Category: Search Engine Marketing

With the slow and steady evolution from keyword searching to resolution questions typed into Answer Engines, you are going to lose traffic (and revenue) somewhere in the rage of -18% to -64% during the course of the next calendar year. Today, our challenge is three-fold: A. How can you identify the size of your loss? B. What can you do to recover some losses? C. What actions can you take to take advantage of this shift and grow revenues? Every smart company is building a forecasting model to estimate these three life-critical dimensions. Let me make that important exercise a little easier for you. My model will help you estimate your losses, identify opportunities to recover, and share actions, and by how much each can drive growth. You can use the model to have strategic conversations with your CEO, CFO, and help your CMO create a clear, prioritized, list of actions (including hiring new staff with relevant expertise). This blog post was originally published as edition #482 of my newsletter, TMAI Premium. Each week, the newsletter shares strategic frameworks and practical here’s how to stay at the very bleeding edge of CFO-proof Marketing and Analytics. Sign up for TMAI Premium to accelerate your career trajectory. The Librarian to Grad Assistant Search Transformation. Past: When the User asked a question, traditional Google was a librarian. It did not know answers, it pointed us to a section of the library – four plus ten blue links – and said the answer is highly likely to be in these books, good luck. As a business, our job: Be the most attractive, relevant, authoritative book on the shelf, and/or pay to put our book on the special display by the front door of the library. Present: When the User asks a question, the new Answer Engine is the ruthlessly efficient grad research assistant. It goes to the library. It reads the 14 relevant books from a billion books, synthesizes the information, writes a perfect one-page summary directly answering the question. Most businesses lose the clicks, one or two get the click now – and even that we might not get as the Answer Engine absorbs ecommerce, and as AEs become Agentic eliminating the human step altogether. ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude are examples of Answer Engines. AI Mode in Google, now out in 40 countries, is also an example of an Answer Engine experience. ChatGPT Agent, Rufus from Amazon are examples of AE experiences that get close to Agentic search – humans need only express a wish; the agent does everything else. Learning, shopping, homework, will never be the same again. My recent AEO newsletter series, six editions (!), covered the changes underway, the actions you need to take on your digital experience, your organic and paid strategies, new measurement to embrace, and how you can prepare to live in an Agentic “Search” world. If you’ve not read that almost mini-book, please do. It is critical to understand the nuance and detail of this conversation. [Note: If you are a new Annual Premium Subscriber, please email me. I’ll be happy to share the six-part series with you.] Here’s a picture I sketched for a recent keynote on AEO, outlining the transformation underway… And, the implications… The completed forecast model will cover items 1 through 5 in the picture above, which are raised from these three questions for every business: 1. How much traffic will we lose? (Organic & Paid) 2. Given the librarian shift, how much of this loss can we recover? (Not all.) 3. Can I take advantage of this shift and grow new traffic? (Yes.) Let’s answer. The Business Losses Are Here (And, Accelerating). The change in user behavior above (in blue) is driving a change in the user experience (in black). Ex: Answers take up most of the real estate, with the answer often reducing the need to go to a downstream site. Ex: Paid ads might come, but for now there are either no ads or few ads (below the fold). Both create losses. My expectation is that the losses will accelerate in 2026. Important note: Losses, Recover & Grow will have different answers for different companies. Ex: For many publishers (news, magazine, content), the loss in traffic is already large, and permanent. These entities will need a phoenix type rebirth. I am going to focus on normal businesses: Ecommerce-type entities, B2B & B2C where the earning of revenue is a short, medium, long-term objective. 1. Factors driving losses in SEO Traffic. Informational queries are at the highest risk. These are the what is, how to, and best of queries. They represent, what some people call, top of the funnel. AEs are designed to directly answer these. Commercial queries are close to the highest risk. These are the vs queries, comparisons. Lenovo ThinkPad Snapdragon vs. Asus Zenbook A14. These are very high value queries, AEs will not generate an on-the-fly custom comparison table and even tell you to buy the Zenbook (btw, I have one and it is spectacular!). Non-brand High-Intent Transactional queries are at moderate risk. These are the user typing “buy men’s waterproof hiking shoes for an Alaska trip.” The current UX is that the AE will provide a handful of recommendations, with a summary of why. The user will click fewer times, and your organic category page will be ineffective. Branded & Navigational queries are at low risk. These are “Kate Spade Black Friday Sale.” Or “Coach Tabby in loved leather.” The AE will deliver the traffic to you, as that is the intent of the human. In future iterations, there might be insertion of things like “site links,” which might be a small risk. [Bigger lesson: Brand Marketing has never been more critical!] So, what’s the potential loss through the year 2026 of no AEO action by your company? Let us assume you currently get 5,000,000 visits from Organic Search, and the Revenue Per Visit (Total Organic Revenue/Total Visits) is $2.5. Based on my research, conversations with the top LLMs, competitive intelligence tool builders, and my judgment, here’s the section of the model that proposes the potential losses due to SEO (as Users shift from old-school searching to resolution queries in AE experiences): From an anticipated Revenue of $12.5m, a potential loss of $4m is coming your way. [Note: Annual Premium Subscribers