Ai Removes the Middleman: The Decline of Search and SEO
By Grayson Patrick Trent | greg report contributor
When Ai answers everything, who still needs your website?
For years, Google and other search engines have been the indispensable middlemen between our questions and the world’s knowledge. Need a solution or a stat? You’d search, scroll, and click through to a website. Today, that middle layer is evaporating. Ai is replacing the “middle man” in everything and search is ground zero. Instead of visiting dozens of sites, people are asking large language models for direct answers. The effect on traditional search metrics has been immediate and brutal.
Consider Google’s own backyard. Recent research shows nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to an external website. Think about that: over half of searchers find what they need (or give up) without visiting anyone’s blog or homepage. In 2024, for every 1,000 searches by U.S. users, only about 360 resulted in a click to a non-Google site. Nearly two-thirds of all queries stayed within Google’s walled garden.
Some of those were satisfied by featured snippets or Google’s own properties, but many simply went nowhere, questions asked and answered (or abandoned) entirely on the search results page.
This “zero-click” phenomenon isn’t just a quirk of user behavior; it’s a sign of Google’s evolving strategy and AI’s influence. As Google rolls out its AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) summaries, even more users get what they need at a glance. According to Similarweb, after Google introduced AI Overviews in May 2024, the share of news searches that produced no click-through to news sites jumped from 56% to nearly 69% by May 2025. In parallel, total organic visits to news websites fell from a mid-2024 peak of 2.3 billion a month to under 1.7 billion, a 26% drop in less than a year. The pattern is clear across industries: searchers are finding answers without leaving Google, and the open web is starved of traffic as a result.
Even when users do click, more of those clicks stay “in-house.” Roughly 30% of all Google search clicks now go to Google’s own properties like YouTube, Maps, and Google Travel. The search giant has become both gateway and gatekeeper, hoarding attention. Only about one-third of searches in 2024 led to a click on the “open web” (a site neither owned by Google nor paying Google for ads). It’s no wonder many web publishers feel like the ground is shifting beneath them. As one marketing CEO put it, “Most of our websites are getting less traffic from Google, NOT more.” His own analytics show search traffic down 41% from its peak. He’s not alone.
The decline isn’t limited to Google. Microsoft’s Bing integrated ChatGPT into search results early on, hoping to lure users. It saw a temporary boost, crossing 100 million daily active users, but still only claims around 4% of global search market share. By mid-2025, Bing’s worldwide usage had actually declined slightly from late 2023 levels. In short, the traditional search engines as a whole aren’t growing. In fact, when you look at web traffic, Google’s global visits dropped nearly 8% from 2023 to 2024 after ChatGPT’s debut. Other engines saw similar declines. For the first time in the modern internet era, the search emperors are seeing their kingdoms shrink.
an AI is surfacing their content across platforms, not just Google Search. It’s exactly what “a world without B2B/B2C” implies: good content finds its way to the user whether it originated as a whitepaper or a TikTok clip
Why? Because people aren’t searching less, they’re just searching elsewhere and in new ways. AI assistants have begun siphoning off search intent at the edges. Instead of firing up a browser and typing a query, you whisper “Hey GPT” or tap out a question to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Pi. No middlemen, no multi-page results, no banners. We predicted this, and now it’s here. “Ai is replacing the ‘middle man’ in everything,” I wrote, and it’s bearing out rapidly in search.
The result? SEO performance is tanking for many businesses, especially those built on content as a funnel. Traffic that once came easily now must be fought for or re-imagined entirely. The classic playbook of publishing high-volume, keyword-optimized posts is crumbling. One need only look at the cautionary tale that is HubSpot, a company synonymous with content marketing .
Late last year, HubSpot’s blog traffic fell off a cliff, dropping an estimated 75–80% year-over-year. This wasn’t a slow erosion; it was a plunge, triggered by Google’s algorithm updates and the changing search landscape. In one two-month span, their organic traffic plummeted from 13.5 million visits to 8.6 million. Pages that once pulled in thousands of clicks a day simply vanished from the rankings.
The worst-hit content? Exactly the kind of broad, informational articles that used to be SEO gold for B2B marketers (think “Cover Letter Examples” or “Famous Sales Quotes”).
