At a Glance
- AI summaries and answer boxes are now sitting above the fold on more queries, cutting click-through rates to traditional results by 30–60% in many categories.
- Yet brands that are cited in those AI answers often see more total traffic and conversions than those merely “ranking well,” because they’re embedded in the answer and the links underneath.
- The real shift isn’t “SEO is dead”; it’s that rankings alone are no longer the game. You now need a combined SEO + AEO strategy: you still care about links, but you optimise for answers, citations, and how AI retells your story.
Why Rankings Look Fine but Traffic Feels Soft
If you’re leading marketing at a growth-stage SaaS or a content-heavy services firm, there’s a good chance your rank tracking still looks pretty healthy. You haven’t “fallen off a cliff.” Yet your analytics tell a different story: lower organic sessions, flatter branded traffic, more “direct” conversions you can’t fully explain.
This isn’t in your head. Multiple independent analyses now show:
- When Google shows an AI Overview, organic CTR can drop by 60%+, even for top-ranked results.
- Pew’s March 2025 study found that users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result just 8% of the time vs 15% when no summary appeared.
- News and content-heavy sites have seen traffic declines of 30–40% post–AI Overviews, even when their rankings didn’t change.
At the same time, McKinsey estimates that half of consumers already use AI-powered search, and up to 50% of traffic for some journeys may shift into “answer-first” interfaces over the next few years.
In other words: your SEO reporting stack is still staring at the 10 blue links while the real battle is moving into the summary above them.
What “From Links to Answers” Actually Means
AI isn’t killing search; it’s rewiring where value accrues. Webflow sums it up pretty cleanly: “The future of search is about answers, not keywords.” Ahrefs defines answer engine optimization (AEO) as “making your content visible and useful to AI systems that deliver direct answers.”
In practice, three big shifts matter for your team:
- From ‘position 1–3’ to ‘are we in the answer layer at all?’
- Data from Google AI Overviews shows that being cited in the AI summary correlates with 35% more organic and 91% more paid clicks than not being cited — even though everyone’s CTR is lower than in the old SERP. Winning means getting into the answer box, not just the ranked list underneath it.
- From optimizing pages to optimizing stories AI can retell.
- Webflow’s AEO work and McKinsey’s “new front door to the internet” analysis both stress that AI is stitching together narratives: who you serve, what you do, why you’re credible. That pushes you to structure content around clear definitions, use cases, comparisons, and proof — so AI can safely summarise your story without hallucinating.
- From one search surface to an ecosystem of AI discovery.
- Search isn’t just “Google and maybe Bing” anymore. Buyers are asking questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Arc, and industry-specific tools — often before they ever search traditionally. Your visibility now depends on how your content is interpreted by multiple answer engines, not just one algorithm.
So yes, the classic “10 blue links SEO” is quietly dying. What replaces it is not chaos, but a broader remit: you’re optimising for answer visibility and narrative control across channels, with rankings as one (important) input.
How to Evolve Your Strategy Without Burning Everything Down
This is where I see teams panic and overcorrect — either by declaring “SEO is dead” or by pretending nothing has changed. Neither helps. From an Underscore point of view, the pragmatic move is to layer AEO on top of what’s working, in three steps.
1. Reframe Success Metrics: Add Answer Visibility to the Dashboard
You don’t stop tracking rankings and organic sessions, but you add:
- Presence and citations in AI Overviews and LLM answers.
- Share of voice for key problems/queries across Google + major AI tools.
- Accuracy of how AI tools describe your brand (ICP, category, differentiators).
Suddenly your reporting reflects the world your buyers actually live in.
2. Turn “Blog Clusters” into Answer Hubs
Instead of shipping yet another scattered post on “X in 2025,” consolidate your best content into structured answer hubs:
- “What is [category]?” guides
- “[Category] for [industry/role]” pages
- “[You] vs [competitor] / alternatives to [you]” comparisons
Webflow’s AEO content guidance and independent LLM research both point to these long-form, well-structured resources as the pages AI is most likely to cite.
If you’re on Webflow, this is where you lean into CMS-powered templates so every “answer hub” shares a consistent, AI-friendly structure without extra design overhead.
3. Align SEO and AEO on One Roadmap
Finally, stop treating SEO and AEO as two separate initiatives.
- Use your existing SEO foundation — crawlability, internal linking, performance — as the base AEO depends on.
- Prioritise work where both worlds benefit: answer hubs, updated schemas, clearer IA around buyer questions, and better use of tools like llms.txt.
- Make AEO a standing topic in your monthly SEO/content review: “What changed in AI answers this month, and which pages do we update as a result?”
You end up with one roadmap that acknowledges the new reality, instead of two competing ones.
Conclusion & Next Step
AI search hasn’t killed SEO, but it has killed the illusion that rankings alone tell you whether you’re visible.
The real shift is simple:
- Links still matter — but answers matter more.
- Being ranked is useful — being cited is decisive.
- Ten blue links are now the supporting cast around an answer layer your current dashboards largely ignore.
If you want to walk into your next leadership meeting with something more compelling than “our rankings are fine, but traffic is weird,” this is where to start: add answer visibility to your metrics, convert scattered content into answer hubs, and align SEO and AEO on a single roadmap.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on that transition, that’s what we use our Webflow AEO Session for: we’ll overlay this “links to answers” shift on your current Webflow or WordPress setup and turn it into a 6–12 month plan your team can actually execute.
Sources
- AEO with Webflow – SEO is shifting. AEO is next.
- How AI is reshaping — not killing — search in 2025 (Webflow)
- Answer Engine Optimization: How to Win in AI-Powered Search (Ahrefs)
- GEO, LLMO, AEO… It’s All Just SEO (Ahrefs)
- AIO Impact on Google CTR (Seer Interactive)
- Google AI Overviews drive 61% drop in organic CTR (Search Engine Land)
- Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? (Pew Research)
- New front door to the internet: Winning in the age of AI search (McKinsey)
- How AI is reshaping search traffic for publishers (Guardian / Similarweb reporting)
- Webflow and AI SEO: How to optimize for AI search engines
