Ever seen the film Don’t Look Up? A black comedy drama which portrays a group of astronomers (including; Leo DiCaprio & Jennifer Lawrence) who accidentally notice a distant asteroid is on a collision course with Earth that might be diverted – but fail to get their warning across to a sceptical world and leaders. Inevitably civilisation ends. There’s a lot of running around near the end.
AI Search Doomsday Q3 2027 won’t end the world, but my detailed and peer reviewed research suggests it could end or do serious damage SME and MME businesses who are not already working on increasing the likelihood of their web pages’ AI Summary inclusion and citation or appearing on AI App outputs. Few are being assisted by the website provider industry – the reluctant gatekeepers of change
The people who I have spent time with over the last three months are truly the outliers and thinkers in industry. They have noticed an unprecedented and difficult to interpret drop in Click Through Rates from vital search phrases and/or recognise the threat AI Search poses to their industry. We have a remedies underway. Where is your business on this paradigm shift?
My Linked-In post today.
In late 2024 I started digging into a question most business owners haven’t asked yet:
What happens to search when AI stops sending clicks to websites and just answers the question itself.
The authoritative and published data I’ve been tracking since is stark. Zero-click searches have gone from 56% to 69% of all Google queries in a year. When an AI Overview appears, that jumps to 83%. Organic click-through rates on those queries are down 61%. HubSpot, one of the best SEO operations in the world, lost 70 to 80% of its organic traffic in under 12 months, while its rankings barely moved.
That’s the part people are starting to notice. What I’ve spent the last year and a half researching is what it actually means for a business, and I’ve written it up across three reports which are all now published.
– Your Business Is Becoming Invisible sets out the diagnosis. Ranking and being cited by AI are now two separate problems. Across 20 UK automotive and estate agency audits I ran, the average AI readiness score was 5.5 out of 10, and not one of those businesses knew it.
– Search Doomsday Is Q3 2027 puts a date on it. AI is currently intercepting around 17% of the clicks that would once have gone to a website. Every data source I’ve reviewed converges on the same figure: 40% by Q3 2027. That is the point where the question changes from “do we rank?” to “do we get cited?”
– The Chaff Effect is the sharpest and damning finding of the three. Clicks are not disappearing evenly. AI resolves informational, early-stage searches 74% of the time, but only 31% of transactional ones. Businesses are losing the awareness-stage traffic that used to feed everything else, while the pool that is left quietly runs dry behind them.
Next week I’m releasing a benchmark that lets any SME or MME leader, and the marketers working for them, see exactly where they stand against this shift, and what to do about it before the inflection point arrives.
If your enquiries have been sliding while your rankings look fine, this is why.
More next week.
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Feel free to contact me if you are the director or employee in the business pushing to ensure yours is included in AI Summaries, Citations and on AI Apps.