received a full working Excel forecasting model, with losses, recovery, grow included. If you’ve misplace it, or are a new Subscriber, please email me.] Your to-do is to go to your Digital Analytics tool and take your current Organic Search traffic and compute the size of your Informational, Commercial, Non-Brand Transactional, and Branded & Navigational. Then, update column 2 (% of Current Visits). The rest of the cells will update and you’ll see your real losses. My assessment of Potential Loss in each row is conservative, and for “strong brand ecommerce” type business. If your business is different, please invest in research and update that column. With so much changing all at the same time, it is difficult to predict user behavior shifts with 100% accuracy. Consider the loss estimates as the best educated markers. They could happen much faster, could take a little bit of time, but if you stretch over the year 2026, you will broadly be in this range. Hence… Time. For. Action! 4. Factors driving losses in PPC Traffic. The threat to Paid Search is different, and just as scary. It is defined by two words: Transformation, and displacement. Remember, for now, none of the LLMs have advertising as a business model (though, it is too lucrative to resist ads for monetization). That’s displacement. Google, with the largest Search business to protect, will surely have ads in AI Mode, but for now they will look different and seem to be below the fold. Bing is trying new ad formats in its version of AI Mode. This is Transformation. Translation: Fewer options for you to pay to get clicks. Let’s use the same categorization as SEO to reflect on risks. Informational queries represent the same high risk of loss. Setting aside the no ads and below the fold ads issues, the entire purpose of Answer Engines is to answer. Hence, budget spent on informational questions will likely be completely wasted. The User is likely to ignore the ad, and certainly not scroll for ads below the fold. Commercial queries hold a giant point of friction. Our paid ads for, say, “best shoes for hiking,” will compete with the Answer Engine’s AI-analyzed answer for… best hiking shoes! Unless by the grace of God your brand was the AI’s assessment of the right answer, your text ad will lose the fight for attention. Non-Brand High-Intent Transactional queries are likely the bulk of your current ad spend. Ex: buy waterproof hiking shoes for a trip to Alaska. The risk here is not elimination, rather it is format shift. Ex: Text ad slots with breadcrumbs are being replaced with one (or two) AI-powered carousels. The four ad slots were clearly visible; in a carousel format that might not be the case. AEs are likely to have new approaches to Ad Quality Score (tied to now their superior understanding of the user’s intent), this might make it harder for your ad to show up. Other as yet unpredictable ad “innovations.” Branded & Navigational queries, as with SEO, are likely to have a lower risk of reduction. (But, as with your brand keyword ads today, when you measure them today on the basis of Incrementality, using CLS, you will find that they have very low incrementality. So… You should not be buying ads today. Definitely not in Answer Engines either – it is in their vested interest for them to send a user with your brand intent to you. [Note: There is another threat to Navigational and Branded ads. Buying seems to be moving directly into the Answer Engines. This might mean more wins for your competition, and certainly fewer cross and up-sell opportunities for you (lower AOV). Both, not fun.] So, what’s the potential PPC loss through the year 2026 of no AEO action by your company? Assuming $7m annual Visits, with Value Per Visit of $2.5… Here’s my model to help direct your strategic choices: From an anticipated Revenue of $17.5m, a potential loss of $4.6m coming your way over the course of CY 2026. As with SEO forecast, update your Traffic and Value Per Visit numbers from your Google Analytics data. Cluster the keywords you are buying into Informational, Commercial, Non-Brand Transactional, and Branded & Navigational. Update the column titled “% Current Visits.” The rest of the cells will fill in. Compute your potential losses. Take both of these tables to your next CxO strategic conversation. Have a good group cry. Then, start a little Marshall project to kick off urgent action. A Humbling Realization. Recognizing that every company is unique, even similar ones, and hence predicted outcomes will vary… My assessment here of the potential Loss for each query cluster is conservative. Additionally, I’ve assumed that you do everything I’ve urged you to do in TMAI #469: AEO Exp & PPC, TMAI #470: AEO Content FTW. If you have not, the non-positive impact will be significantly higher. So, pelase do not delay understanding and the urgent need to influence your company culture. The Modeling Journey Continues. Good news: You can recover some of your losses! Excellent news: You can take bold action right now, earlier than your competitors, to grow your traffic and revenue in an Answer Engine world!! The grow possibilities are substantial for some industries. TMAI Premium editions #483 and #484, outlined specific Recovery and Growth actions, and anticipated positive percentage impact of each action. They would specifically apply to ecommerce-type entities, B2B & B2C where the earning of revenue is a short-, medium-, and long-term objective. Using the format above, the model offers the same for Paid Ads. If you are a new Premium member, you can email me for the complete forecasting model. Bottom line. Every user behavior transition brings adjustments that businesses have to make. This is one such moment, happens to be the once-in-a-generation kind. Even when so much is unknown, you now have a clear and helpful model to start to quantify the size of the impact. That gives you power to take control of your destiny. Get your team ready to recover, and even grow. Carpe diem. PS: As you execute all of my recommeded actions, you’ll have an intelligent program of Answer Engine Analytics (AEA) to measure success, identify new opportunities. Here’s a helpful sketch, by our friend Gemini, of my Big 5 recommendations:

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