Much like The Foo Fighters, I have a confession to make: I am not an SEO person.

My entry into the marketing world was through social media. I’ve cobbled together several skills from there. Still, I am not an SEO person.

The way I’ve always understood SEO was that it wasn’t simply about rankings.
It was about finding signals; understanding who was searching, what they needed, and where they were looking to go next.

That is why the discussions over the past month about the future (and current state) of search and its next evolution have been so intriguing.

While we stand to gain convenience, what do we risk losing?

Search Engine Overhaul

Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

Recently, I read a LinkedIn post that shared an Ahrefs study that should raise every B2B marketer’s eyebrows. There’s plenty to take in, but here’s the biggest takeaway. “When Google’s new AI Overviews appear in search results, click-through rates for the top organic result drop by 34.5%.”

Since this post, I’ve read many articles in a similar vein, each covering different aspects of these ripple effects. Losing more than a third of click-throughs sure sounds…alarming, right? Perhaps. 

The more I’ve read, the more context I’ve uncovered to color what’s happening.

• AI Overviews are not villainous.
• It is not killing SEO (Google’s traffic increased in 2024)…
• …but downstream traffic has dwindled.

All in all, real seismic change is occurring under our digital feet.

Change in marketing is inevitable, and it sure seems that we have entered into another era of significant change.

The Disappearing Value Exchange

For years, the inbound playbook was simple:

• Write content that Google likes. 
• Get rewarded with traffic. 
• Generate leads. 
• Repeat.

We learned how to title, structure, and sprinkle keywords in just the right places. We cracked the algorithmic code. And it worked.

Then Google pivoted, saying, “Stop writing for robots, start writing for people.”

E-A-T (now E-E-A-T) became gospel. Depth, credibility, and originality became the new best practices.

The focus shifted to clarity, usefulness, and intent.

But now? We’re back to writing for robots. And this time, they don’t click.

So, what are we losing here?

I mentioned above that my understanding of SEO has always revolved more around the intent signals and contextual clues that search revealed to us (who was ready to act, and why). 

Those signals are disappearing.

As AI Overviews become more prevalent and the use of chatbots continues, we’ll need new ways to capture them; ways that demand deeper experiences, stronger value exchanges, and a real rethinking of what inbound marketing is supposed to do.

• They don’t need context. 
• They certainly don’t need your website. 
• They just need the gist.

AI Overviews are scraping, summarizing, and repackaging your content, and delivering answers before the reader ever reaches you.

These AIs need you, but they don’t serve you. 

Sure, you may get the credit. But you don’t get the visit. 

For media properties, this is quite the predicament. “Publishers are being heavily impacted by AI,” NetLine GM David Fortino shared. “[These publishers are] providing answers that don’t require users to even get to the editorial content they’re writing.”

The value exchange many of us relied on is disappearing right at the doorstep.

And the longer we allow that value to go unclaimed, the more room we leave for someone else to define us.

As Michael Brito cautions, our brands are increasingly being defined by third-party chatter—forums, reviews, old blog posts—not the assets you’re intentionally publishing.

Convenience Minus Context

The value exchange that businesses and publishers have come to expect across the web is no more. Yes, that brand visibility you’ve become accustomed to generating through your SEO efforts may still come, but it’s not the same as it once was.

Here’s what’s increasingly missing:

• The context you’d normally provide.
• The branded experience of your site.
• The behavioral data you used to capture.
• The chance to convert that interest into a lead or conversation.

As Wil Reynolds has noted in many of his keynotes and blogs, while AI Overviews haven’t destroyed traffic the way many feared, they’ve introduced new complications. 

“SEO isn’t being replaced by AI Overviews. But these summaries are changing the nature of the click. You’re still showing up—just not getting the data or business benefit you used to.”

Valuable Enough to Seek Out

Your brand may still be visible across these overviews. But you can’t capitalize on that visibility.

“Unlike search, where a teaser might bring someone to your site,” David Fortino shared, “AI just gives a lot more value to the end user right there, in the moment. And you’re left hoping that they find you valuable enough to seek out.”

This is the heart of the issue: Do you provide enough perceived value for a user to continue?

AI is faster than us. It’s more convenient. It’s trained on more data than any single human will ever process.

And hope is not a strategy.

But what AI still cannot do is think originally. It doesn’t create new knowledge. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t have conviction.

This is exactly what Andy Crestodina pointed to in a recent conversation with NetLine. “AI cannot produce new original data. It doesn’t really do that. And AI does not ever really take a stand. It doesn’t have beliefs like we do.”

