For decades, the search was easy. You entered a query and received “10 blue links.” You aimed to reach the top of that list. This was the world of conventional SEO. That world is changing rapidly.

Generative AI search, such as Google SGE, gives short, summarised answers right on the results page. It reads and compiles information from various websites and generates one coherent answer. To the user, it is extremely effective. To enterprises, it poses a dramatic new threat. If your content isn’t selected by the AI to be included in that summary, click-through rates for your website can crash, even if you rank on page one.

Recent research discovered that users click on search results just 8% of the time when they have AI summaries compared to 15% without them. That’s almost a 50% drop in clicks. More surprisingly, just 1% of users click on sources mentioned within the AI summary itself. To add insult to injury, 26% of users completely close their search session after viewing an AI summary, versus 16% with regular search.

This transition from “list of links” to “conversational results” means the war for attention is therefore being fought on a new frontier. Ranking is no longer just a matter of visibility; it’s now a matter of being referenced as an authoritative source by the AI itself. GEO is the technique that secures your business as a first source of information, authority, and eventually, an essential driver of customer acquisition.