For twenty years, the unit of online attention was the ten blue links. Build content, earn rankings, watch traffic come. Every marketing budget, every agency contract, every measurement framework grew up assuming that surface existed.
It is fading faster than the industry talks about.
The proportion of UK commercial queries where Google returns an AI Overview above the ten links has crossed a meaningful threshold. For many buyer-intent queries, the Overview now serves the majority of impressions; the ten links sit below the fold, attracting a small fraction of the click-through they did even a year ago.
For CMOs, the practical consequences are immediate. Budget that was earning a steady return from organic SEO is earning less. Agencies that report on rankings are reporting on a metric that has decoupled from revenue. Internal teams that have been told to "do more content" are doing more content into a smaller and smaller surface.
The realistic move is not panic, and certainly not abandonment of SEO. The realistic move is to redirect a meaningful slice of the content budget — anywhere between 30 and 60 per cent for most brands — towards GEO. That means citation tracking, entity work, off-site authority, and content engineered for AI engines rather than for rankings alone.
The brands that make this shift in 2026 will dominate AI-search citation share for years. The ones that wait for "more data" or "for things to settle" will be working uphill against incumbents who claimed the space first. There is no version of the future where AI search shrinks back to being a niche surface. There is only the question of whether you appear in it.