TL;DR: At a CMO Inspired summit last week, two speakers mentioned the same problem. With AI search, traditional approaches are losing ground fast: when Google shows an AI summary, 83% of searches end with no click at all. Now businesses have "content debt", which feeds into this, and it opens a number of questions: how to be discoverable, how to organise governance of what's already out there, and what to do about it altogether.
Where did the click go?
Search used to work like a librarian pointing you to the right shelf. Now the librarian reads the books for you, tells you the answer, and only sometimes mentions which book it came from.
In the UK, seven in ten Google searches now end without a click on anything, the highest of six countries in a recent study. Google says the clicks it does send are better quality.
Search used to send you to the shelf, now it hands you the answer
Why does old content matter so much?
Maddie Hampson of Storyblok, one of the speakers, calls this content debt: every old product page, out-of-date PDF and forgotten bio is still out there, and when someone asks an AI about you, the answer gets built from whatever it finds. Her slide said: "In many categories, being ranked matters less than being cited and trusted."
And when your next buyer asks an AI for a shortlist of suppliers, that shortlist gets built the same way.
Buyers already work this way: in a Magenta Associates survey, two-thirds of UK B2B decision-makers said they use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Perplexity to research suppliers. Most of those who found a supplier that way went on to visit its website. The AI makes the shortlist, and the website still has to close the deal.
Content debt, the old pages an AI builds its answer from
What can you do about it?
Marketers have started calling this GEO, generative engine optimisation: SEO for AI answers. I'd pick out three things from what I heard and read:
Describe yourself the same way everywhere. Website, LinkedIn, directories, author bios.
Get mentioned on other people's sites. In the largest studies, being named on other pages tracks AI visibility more closely than links to your site do. Not too far from traditional SEO approaches. For a B2B firm that means trade press, partners' pages, event pages, podcasts and customer stories.
Answer the question people ask, near the top of the page. The question in the title, the answer in the first two sentences, and real numbers with named sources. In the study that coined the term, pages carrying statistics, quotes and sources were more visible in AI answers.
I skipped two popular fixes, as they're useless if not harmful today. One is an llms.txt file, a sort of welcome note for AI crawlers, which Google says it ignores and which crawlers rarely open, according to a study of 137,000 sites. The other is stuffing pages with keywords, which made them less visible in the study that coined GEO.
How will you know it's working without a crystal ball?
The other speaker, Matt Coughlan of THG (the group behind Myprotein), had the practical slide, on measurement. If more people search for your brand by name over time, that's one sign your AI visibility is working, because people are hearing about you somewhere. Then track the handful of buying questions that matter to you, the way THG tracks "best protein powder under £50". When an AI names you in that answer, he calls it a clickable mention.
There are free tools for this now. Since the summer, Google Search Console has shown how often your pages appear in its AI summaries (Google calls them AI Overviews) and in AI Mode, its chat-style search. Bing's Webmaster Tools has shown citations in Copilot since February.
Search Console also sends emails like this one now:
From there I can drill down into the detail. There isn't much data yet for me personally, only 30 clicks from Google in the past 28 days, but it's been a couple of months on beehiiv with literally zero SEO marketing budget, so I still take it as a win.
The KPIs suggested at the summit for tracking GEO success were:
Brand searches
Direct to site/app traffic
Google Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools cited page impressions
On-site conversion rate
And I wouldn't underestimate Bing, given that in the B2B world Microsoft is often the default software suite, so it's used more than many might think.
To sum up
Search is turning into a conversation, and most of the time your website isn't in the room.
Try it today. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode and ask three questions:
What do you know about [your company]?
Who are the best [what you sell] suppliers in [your region]?
Which sources did you use for that?
Save what it says. When I searched for AI Bear, I got an old bio and a bear-scaring system, so I definitely have work to do on my newsletter here.