u/gorelevant

Google confirmed this month that Gemini now powers every search query by default, not just the AI Mode tab people were opting into. Blue links are still there, but they're not really the interface anymore — you ask, Google answers, you follow up conversationally, and the results page turns into something you scroll past. Zero-click rates in AI Mode are sitting close to 90%+ now, publishers have lost 80-90% of their organic traffic over the last year and a half as this rolled out, and AI Mode query volume has been more than doubling every quarter since launch.

I keep coming back to how quickly the ground shifted under an assumption nobody really questioned. The GEO framing I've seen so far — including in how I was thinking about it — has mostly been "track your citations and sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc., alongside your regular SEO." That only works if Google search is still mostly Google search — a stable channel sitting next to the AI stuff, something you keep doing what you'd always done for while treating GEO as the new thing on top. That assumption doesn't hold anymore, and I don't think it's just a tooling gap. It's every business that built its growth engine on the old rules — content teams optimizing for rankings that don't lead anywhere, budgets still weighted toward a channel that no longer sends traffic the way it used to, whole functions built around a feedback loop (rank → traffic → revenue) that's quietly stopped working for a majority of queries. I don't think most orgs have sat with what that actually means yet.

The tools built around "track mentions across four or five AI platforms" now have to treat Google as one of those platforms too, except at a scale nothing else comes close to. And the gap I was asking about in my last post — going from "here's your citation score" to "here's what to do and proof it worked" — just got more expensive to leave open, because this isn't a side channel anymore, it's the default way people find anything. I don't think most GEO tooling, including stuff I've used myself, was built for that. Curious if others building or using these tools — or running marketing/growth at their own companies — are seeing the same thing, or if I'm reading too much into one announcement.

With classic SEO there was always a clean loop: rank moves, traffic moves, you can draw a line to revenue. Google was the one channel, and that correlation made the "so what" obvious.

I've been going back and forth with a few people building/using GEO tools, and it feels like the whole category right now is indexed on measurement — tracking prompt mentions, citations, sentiment across models. That part's maturing fast.

What I haven't seen a good answer to: how do you actually turn that into a repeatable action loop?

• Once you know you dropped out of an answer at some point in a conversation, what's the real playbook — content/schema changes, seeding sources, something else?
• How is anyone tying this back to actual business outcomes, given there's no click/traffic signal like old SEO?
• Is anyone actually re-measuring after a fix to prove it worked, or is it mostly "here's your score" and manual guesswork from there?

Genuinely curious how people here are approaching this. If you've hit a wall trying it, that's just as useful to hear as a win.