Google decided those posts were shallow or irrelevant to HubSpot’s core audience and axed them from visibility. And when users ask ChatGPT how to write a resignation letter or prep for an interview, guess what, it’s not citing HubSpot at all. It’s pulling from sources known for jobs and careers, not a CRM company. The content HubSpot created purely to capture clicks (“top of funnel” content with tenuous relevance) has lost its edge in a world where AI can summarize generic info without ever visiting your site.
We’re witnessing a generational shift in how knowledge is shared and how businesses connect with customers.
This is a wake-up call. “Traffic is getting harder to earn, easier to lose, and less valuable when disconnected from fit and influence,” as one marketing strategist observed in the HubSpot post-mortem. It’s not just that Google’s algorithm grew a spine; it’s that the entire value of being found via search is diminishing. High rankings don’t guarantee traffic now. You might sit at position #1 and still get passed over because the user got their answer from an Instant Answer box or an AI snippet. As another analyst noted, “with AI summaries and zero-click answers, being ‘position one’ doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.”
A World Without Data: The Vanishing Feedback Loop
As the search middleman disappears, something else is quietly dying: the data trail. In the old model, when someone clicked through to your website, you at least knew something – you’d see a visit in your analytics, maybe get a sense of what they searched for, perhaps even capture an email or cookie. In the new AI-driven model, you often get nothing. It’s as if these prospects spoke with an oracle in a sealed temple, and you’re left outside, unaware of their questions and the answers they received.
I’ve called this emerging reality “a world without data, at least in the contemporary manner.” After all, if Ai is operating on real-time streams and generative answers, the traditional stockpiles of historical data start to lose relevance. We’re seeing hints of this already. Marketers are used to dealing with Google’s notorious “not provided” (when search stopped telling us which keywords drove organic visits). But AI takes this opacity to a whole new level. So far in 2024, AI search is a ZERO data environment for those of us running websites. If a customer asks an AI assistant for advice – “What B2B software solves problem X?” – and the AI delivers an answer synthesized from who-knows-where, the vendor might never know a question was asked at all. No click, no query string, no referrer. You get none of it.
We are flying blind. The great feedback loop between audience and creator is being severed. In exchange for convenience, users give up less observable behavior, and companies lose insight. One veteran SEO consultant tracked traffic from AI chatbots and found that Google sent him 30,000 visitors in a month while ChatGPT and Perplexity combined sent only 200. That 200 isn’t just small; it’s also largely invisible. Those people likely arrived via some transient browser built into an AI app, with minimal trace. If AI becomes the default interface, the majority of interactions could happen off-analytics. It’s the end of the web’s data era and the beginning of something new.
Ironically, as AI deprives businesses of user data, AI itself thrives on data, just not in the way we used to think. My Prediction #12 was “A World Without Data,” and what I meant was the end of historical data as a treasured resource. AI doesn’t need decades of backwards-looking data if it can learn and respond in real time. We see glimmers of that in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models that pull current info on the fly. The AI of the near future will ingest live sensor inputs, real-time market stats, and fresh user feedback instantly, making yesterday’s data irrelevant. When everything is a stream of “now,” the hoards of stored data lose their shine. Google’s entire model of indexing the web (a giant historical cache of pages) could be upended by an AI that says: Why index the past when I can compute the present? That paradigm shift is still in early days, but you can already sense it: we are moving from retrieval to generation.
For B2B marketers, this heralds a tough reality. The tactics of accumulating SEO content and analyzing heaps of user data to fine-tune strategy are yielding diminishing returns. As one Gartner study cited by industry experts predicts, search engine traffic to websites will drop 25% by 2026 and some businesses report they’re already 40% down ahead of that schedule. If you’ve been measuring success by impressions, clicks, and Google Analytics charts, it’s time to rethink those KPIs. Those metrics belong to the world of yesterday’s data. Today, we need new ways to gauge if we’re reaching people at all. When “our KPIs no longer serve us in a world of disappearing SEO data”, we have to refocus on outcomes and engagement that we can measure (or directly observe), even if that’s within closed platforms or one step removed from direct traffic.
