Stop Optimising for Clicks. Optimise for AI Answers

Hasan Saleem is the founder of DSS Media in Dublin. He writes on technology and business for Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fast Company, and Benzinga. More of his work sits at hasansaleem.com. Who looks at Optimise for AI Answers.

Almost six in ten Google searches now end without a single click. Similarweb’s 2025 Zero Click Study puts the figure at 58.5% in the United States and 59.7% across the EU. Your customer reads the answer on the results page and moves on.

Optimise your work for AI Answers

AI Overviews caused this. BrightEdge measured them on 48% of all searches by February 2026, up 58% in a single year. Google answers the question before anyone reaches your website.

Some sectors already live in this future. BrightEdge clocked AI Overviews on 83% of searches in education, where buyers research before they ever pick up the phone. If you sell into a research heavy category, assume your prospects read the machine’s summary instead of your homepage.

The damage shows in the click data. Seer Interactive analysed 25 million impressions and found organic click through rate dropping from 1.62% to 0.61% once an AI Overview appears. Same ranking position, 61% fewer clicks.

Ranking first stopped being the prize. Getting named inside the answer is the prize now. SparkToro found that brands cited within an AI Overview earn 35% more organic clicks than the brands left out of it.

The same research recorded a 91% lift in paid click through rate for cited brands. A mention inside the answer lifts your ads as well as your links. One citation pays you twice.

I rebuilt DirJournal, a web directory I have run since 2007, around this single idea. I wrote up that rebuild for Entrepreneur.

Clean structured data beats clever copywriting when a model decides who to quote. Pages that win carry proper schema markup and plain facts a machine can lift without guessing, attributed to a named author.

Write for the question, not the keyword. Put your answer in the first two sentences, then back it with specifics a reader cannot get anywhere else. Vague pages get skipped by Google and by the models reading on its behalf.

Most Irish businesses still judge success by counting sessions in Google Analytics. That number now hides more than half of what is actually happening. When 58% of searches never reach your site, a traffic count measures the wrong thing entirely.

The shift runs past Google too. ChatGPT processes roughly 3 billion prompts every month, and each prompt carries a question you want your business to answer. People ask the machine for a name and act on whatever it returns.

Test your own position right now. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini to recommend a company in your category. If your name never appears, you are invisible to the fastest growing way your customers make decisions.

The fix is not more blog posts. The fix is structure that machines trust. Mark up your pages and give every claim a source a model can verify.

Google still holds close to 89% of search, so none of this means walking away from it. It means feeding the answer engine that now sits on top of it. The companies winning citations today are writing the references that every model will quote tomorrow.

Search itself keeps growing while the clicks dry up. Google handled between 9.1 and 13.6 billion searches a day in 2025, more than the year before. Demand for answers rose, and the traffic those answers used to send you fell at the same time.

Pew Research found that users shown an AI Overview are half as likely to click any link at all. That window narrows every quarter.

Hasan Saleem is the founder of DSS Media in Dublin. He writes on technology and business for Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fast Company, and Benzinga. More of his work sits at hasansaleem.com.

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