Google's AI search rollout has split has created two camps among those who create content -- those cited inside AI answers and those rendered invisible.
The giant digital player this month launched AI-enhanced search tools, deploying Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default AI mode globally.
The update allows search conversationally through AI agents rather than traditional text-based queries.
"It's the biggest shift in search in 20 years. Google is moving from being a gateway to the web to becoming the destination itself," said James Lawrence, co-founder at Rocket Agency.
The shift has put the economics of digital publishing under further pressure.
"The implicit deal of Google sending traffic in exchange for indexed content is breaking down, and the ad-funded open web model is being structurally re-priced as a result," said Sam Makwana, general manager at Melbourne digital agency Impressive.
"It fundamentally changes how users interact with search results, reducing clicks to websites and reshaping the value exchange between Google, publishers and advertisers."
AI Overviews are now present in 30% of all searches, up from just over 10% in 2025, according to research by Rocket Agency.
When AI Overviews appear, clicks to the top organic result drop by 58%.
Rocket Agency's April 2026 analysis of more than 1.1 million data points across 150 Australian businesses found impressions inside Google rose 43% over the past twelve months while clicks fell 2.5%.
"The old model was search, click, website, conversion. AI changes that because influence increasingly happens before the click or without one entirely," said Lawrence at Rocket.
"We estimate that AI search is now influencing 20-30% of buyer journeys despite only pushing 1% of traffic. Search engines were built around the concept of a click, large language models are not."
Nick Grinberg, head of strategy at Next&Co, said Google’s search ecosystem has always depended on publisher content.
“The risk with AI search is that the platform moves from being a discovery engine to becoming an extraction layer using publisher content to answer user queries while reducing the need to visit the publisher themselves,” he said.
“That fundamentally changes the bargain between platforms and publishers. That has much broader implications for the economics of publishing, the incentive to create quality content, and ultimately the health of the open web.”
For publishers, the divergence is already splitting the market.
Alfie Lagos, director at Lexlab, said getting cited inside an AI overview means you can hold your clicks or even pick a few up.
"If you don't get cited, you're invisible," Lagos said. "That's splitting publishers into the cited and the ignored, and the gap is widening fast."
The exposure extends beyond publishers to brands with narrow search footprints.
Samantha Coates, SEO director at Hatched, said the most exposed are brands that have relied on branded search and have not built visibility outside of it.
"If a customer has to already know your name to find you, AI search will not help you grow," Coates said.
This vulnerability will impact some content categories more than others, with Makwana identifying News, affiliate and others as overly reliant on informational traffic.
Makwana at Impressive said most exposed are news, affiliate, recipe and how-to publishers reliant on informational traffic.
Best positioned are established brands with strong direct demand, subscription-led publishers and retail media networks where the transaction happens at the point of intent.
Jordan Taylor-Bartels, CEO at Prophet, said the implications could reach further than traffic for some.
"Search used to distribute attention across the web," said Taylor-Bartels. "AI search concentrates attention inside the platform itself - and it changes where value accrues.
"Discovery becomes recommendation-driven rather than navigation-driven, which is intuition we think we all want, until we don't.
“If the interface gives you the answer directly, the opportunity to influence choice moves much earlier in the process. This is no longer an election or a contest. It is going back in time to where one book is the gospel.”
Robert Nagy, general manager - product and operations, Yango, said the entire top-of-funnel discovery phase is being re-engineered.
"Advertisers will need to rethink intent targeting and adapt to changing publisher advertising costs, reach and audiences, while publishers face an existential need to offer unique, trustworthy expertise in specific topics rather than commoditised information, with the hope of becoming more visible in AI overviews," he said.
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