The traffic collapse is real. Around 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT are already changing how people search, alongside growing audiences for Gemini, Perplexity and other AI services. With more than half of all searches now ending without a click, some organisations are experiencing traffic losses of up to 90%.

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