What’s happening to SEO?
The old rules of SEO are breaking down – but the new ones haven’t been written yet.
Recently, Dotdash Meredith, America’s largest digital and print publishing company, reported that traffic from Google is now roughly half what it was four years ago.
That astonishing stat, shared during their most recent earnings call, is an example of the kinds of signals we’re getting that something fundamental is shifting in how people find and consume information online. The old routes to traffic, attention and visibility are drying up – and AI is rushing in to fill the gaps.
What’s actually happening to search?
The search engine, as we knew it, is being quietly dismantled. For years, marketers, creators and businesses played by the rules of SEO. You could gather your keywords, optimise, tweak, target. You could understand the mechanics – not entirely, but enough to strategise with some confidence. You could climb the rankings if you had a structured method, disciplined process and enough grit and patience to keep going.
Now, that scaffolding is dissolving.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude aren’t just tools for productivity and efficiency; they’re becoming primary interfaces for discovery. You ask them questions instead of Googling. And instead of offering a list of links, they deliver direct answers. No pay-to-play. No optimised keywords. No ads.
A (very) short history of browsers – and why they matter now
In parallel, a new generation of AI browsers is emerging – Arc, Comet, Opera Neon – reshaping not just what we find, but how we find it. These aren’t just portals to the web; they’re beginning to act on our behalf, browsing, summarising, even generating content in response to our prompts.
At the centre of it all is a growing unease: the old playbook no longer works, but no one has invented the new rules of the game.
Web browsers are the gateways to the internet. Chrome, Safari, Firefox – these are the tools we use to access websites, read news, shop, scroll and search. We don’t often think about them. They’re just there.
Behind the scenes, though, browsers shape how the internet works – how we find information, how industries are formed, how brands are built. In the early days, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominated. Then came Firefox and Google Chrome, which offered better speed and user experience. Chrome eventually won, and today it’s the default choice for most of the world.
Now, something new is brewing. This is interesting because, to quote tech journalist Casey Newton, “It has been a long time since the internet saw a proper browser war.”
Two things are driving it:
Regulators are challenging Google’s dominance. The US government is actively trying to break up Google’s control over search and Chrome – which could create space for competitors to emerge.
AI is changing what browsers do. Instead of just showing us pages, new AI-powered browsers want to do things for us. They can answer questions, complete tasks, summarise websites, even act like research assistants. In this world, we’re not the ones browsing anymore – the AI is.
That’s a major shift. It changes how we consume information, and how people discover products, services, and brands. The tools we use to explore the internet are becoming intelligent agents. And that means the way brands show up – or don’t – in those experiences will matter more than ever.
Into the black box
Some in the industry are already coining new terms to make sense of this shift. “Share of Model” is one. It's essentially the idea that your brand should appear in AI-generated answers in the same way it used to appear in Google’s top results. A seductive concept – easy to understand, easier to sell.
But the reality is, we’re deep in the black box.
Ask ChatGPT about your brand today and you may get one answer. Ask tomorrow – with a different phrasing, in a different tone, using a different model – and you may get something entirely different. Results vary by version, region, search setting, customisation, even spelling.
The model is unknowable. Its memory is imperfect. Its training data opaque. Its logic unexplainable.
And yet, businesses are already being sold dashboards and services to “optimise for AI visibility” as if this system were a spreadsheet waiting to be tamed. The comfort of metrics is hard to resist – but it's often an illusion.
The danger of false clarity
Marketers have always been comfortable with ambiguity, but we’ve also been trained to seek out pattern and predictability – to find levers we can pull. That instinct is powerful, but here it can mislead.
This new search environment rewards clarity, credibility, and coherence – but not in ways that are trackable or replicable. What works today may not work next week. What’s seen by one user may be hidden from another.
In this context, any confident claims about “how to win in AI search” should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. Certainty, in this landscape, often correlates with credulity.
A different kind of visibility
So what does success look like now? Not visibility at all costs, but legibility – to humans, yes, but also increasingly to machines.
Search used to be about ranking, but now it’s more about recognition. Not just being present in a list of results, but being embedded in the systems that generate the answers. That’s a different challenge – and a more existential one for brand visibility.
What does a brand mean to a model trained on the entire internet? What associations and signals does a brand give off in the wider web? What’s the shape of a brand’s presence? Is it consistent, structured, and clear enough to be understood by a system that is synthesising everything all at once?
Perhaps the future of search won’t be about gaming the system, maybe it’ll be about being coherent enough to be remembered when the system reassembles meaning on the fly.
Where does this all go?
It’s tempting to think of this as just another evolution in tech – the next version of SEO, with a new set of tactics and tools. But this feels deeper. Search and browsers used to be tools we controlled. Now, they’re merging into AI-driven agents that may soon control more of our discovery than we realise. These systems will not just answer questions, but make decisions, complete tasks, carry out research, even filter and shape what’s presented to us.
If the browser is becoming the agent – and the agent is the one doing the “browsing” – then who is web content really for? What’s left of the open web when pages are read more often by machines than people?
We are entering a third browser war – not about faster loading or sleeker design, but about which AI gets to shape your reality. The stakes are visibility, legibility, and ultimately trust.
What’s the next move?
There’s no cheat code. No template. No step-by-step guide. Just a few durable instincts from good content design: Be clear. Be credible. Be coherent. And a kind of freshly important one: be structured – so your content can be read by machines.
This version of the game is still being invented – all current rules are temporary scaffolding. Brand visibility in this new world isn’t earned through gaming the algorithm, but by being consistently useful, structured and understandable – both to people and to the systems they now use to think.
The old rules of SEO are breaking down – but the new ones haven’t been written yet. It’s so tempting to scramble for shortcuts or metrics (like “Share of Model”) that aren’t yet meaningful. Instead, focus on building adaptive content and capability that can thrive in a search environment increasingly controlled by AI interfaces, not search engines.
