AI Overviews

Blueprint-style illustration of an SEO agency retainer contract split into three labeled fee sections with 25% and 75% figures and a data-access key.

Avinash Kaushik Says Cut Your SEO Retainer 25-75%. First, Own Your Data.

Avinash Kaushik, a 16-year Google veteran now chief strategy officer at Human Made Machine, told marketers this week to renegotiate agency contracts for 25% to 75% lower fees. His argument: AI and the ad platforms now handle the account structuring, bidding, and reporting that used to fill a retainer. The

Diagram of a Google results page with an AI Overview box absorbing a falling organic click line marked 39.8% while paid ad clicks hold steady

AI Overviews Cut Clicks 39.8% in the First Randomized Test (Paid Untouched)

A randomized field experiment of 1,065 US desktop users found that Google AI Overviews cut organic clicks by 39.8% and pushed zero-click searches up 34.5% when a summary appeared. Sponsored clicks barely moved. It is the first causal test of AI Overviews rather than another before-and-after correlation,

Torn newspaper page reading 'GOOGLE SEARCH IS OVER' overlaid with a blueprint schematic of three surviving query buckets: branded, transactional, and YouTube carousel.

TechCrunch Called Google Search Over. Three Query Types Didn't Get the Memo.

TechCrunch's May 19 piece declared the ten blue links dead and Google Search "over." The headline obscures three query types where Google's AI rollout has the smallest impact on click-throughs: branded searches, high-involvement transactional searches, and YouTube SERPs. A Search Engine Land UX study

Future PLC's 67% Profit Drop Puts a Public Number on the AI Overviews Tax

Future PLC reported a 67% drop in pre-tax profit for the six months to March 31, 2026, with website sessions down 15% and Google Search and Discover traffic both off roughly 20% year over year. The £4 billion market capitalization the group held in December 2022 has shrunk to about

Blueprint schematic of open web traffic falling 46% from 2023 to 2026 with Google AI Overviews, closed social link posts, and the Zero Click Marketing book

Fishkin's Zero Click Marketing Book Pins a 46% Number on the Web Collapse

Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad opened pre-orders this week for Zero Click Marketing, a book that pins a single number on a shift marketers have been arguing about for three years. Open-web traffic is down 46% since 2023, per data Fishkin cited on LinkedIn. Teams still using session count as

Condé Nast Hit 25% Google Traffic and Stopped Pretending Search Returns

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch told the Financial Times in late February 2026 that Google search is "no longer a meaningful driver" of traffic to Vogue, GQ, or The New Yorker. The publisher's Google share fell from a majority to roughly 25%. Ahrefs's December

Blueprint diagram showing three separate citation networks for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews with a tiny overlap zone in the center.

Kevin Indig Found Only 2.37% of AI Citations Survive All Three Engines

Kevin Indig analyzed 3.7 million URL citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews from Q3 2025 to Q1 2026, drawing from a 20,000-prompt random sample. Only 2.37% of cited URLs appeared in all three engines for the same prompt, and 91.07% appeared in only one.