The 61% Cliff: What Happens When the Click Disappears
For more than two decades, digital growth ran on a simple equation: visibility drives traffic, traffic drives opportunity.
Then the equation changed.
Between mid-2024 and late-2025, organic click-through rates on Google queries that triggered AI Overviews fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, a 61% decline. Paid search fared no better. On those same queries, paid click-through rates dropped from 19.7% to 6.34%, a 68% contraction.
Even more telling, queries without AI Overviews saw organic click-through rates fall by roughly 41% year over year. This is not a feature-level disruption. It is behavioral.
The search page is no longer primarily a gateway. Increasingly, it is the answer itself.
When a machine composes the response at the top of the page, the incentive to click diminishes. The link becomes optional. And when the click disappears, so does the growth model that depended on it.
From Ranking to Referencing
In response, companies are reframing their strategy. Nearly half now describe their approach as "SEO for AI" or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The objective has shifted from ranking first to being cited inside the answer.
This is not a rebranding exercise. It is a structural change in how authority is earned.
Research into AI citation behavior reveals consistent patterns. The GEO-16 study on AI answer engine citations found the strongest predictors of being cited were:
Metadata and freshness (r ≈ 0.68)
Semantic HTML structure (r ≈ 0.65)
Structured data markup (r ≈ 0.63)
Machines favor clarity. They reward content that is organized, labeled, and recently updated.
Experimental research summarized in what is often referred to as the “Princeton GEO” study adds further insight:
Adding attributed expert quotes increased citation probability by ~41%.
Including statistics and quantitative data improved citation likelihood by ~30%.
Improving readability — through clearer language and structure — increased inclusion by ~22%.
Authority, in this environment, must be extractable. If a model cannot isolate a clean claim, attribute it, and verify it, the content will not surface.
The Paradox: Fewer Clicks, Higher Stakes
Here is where the story becomes more nuanced.
While overall click-through rates are declining, being cited still matters enormously. Analysis from Seer Interactive shows that brands included in AI Overviews earned:
35% more organic clicks
91% more paid clicks
compared to brands that were not.
The funnel is shrinking. But it is concentrating.
Fewer users click. When they do, they disproportionately choose sources the AI has already surfaced. Citation is becoming a form of endorsement.
The Human Premium Emerges
At the same time, consumer sentiment is moving in a different direction.
A 2025 Sprout Social Pulse Survey found that:
55% of consumers say they trust brands more when content is human-created rather than AI-generated
Among millennials, that rises to 62%
Meanwhile, social commerce research shows that TikTok frequently drives product discovery and purchasing decisions for:
58% of Gen Z
42% of millennials
This is not a rejection of technology. TikTok is algorithmically optimized. But what users encounter there is visibly human perspective — interpretation layered over information.
As generative tools flood the internet with low-cost, low-friction content, audiences are recalibrating what feels trustworthy. Information is abundant. Judgment is scarce.
We are seeing the emergence of a Human Premium.
The Strategic Tension
Executives are now managing two audiences at once, and they want different things.
AI systems favor structure, recency, quantified claims, and attributed expertise. Human audiences favor narrative, voice, context, and the kind of perspective that only comes from experience. These are not opposites, but they pull in different directions.
Optimizing purely for machines produces content that is technically sound and completely forgettable. Ignoring AI systems means disappearing from the answer entirely. Neither is a strategy.
The brands that will win this period are designing for both. Structured enough to be cited. Distinct enough to be trusted.
At Camino5, we call this a Paired Perspective approach: combining the rigor that AI systems reward with the human judgment that audiences actually respond to. The goal is not AI adoption for its own sake. It is momentum, using technology to build authority rather than replace it.
A New Authority Model
The 61% decline in click-through rates is not a marketing disruption. It is a reallocation of attention.
Search is evolving from a referral engine into a filter. Traffic is concentrating among sources that machines can read and humans choose to trust. In that world, the old growth levers invert.
Ranking matters less than being referenced. Volume matters less than being believed. Automation scales output, but it does not scale credibility.
The companies that understand this will not treat the 61% decline as collapse. They will treat it as correction, a shift away from traffic as a vanity metric and toward authority as a strategic asset.
Machines compress information. Humans assign meaning.
The click economy is narrowing. The credibility economy is just beginning.
Ryan Edwards, CAMINO5 | Co-Founder
Ryan Edwards is the Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at CAMINO5, a consultancy focused on digital strategy and consumer journey design. With over 25 years of experience across brand, tech, and marketing innovation, he’s led initiatives for Fortune 500s including Oracle, NBCUniversal, Sony, Disney, and Kaiser Permanente.
Ryan’s work spans brand repositioning, AI-integrated workflows, and full-funnel strategy. He helps companies cut through complexity, regain clarity, and build for what’s next.
Connect on LinkedIn: ryanedwards2