In practical terms, this means shifting from pure traffic acquisition to building brand presence and trust in whatever arena the conversations are happening even if that arena doesn’t send you referral logs. It means that instead of counting visitors, you might count something like “mentions in AI outputs” or user recall or community interactions. Indeed, tools are already emerging to track how often a brand is mentioned by ChatGPT or Bard. Crazy? Not at all. If potential customers aren’t visiting your site but are hearing about you via AI, you’d better know and care about that. In an Ai-driven future, data is no longer about web hits; it’s about mindshare in ecosystems we don’t directly control.
“If your blog is filled with explainer content that AI can generate in seconds, you’re not defending anything. Create content that builds belief, not just traffic.”
A World Without B2B or B2C: The Blurring of Buyer and Consumer
One of the more provocative predictions I’ve made is that the line between B2B and B2C will dissolve. That world is starting to take shape. What does “a world without B2B or B2C” look like in practice? It doesn’t mean businesses stop selling to other businesses or consumers vanish. It means Ai creates a new way of business altogether, merging the B2B and B2C models. In this new way, whether you’re a corporate procurement manager or a solo consumer, you leverage the same personal AI assistants and expect the same instant, personalized answers.
We already see early hints: A mid-level engineer at a company needs a software tool to solve a problem. In the past, they’d call up a sales rep or search through vendor whitepapers (classic B2B behavior). Now, they might just ask an AI assistant: “What’s the best solution for X, and can you connect me with a provider?” To the AI, this engineer might as well be asking for a restaurant recommendation. The AI doesn’t care that this is a “B2B purchase”, it processes the query using its vast training on consumer reviews, expert content, maybe even the company’s own data if plugged in.
It then tells the engineer exactly which product fits and perhaps facilitates the next step (a demo sign-up or procurement form) right then and there. No traditional marketing funnel, no clear division between a business buyer’s journey and a consumer decision. Just a single, streamlined experience driven by the user and their AI.
This collapse of distinction is forcing B2B marketers to rethink their playbooks. The content tone and distribution channels of B2B are becoming more like B2C because attention is attention, regardless of who’s paying. Business decision makers are consuming content on LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, and yes, through AI, just like anyone else. And they expect the immediacy and personalization they get as consumers. If your AI assistant can instantly summarize the “magic quadrant” of enterprise software, why sit through three vendor webinars? If ChatGPT can pull up the specs, pricing, and user feedback on a B2B service in one go, why speak to a junior sales rep reading a script? The middlemen are again removed – here it’s the sales and marketing layers between a problem and a solution.
Forward-thinking companies have picked up on this and are adapting. Remember HubSpot’s massive traffic crash? They didn’t try to SEO their way out of it. They pivoted their entire content strategy to become less dependent on search and more like a media company. They cut over 30,000 pages of fluff that weren’t converting. They invested in newsletters, YouTube channels, podcasts, and influencer partnerships. In other words, they started behaving less like a B2B software vendor and more like a B2C media brand, meeting their audience on multiple platforms. It’s no coincidence that HubSpot’s former marketing chief said they deliberately shifted to “influential channels” where attention was moving buying The Hustle newsletter, launching shows, and building a creator network.
This is the new playbook: own your distribution and speak to customers directly, because you can’t count on an algorithm to deliver them.
We see this trend broadly. 68% of B2B marketers increased their use of LinkedIn in the last 12 months, and for good reason. LinkedIn, essentially a social network, has become the top platform for B2B outreach 85% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn provides the best value for their content distribution. Why? Because on LinkedIn you reach people as people, not faceless “organizations.” The content might be professional, but the engagement model is personal, social, and direct. The lines blur: a VP scrolling LinkedIn is as much a consumer of content as a college kid on TikTok. The difference is fading.
And guess what else? Those LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and podcasts are now feeding into AI models. ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff gets updated, Bing’s AI can search LinkedIn posts if public, and so on. HubSpot noted that their YouTube videos began showing up in ChatGPT responses for relevant queries. That’s wild, an AI is surfacing their content across platforms, not just Google Search. It’s exactly what “a world without B2B/B2C” implies: good content finds its way to the user whether it originated as a whitepaper or a TikTok clip, because the AI intermediaries and social networks treat it all as just information.
