By Janus Boye
Jörg Schäffer is a long-time part of our community and also leads our product management groups in Germany and Switzerland
The traffic collapse is real. 800M weekly users are displacing Google. Over 50% of searches are now zero-click. Some organisations are seeing up to a 90% drop in traffic.
These are no longer edge cases or future warnings. Over the past year, AI-generated answers have started to satisfy user intent before visitors ever reach a website, fundamentally changing how visibility, authority and value are created online.
In last week’s end-of-year member’s call, we explored what this shift really means in practice with Jörg Schäffer, a Hamburg-based product marketing leader with more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of content platforms, search and digital commerce. Jörg shared his perspective on the rise of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the growing influence of AI platforms, and the emerging content arms race that is reshaping how organisations are discovered.
What emerged clearly from the discussion was this: the decline of website traffic is not a temporary disruption. It is a structural change that demands a new way of thinking about digital strategy.
The traffic collapse is already happening
For years, declining organic traffic was something many teams could explain away with algorithm updates or seasonal changes. That excuse no longer holds.
AI-generated answers are now satisfying user intent before visitors ever reach your website. Zero-click searches account for roughly 58–69% of Google queries, and when AI Overviews appear, click-through rates can drop by 34–61%. In extreme cases, publishers have lost almost all of their traffic and been forced to shut down entirely.
This is not a future scenario. It is already reshaping how people discover, evaluate and buy.
As Jörg put it during the session, the web’s long-standing value exchange, content in return for traffic, is breaking down.
MORE COMING SOON