Semrush’s “earthquake” was once an exciting email update for years, but the “Zero Click” web changed the digital landscape.
馃憠But less than 15% of our Q4 traffic came from organic search. It used to be ~90% in 2022.
For starters: yes, DevriX is still a Semrush agency partner, and we still have several partners with direct-to-consumer campaigns, local SEO, or very niche industries where organic search is king. It also plays well with other Google properties (ads and YouTube).
But it’s not universal anymore. Google’s AI Overviews are spitting out detailed responses scraped from user content on a full page, followed by “Discussions”, then “People also ask”, and occasionally some video or image embeds on the way. Getting to an actual click is rare.
The nature of search is also heavily link-led; this is where TOFU content was so critical (a source of links for authority), and now all TOFU is LLM-led. Acquiring new links is predominantly pay-to-play, because few humans write genuine content (since it’s not ranked) and therefore, linking to new content is rare (mostly household names).
The AI prompts also recommend optimizing for some informational queries. Why? Feeding better AI Overview answers is a corporate investment for us while intentionally reducing clicks even further.
The second-order consequences in 2026 go deeper: 猡碉笍
While organic visibility was non-existent for B2B last year (search, social, communities), this impacts paid sources.
鉁旓笍 AI Overviews are taking all the place with a convenient answer, reducing paid link clicks for Google Ads.
鉁旓笍 And AI slop across social sends people away (2022 was the best year for social in history, as measured by “daily/weekly scrolling time”). This impacts paid efficiency with fewer “real humans” scrolling social because of clickbait, viral, bot-generated content.
The Internet represents the “boiling frog syndrome”, where everyone loses reach and inbound flow one week at a time, until these channels fully disappear.
I have no doubt that a Web 4.0 or 5.0 is coming with a heavy social/networking aspect online and better content aggregation, emulating RSS feeds or subscriptions from the early 2000s. But we’re yet to reach the critical point of acknowledging this moment collectively and building this new era.
The HCU update by Google happened in late 2023, nearly a year after ChatGPT was launched and mass-produced content started to creep in. We’re nearly 3 years in this organic collapse.
Will 2026 be the year of the Phoenix for organic search and social?