In this blended world, the key is authority and trust, not volume. Publishing 100 mediocre blog posts won’t win against an AI that aggregates the top 1% of insights from across the web. But being that top 1%, having true expertise, a unique voice, a community of believers, that matters more than ever. If your content is insightful enough to be the one an AI chooses to quote or a professional chooses to share, you win. As I wrote in my predictions, “If your blog is filled with explainer content that AI can generate in seconds, you’re not defending anything. Create content that builds belief, not just traffic.” B2B and B2C both boil down to H2H, human to human, or perhaps human to AI to human. Either way, authentic authority cuts through.
The companies that understand this are moving fast. They’re diversifying beyond SEO before they’re forced to. They’re investing in community, brand, and product quality – things no algorithm update can take away overnight. They’re treating their audiences not as “leads” or “accounts” but as fans and collaborators. In many ways, they’re embracing a B2C mindset: delight the individual, wherever they may be, and the business relationship will follow.
Ai Creates the Future: Evidence in Real Time
When I first outlined the Gregorian Ai Predictions, I suggested that Ai wouldn’t just predict the future, Ai would create the future. At the time, it sounded grandiose. But look around: we’re watching it happen, one prompt at a time. The collapsing SEO and traffic stats are not just numbers on a marketing report; they are the imprint of AI’s hand shaping the course of industries. It’s as if the web itself is being refashioned by these tools that we created.
One year ago, who would have thought that Google, the titan of the internet age, would be contemplating its own obsolescence? And yet here we are, with Google’s CEO openly noting that AI features are driving even more searches (ironically) because people want to validate AI answers. Yes, Google’s search volume grew in 2024 (up 21.6% year-on-year), but those extra searches often don’t leave Google’s ecosystem. It’s a defensive move: by embedding AI, Google hopes to keep people searching within Google. The future is being negotiated in real time between AI convenience and incumbent power. Thus far, AI is winning on user experience, and Google is winning on sheer habit and reach. But beyond that battle of giants, the rest of us have to live with the fallout: less traffic, less visibility, and the imperative to innovate or fade away.
Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a strange, exhilarating promise in this new world too. For one, the user is arguably better served. As a user, I don’t miss combing through ten blue links to piece together an answer. I can get a quick, synthesized response from ChatGPT or Bard without the runaround. That’s more human in a way – I ask, you answer. Ai removes the middleman, and I get what I need. As a consumer, it feels like progress.
For businesses and creators, it forces a return to fundamentals. Why will people seek you out when AI can emulate or aggregate what you do? That question is uncomfortable, but it’s driving a creative renaissance. The companies surviving the traffic apocalypse are those rediscovering their unique value and voice. We’re seeing more thoughtful content, deeper expertise, and new formats. We’re seeing the rise of proprietary data and experiences that AI can’t scrape so easily (think interactive tools, live events, strong brands). We’re also seeing collaboration with AI: using it to enhance human creativity rather than just replace search.
And importantly, we’re seeing Ai create entirely new engagement models. For example, ChatGPT’s plugins and browsing features have grown referrals to news sites by 25x in a year. That number (25 million referrals from ChatGPT to news publishers in 2025) is tiny compared to Google’s might, but it’s exploding fast. It hints at a future where AI assistants become a significant source of traffic in their own right, perhaps an intentional middleman that users choose because it’s convenient. Paradoxical as it sounds, the middleman isn’t completely gone; it’s just not a search engine results page anymore, it’s an AI chat interface. The difference is that this new middleman, the AI, works for the user, not for any single platform. That’s a profound change.
As Ai interfaces dominate, they will likely demand a new kind of optimization, call it AI Optimization (AIO) to go alongside SEO. Companies will strive to have their content be the one an AI trusts and cites. We already see savvy publishers monitoring how often they’re mentioned by ChatGPT or Bard. It’s not far-fetched to imagine businesses providing AI-ready data feeds or APIs to ensure accurate representation in AI answers. In fact, as of this writing, Similarweb (the analytics firm) launched a service for brands to track their presence in GenAI tools. The future arrives quickly.
All of this validates what we foresaw: “Ai helps us recognize what has always been true: there are no separations, no silos. Everything is connected.” The boundaries between search and social, between business buyer and casual reader, between human and machine-generated content they’re melting away. In their place is a more fluid, if chaotic, continuum.
