as Reddit. The site’s figures show that it was catching somewhere in the region of 25,000 spammy posts and comments per day in Q1 2026 alone.
Those figures will balloon as PR agencies prepare PowerPoint presentations for clients detailing how they can “own” the LLM search space around a particular product category. Chances are that if you see someone on Reddit waxing lyrical about how great something is, there’s a possibility that person is being paid to enthuse by Big Business.
Nor is AI the only beneficiary of Google’s declining grip on discovery; the others have been social platforms, with TikTok and Insta in particular now becoming de facto discovery platforms, particularly for young people.
As a result, brands are getting creative about how they show up in-feed and in-search. Watch a vertical video platform long enough and you’ll come across “storytime” posts, in which someone spins a yarn down the camera in conversational style, occasionally dropping a mention of a product or service partway through the monologue. Those mentions? 100% paid-for by a brand or agency.
This is, at heart, yet another way in which AI is undermining our sense of what is real and authentic; not just through the creation of words and images to deceive and manipulate, but by destroying the systems that we used to rely on to determine “truth”, and allowing for the creation of new ones that can be played by unscrupulous actors and Big Money.
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One might, of course, argue that it has ever been thus. After all, before GEO we had the multibillion-dollar industry that was Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But this feels more pervasive, more widespread, and fundamentally more uncertain.
After all, with SEO there was a shared, public artefact: everyone typing the same query saw broadly the same page. An LLM answer is generated fresh, differs between users and sessions, and leaves no record. Nobody can check whether the recommendation you got was manipulated, including you.
The upshot, for now, is that you can’t entirely trust that anything you see online any more is real, that an AI’s answers aren’t being played by a PR, or that opinions and endorsements presented as personal aren’t the product of someone being paid money to espouse them. Yet another thing to thank the tech bros for.
