If you’ve spent years refining your website copy, improving your product descriptions, writing keyword-rich blogs and monitoring your Google rankings, you’re not alone. SEO has long been the slow, steady foundation of organic growth for product-based businesses. It’s time-consuming, often frustrating, and rarely delivers instant gratification. But when done well, it works. Or at least, it used to. Now, the ground is shifting—and fast.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a call to debate the ethics of AI, its environmental impact or the societal consequences of large-scale automation. Those conversations are valid (and completely necessary), but this article is about something more immediate: the fact that these tools are already live, already influencing consumer behaviour and already reshaping where attention goes.
Google has quietly rolled out AI Overviews (formerly known as the Search Generative Experience), and they’re rapidly becoming a standard feature across search results. These AI-generated summaries appear right at the top of the page (above organic results) offering users a condensed, auto-generated answer to their query by synthesising information from websites like yours.
And here’s the sting: organic click-through rates are dropping. Research shows that even top-ranking content is suffering. One Ahrefs study analysed 300,000 keywords and found that when Google’s AI Overviews appear in search results, the #1 organic listing loses an average of 34.5% of its clicks.1 A separate analysis by Amsive across 700,000 keywords reported an average CTR decline of 15.5%, with losses approaching 20% on non-branded informational queries. 2
In practical terms: you can spend hours crafting a perfect, SEO-optimised blog post, only to see its most valuable content paraphrased in an AI-generated summary that doesn’t even link back to you.
It’s a blow to brands that have built growth on long-term SEO strategy. But this isn’t the first seismic shift we’ve had to navigate. Just as we adapted to algorithm updates, mobile-first indexing, zero-click search, we need to adapt again—strategically, not reactively.
ChatGPT is no longer just a productivity tool. It’s fast becoming a product discovery engine. Users are turning to it for questions like:
Best electrolytes for post-run recovery?
Most beautiful cashmere gifts for newborns?
Sustainable skincare brands for dry skin in winter?
And it answers—instantly, confidently, and without ads, affiliate links or SEO clutter.
If your products aren’t showing up, you’re missing high-intent customers who are actively looking for what you sell. Unlike Google, this isn’t about search rankings, it’s about accessibility and inclusion in an entirely new kind of interface.
OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT’s product search feature, enabling users to browse and shop directly from within conversations.