It’s a strange new world, and living through its creation is by turns thrilling and unsettling. I won’t lie: seeing beloved websites lose traffic or watching an entire discipline like SEO enter an existential crisis can feel emotional. For those of us who remember the early internet’s promise, there’s a twinge of sadness as the open web becomes quieter, almost like empty streets after a big parade. But there’s also a sense of wonder. We’re witnessing a generational shift in how knowledge is shared and how businesses connect with customers. The predictions I made, Ai removing middlemen, data becoming real-time, B2B blending with B2C, AI shaping the future, are not distant prophecies but daily reality. And it’s happening faster than anyone expected.
Greg’s voice, my voice, has long spoken about these coming changes. Now we’re living them. It’s a turbulent time to be a marketer or creator, no doubt. But it’s also a time of great innovation and opportunity. The playing field is being leveled and re-leveled in real time. New leaders will emerge from those who understand that attention and trust are now earned on new terms. And those terms are dictated increasingly by AI-mediated experiences.
In one of my prediction posts I noted, “One of many taking reality in months, not years.” That was in June 2024, reflecting on how quickly AI was confirming bold forecasts. Here in mid-2025, that statement might be the understatement of the decade. The evidence is everywhere: charted in collapsing referral graphs, reflected in boardroom strategy shifts, and increasingly, felt in our day-to-day lives as we interact with these AIs.
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a choice. We can cling to the old playbooks and watch our results dwindle, or we can embrace first principles and adapt. First principles logic tells us: if Ai is eliminating friction (search friction, communication friction), then double down on what truly adds value beyond that. If Ai is giving answers, then ask better questions. If Ai is creating the future, then be part of that creation.
I choose the latter. HubSpot’s story, and many others like it, show that adaptation is possible. They treated the 80% traffic drop not as an obituary but as a turning point. They built new channels, cut the dead weight, and found ways to thrive without leaning on Google’s crutch. B2B firms worldwide are doing the same: focusing on community, investing in product-led growth, empowering loyal advocates to spread the word. In doing so, they’re reducing their reliance on intermediaries of any kind. They’re selling and communicating in a more peer-to-peer fashion, ironically closer to how business was done before the internet’s rise (when reputation and relationships ruled). The tools are different now, LinkedIn posts, Zoom webinars, AI chats, but the principle is the same: know your audience, serve them directly, build trust relentlessly.
And what of Ai, our double-edged sword? I remain an optimist. Yes, it’s obliterating certain old ways, but it’s also opening amazing new frontiers. I often ask: Could Ai develop an entirely new universal language? Perhaps that’s metaphorical, but in a sense it’s happening. We are developing a new language of interaction, prompts, queries, and conversational commands that transcend the old UI-driven web. The prompt is the thing now, not the click. That’s a shift as fundamental as the move from command line to graphical interface decades ago. We’re all learning it, together.
In closing, let’s circle back to the core idea: the middleman is dying. The middlemen were not just Google or Bing, but any layers that added friction between intent and outcome. Ai is ruthlessly hunting down those inefficiencies. It’s true in search, in business transactions, in creative production. As Ai dissolves hierarchies and silos, what remains is what truly adds value, the original insight, the genuine connection, the human touch, the spark of creativity. Everything else is just roadblocks that technology is busy removing.
Greg’s voice, my voice, has long spoken about these coming changes. Now we’re living them. It’s a turbulent time to be a marketer or creator, no doubt. But it’s also a time of great innovation and opportunity. The playing field is being leveled and re-leveled in real time. New leaders will emerge from those who understand that attention and trust are now earned on new terms. And those terms are dictated increasingly by AI-mediated experiences.
The article you’ve just read is an example of adapting to that reality, comprehensive, cited, human but informed by machine data, and delivered to you likely via an AI-curated feed or a social platform, not a search box. We’re all adapting, writer and reader alike. The future isn’t just coming; it’s here, being created as we speak, and Ai is at the heart of it. Let’s embrace the opportunities, guided by first principles and clear-eyed about the evidence.
After all, a world “full of stars” (and less middlemen) might be a pretty wondrous place to live.
Grayson Patrick Trent | greg report contributor