Andy doubled down on two differentiators that matter more now than ever:

• Original research
• Strong, unmistakable points of view

This, friends, is where we plant our collective flags.

How Original

The unoriginal advice here is to invest in and produce more original content, especially if you are the only person/brand that can execute against it.

We’ve been warned for years that a content glut was making it harder to stand out. AI’s ascension only adds lava to this out-of-control wildfire.

This was before AI could vacuum up your blog post and regurgitate it in two seconds flat. 

Mark Schaefer called it years ago in The Content Code—specifically with the principles of content shock—warning that an unstoppable flood of content would outpace our ability to consume it.

Of course, the answer to standing out isn’t just more content; it’s producing better content.

BuzzSumo’s 2018 Content Trends Report spelled it out in clear terms. “In a world full of content, people want to share authoritative and quality content. This also applies to links. People want to link to the best content they can find. That means deep research, long-form content, original findings.”

BuzzSumo’s advice is something NetLine has long taken to heart. For the past nine years, our annual State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Reports have delivered a unique look into the behaviors of B2B professionals across the globe. 

Each volume provides value that no others can produce. By sharing these findings and insights, we offer marketers opportunities to level up their work, regardless of their relationship with NetLine.

If the answer back then was depth, differentiation, and conviction, it’s only more critical now.

But how and where it’s answered is most important.

And even when your content does break through, it may not be your version that gets seen.

As Fortino put it, “The LLM is going to craft a response that seamlessly pulls that in. It might cite you, but you have no control over the complete narrative.”

Owning Original 

Convenience is costly. Always has been and always will be. 

We are losing valuable intent signals in exchange for speed.

AI isn’t killing SEO. There’s still a significant role for content that answers specific questions well.

(Don’t believe me? Ask your generative AI of choice where to get the best tacos in Philly and see what sources show up.)

While SEO isn’t dying, it is changing. But, Jon, it’s always changing. Of course; but this is quite different. 

For B2B marketers serious about building trust, authority, and preference, we need to invest in channels and tactics where you own the data.

“If you don’t know who these users are and you have no permission rights to reach them,” Fortino said, “the only thing you have to do is pray that someone actually finds an answer through search that’s augmented with AI—or through an LLM—and that they then go visit.”

This will certainly read as self-serving, but gating your content has never held more value than it does today. 

We share in NetLine’s 2025 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report that gated registrations increased 27% between 2023 and 2024. 

That’s not resistance to friction. That’s a willingness to exchange information for real value.

And while it may feel counter to everything we’re relearning about accessibility and reach, in a world where discovery is outsourced to machines, gating may be the only way to move from being cited to being remembered. 

Because what will separate us isn’t how loudly we publish—it’s what we own and what we offer.

• Content that delivers something new—first-party data, contrarian takes, unique signals
• Ideas that matter—grounded in perspective, not keywords
  Platforms we control—because if we don’t control the platform, we don’t control the outcome

Plus, there’s one big factor in gated content: it means that a user has specifically requested to consume it. They may just feed it to the great big AI machine, but the likelihood that a human being wants to read your content is significantly greater.

Rebuilding the Signal

Photo by Svetogor Maliugin on Unsplash

We can’t rely on old behaviors to reveal new intent.

If AI is compressing content, collapsing context, and reshaping the discovery process, marketers need better ways to identify who’s actually in-market, and what they care about.

This is where buyer-level intent data becomes essential.

Content consumption used to be directional: a visit, a scroll, a download. Now, it’s fragmented across channels, obfuscated by AI Overviews, and often invisible within LLM outputs. The only way to reassemble that picture is by tuning into deeper behavioral signals—the kind that reveal what a buyer is researching, how frequently, and where they are in their journey.

Gating great content is the first step. But linking that engagement to real behavioral insight—and activating it across sales enablement, nurture strategies, and outreach—is how you close the gap between being found and being chosen.

Said plainly: If AI blurred your view of the buyer, intent data sharpens it again.

Be Worth the Extra Clicks

When AI delivers answers instantly, fewer people visit your site, meaning you see fewer people raising their hands.

That’s the new reality.

So the question becomes: If no one has to click anymore, what would make them want to?

You have two paths:

1. Create content that’s easily summarized, skimmed, and forgotten.
2. Or build something so valuable, so specific, so unmistakably you that people go out of their way to find it.

That means leading with original data, owning a clear, compelling point of view—in ways machines can’t replicate.

Visibility used to be the win. Now it’s just step one.

The real question is:

•  Did they care enough to act?
•  Did they care enough to come back?

That’s the bar, now. That’s what we build for.