No — but the way it pays off has changed, and anyone telling you nothing has changed is not paying attention.
Here’s the honest version. Roughly two-thirds of Google searches in the US now end without anyone clicking through to a website, up from about 60% two years ago. When Google shows one of its AI summaries at the top, only about 8% of people click a result, compared to around 15% when there’s no summary. So yes — the same ranking position sends you fewer visitors than it did three years ago.
That’s the bad news, and it’s worth sitting with rather than glossing over.
The part that gets left out: people didn’t stop needing plumbers, dentists, or contractors. They’re still searching. They’re just getting their answer in a different place, and often deciding who to call before they ever land on a website. Which means the goal shifts from “be the link people click” to “be the business that gets named.”
Where the traffic actually went
Three things happened at once.
Google started answering more questions itself. If someone searches “how much does a furnace tune-up cost,” Google increasingly answers on the results page. Nobody clicks. That traffic is genuinely gone, and it isn’t coming back.
AI assistants became a real starting point. People ask ChatGPT or Perplexity “who’s a good electrician in Nanaimo” the way they used to type it into Google. Referral traffic from AI tools grew several times over in a single year. It’s still small compared to Google, but it’s growing fast and it barely existed in 2023.
The searches that survived are the valuable ones. This matters more than most coverage admits. The queries that lost the most clicks are informational — “what is,” “how to,” “why does.” The queries where someone is ready to hire or buy still send people to websites, because Google can’t book your appointment or quote your job. If you’re a local service business, the searches that actually make you money are the ones least affected.
That last point is why “SEO is dead” is wrong in a specific, useful way. Traffic to blog posts explaining things? Under real pressure. Traffic from someone searching “emergency plumber near me” at 9pm? Still very much alive.
What “getting named” actually takes
If the new goal is being the business an AI recommends, it helps to know how these systems actually pick.
Researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi ran a study across thousands of queries testing what makes AI systems cite a source. The things that moved the needle most: including direct quotes, citing statistics, referencing credible sources, and simply writing clearly. Adding relevant statistics to a page raised its citation rate by around 30%. Nothing exotic — it’s mostly “be specific and be clear.”
There’s a practical wrinkle that catches a lot of small businesses out. Most of the major AI crawlers — the ones used by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity — read the raw HTML your server sends. They don’t run JavaScript. If your site was built so that the content only appears after scripts load in a browser, those crawlers see something close to a blank page. Your site looks perfect to you and near-empty to them. Worth checking, because no amount of good writing fixes an invisible page.
The other thing that decides whether you get named is consistency. If your business name, address, and phone number are formatted three different ways across your website, your Google profile, and a few directories, you’ve made yourself harder to identify as one real business. Both Google and AI systems lean heavily on being able to match those signals up. This is unglamorous work and it matters more than most people expect.
What still works, in order
If you run a local business and you’re wondering where to put your effort, roughly this order:
Your Google Business Profile. Still the single biggest factor in whether you show up in the map results, and it’s free. Pick the most specific category that fits. Fill in every field. Keep your hours accurate — being open when someone searches genuinely affects whether you appear.
Reviews, and replying to them. Review count matters, but recency and whether the owner responds have both grown in importance. A steady trickle of recent reviews with replies beats a pile of old ones. Ask in person when the job finishes — that’s when people actually say yes.
Say where you work, on your website. A surprising number of local business sites never name their town anywhere important. If you serve Courtenay, the word “Courtenay” should be in your page title and your main heading, not buried in the footer.
Answer real questions in plain words. Not to game anything — because the questions customers ask you on the phone are almost exactly the prompts they type into Google and ChatGPT. Write the answer the way you’d say it out loud, put it near the top of the page, and you’ve done most of what the research says works.
Make sure the site is actually readable. Fast, works on a phone, content in the HTML. This is the boring foundation, and it’s the thing that quietly breaks everything else when it’s wrong.
The honest caveat
Anyone who tells you they can guarantee you’ll be recommended by ChatGPT is guessing. These systems are young, they change without notice, and nobody outside those companies knows exactly how the ranking works. What we do know is that the fundamentals — be clear, be specific, be consistent, be technically readable — are the same things that have worked for a decade, and they happen to be what AI systems reward too.
The businesses that will do fine over the next few years aren’t the ones chasing every new tactic. They’re the ones who are genuinely easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to verify — whichever tool someone happens to be asking.
If you want to know where your own site stands on the technical side of this, our free website health check tests the things AI crawlers and Google actually look at, and tells you what’s missing.